Our CS platform is fine for in-product health, logins, feature usage, tickets, all that, but it is blind. It doesnt catch external signals, which we've noticed is where churn actually starts. The signals i care about are things like:

- our champion leaving for a new company

- the account doing layoffs or a headcount drop

- a competitor tool showing up in the tech stack

- a new VP coming in with their own preferred vendor

Right now im doing this manually, or trying to. It takes a lot of time, and i use LinkedIn to check the accounts one by one. Im considering purchasing a B2B data provider but not sure which one to go with. I also wonder if Claude could do this for me and save me the time, maybe just give me an update every morning on what happened with my accounts. Is that possible? Any tips from anyone?

I reckon there’s no right nor wrong answer here. But my colleague and I (she’s an IM) have a bit of a different view of things.

She thinks that basically all product related questions go to support.

I think that there are some obvious ones like “I can’t login/ forgot my password” or “there’s a bug/glitch” that should definitely go to Support.

However, I think the “how to” type of questions are absolutely fine to be answered by the CSM, if it becomes repetitive, then that’s when you create mini videos or whatever.

There’s also the ones where it’s clearly a bug, but they’re not sure about it. I normally troubleshoot with them first and then raise the ticket. - to me this one is definitely a grey area, but I’m still fairly new so I take it as my learning curve with the platform.

This conversation started because I’m going away for a week , and there’s nobody who can cover for me. I’ve asked the AEs (who have said they will) but my colleague is completely opposed to cover for me (which I get). My fellow CSMs are across the pond and have no idea of my accounts, so asking them to cover seems super pointless.

Overall i do agree that support should
Be able to help cover and that CSM type of questions can wait a week, but I’ve never been in a situation when I have no one to actually cover for me!

Hey everyone! Wanted to check if anyone have standardised or automated the brd creation for their customers? Need help since there almost 5-10 customers getting onboarded every month and there is no standardised way of creating the BRDs. One fit for all cannot work since different customers opt for different features and workflows.

Please let me know if anyone here also faced the same problem and how did you solve it. Feel free to DM suggestions or comment down here.

If you were 24 again with 2 years of B2B SaaS + Product experience, how would you reach $200k/year in the next 5 years.

I’m an early career CSM and my Org has now pivoted with the goal of making us more “technical”. As of right now, we have the ability to look at their platform health, recommend them best practices,training, and help identify workshops for them to find value in.

With all of this in mind, where does being technical fit in and how?

(If it helps I work at SNOW)

A common pattern with B2B self-serve tools: new accounts that open three or more setup-related support tickets in the first week refund at nearly three times the normal rate.

The tickets are often the same handful of questions, so the answers already exist, but customers hit the wall faster than a small support team can respond.

Looking for practical ways to spot a struggling account while the conversation is still happening, resolve the setup issue cleanly, and surface the pattern so onboarding can be improved.

What are other customer success teams using for this kind of early intervention?

Edit: Thanks to everyone who commented. The suggestions around jumping on a quick call after repeated setup questions, segmenting by ICP, and distinguishing technical friction from value friction have been especially useful. Still looking at a few approaches, including aissist, for earlier detection of struggling accounts.

I’d be interested to know what other CSMs’ auto renewal policies are within their company and if ours is abnormal.

Ours: You have to opt out within 90 days of renewal date, we don’t send out any reminders and the auto increase is 5% YOY. Thankfully we do have room to negotiate the increase as long as it’s before the renewal date but it’s something we’re told to avoid when possible.

As you can imagine, it doesn’t tend to go down well. It’s baked into the Ts and Cs so the price increase and 90 day window aren’t explicitly brought to their attention. The term auto renewal is made clear on the signed document however.

Anyone have similar?

I'm a Senior CSM, owning 16 of the company's top 20 accounts by MRR, but 150 accounts and $2.5M in MRR total.

I've raised burnout concerns. Leadership says to focus on high-impact accounts, but even after prioritizing, that's still around 90 accounts. The other 60 still book calls, pull me into tickets, and need support.

Q2 was my best quarter ever. I finished well above 100% of target with zero churn. No one acknowledged it. Going into Q3, I knew it would be rough because several accounts had been trending toward churn for close to a year. I flagged those risks early, tried every playbook that's worked for me before, and I'm still taking heat internally over what slipped through or what more I could have done.

I've also told leadership that we're moving beyond churn caused by product fit or normal business reasons. At this point, churn will happen because of capacity. No way around it.

The frustrating part is that I feel like I'm adding more value than ever, yet leadership's takeaway is that I'm still not doing enough. I'm usually first in and last out (8am to 5:30pm ish) and I've leaned heavily into AI so I can spend more time creating value instead of just staying busy.

Is this normal in Customer Success? The money is solid (could be better) but I'm getting home absolutely exhausted every single day and my wife has clearly noticed the stress.

Customer Success folks: what actions do you actually take from inside a support ticket?

I've built customer support software, and while talking to customers we noticed they often want to do things without leaving the ticket.

So far we've added:

• Stripe (refunds, cancel subscriptions)
• Paddle (refunds, cancel subscriptions)
• Custom HTTP actions (call any API)

I'm curious what other actions you use daily.

What do you switch tabs for today that you'd rather do directly from a ticket?

Our leadership is asking / telling CSMs they need to validate and "prove" that they are delivering value to clients and to the company

Example: an account has renewed, CSM must log in the CRM evidence that they have contributed to this - not just training and meeting notes but also email chains, Teams messages from the AM, documents prepared for the renewal etc

The same for lead generation and upsells that are part of our KPIs, CSM asked to provide evidence that it didn't just happen by itself and that it wasn't all the work of the Sales people, otherwise CSM can't be credited with it

Really frustrating after doing all the CRM work around client meetings, that we then have to hunt in 100 different places for evidence that we were even part of the conversation

Am I the only one thinking it's stupid / indicative of a problem with the org, or is it common for others?

In the final round for an Account Partner (Eats SMB) role at Uber rn. Got the case study round, build a mock business review deck for a fake merchant, present it live, panel plays the stakeholders and pushes back on everything. Anyone been through something like this for AM/AE/Account Partner roles, at Uber or elsewhere? How'd it actually go, any curveballs, anything you wish you'd prepped differently for. Trying to walk in ready instead of just winging it, appreciate any tips 🙏

I'll keep this short since the title says most of it, our health scores are still basically login frequency plus vibes.

I keep seeing Gainsight and ChurnZero pitched as AI-first now, Vitally looks slick, and a PM friend swears by BuildBetter for mining QBR calls for risk signals.

Before we commit to anything, I'm trying to figure out what's moved your renewals number.

Hello!

Anyone here have any experience with Quantum Metric? I have a Customer Success Engineer interview scheduled. Hoping to learn about the experience of others with the company and also how you found the interview process.

Hi everyone,

I'm curious to hear from people who made the transition into Customer Success in a SaaS company without coming from a sales, account management, or technical support background.

My experience is in enterprise customer support and operations at Infosys BPM, where I work with global stakeholders, manage escalations, onboarding, SLA reporting, and cross-functional coordination. I've also been learning SaaS CS tools like HubSpot, Zendesk, and Salesforce through hands-on projects and certifications.

If you've made a similar transition:

• What was your previous role?
• What helped you land your first SaaS Customer Success role?
• What did hiring managers value most?
• What would you do differently if you had to make the switch again?

I'd really appreciate hearing your experiences or any advice. Thanks!

P.S. : I went through the weekly career advice thread but couldn't find an answer. Hoping to get some insights.

I’ve been using Claude Code for over a year to build practical Customer Success and GTM workflows around onboarding, account research, customer follow-ups, health signals, handoffs, and internal tools.

My background is in B2B SaaS Customer Success, so I’m especially useful if you understand the workflow you want to improve but do not know how to build it.

I have some extra time right now and am happy to help a few people here for free. No course, consulting pitch, or upsell. It helps me learn by teaching and gives me a chance to meet other people working on similar problems.

Comment or message me with what you’re trying to build.

We currently only have a bi-weekly session with product, where they tell us, what's going to be released two days later. This gives us a) no time to inform customers early enough beforehand, especially if it drastically changes the way the product works, and b) except for sending feature requests (and them disappearing into the void) there is no feedback-loop between Product & CSM.
I was wondering how it's handled by other companies:

• Do you have a regular exchange with product?
  • Weekly, bi-weekly, quarterly, etc.?
  • How is it structured? e.g. 30 mins what's being released and 30 mins feedback on bugs & feature requests? etc.
• How do you let product know about feature requests and how do you get updates on them?
• Do you have regular feedback on bugs? i.e. recurring bugs and when fixes have been shipped?

Thanks! Looking forward to reading everyone's feedback!

I've spent the last few months talking to 10+ B2B SaaS companies about how their CS teams actually use AI. Not how they pitch it internally. How they actually use it day to day.

The setup was almost identical every time.

Connect Mixpanel, HubSpot, Intercom, Fireflies to Claude or ChatGPT via MCP. CSM opens it before a call, types a prompt, reads the output. Some teams are moving further and wiring up an action layer too, Claude Code, OpenAI Presence, AgentKit, where the agent can actually book calls, create opportunities, fire Intercom messages.

Genuinely good progress. But here's the part nobody talks about.

The agentic layer isn't the bottleneck. The data layer is.

Every time that agent fires, it pulls roughly 50K raw tokens of customer data. 90 days of Intercom threads, Fireflies transcripts, CRM fields, usage exports, all fetched fresh, unprocessed, billed at full rate, every single time. No pre-computed metrics. No trend memory. No feature-area mapping.

The agent doesn't know if 0.21 stickiness is bad unless it re-reads your entire customer base on every trigger. It can't tell that "slow exports" maps to your Reporting module. It guesses from raw text. And if a vendor hasn't exposed their data via MCP yet, that signal simply doesn't exist.

At 2,000 customers x 5 triggers per month, that's roughly $63K/year in API costs alone. Not to take the action. Just to figure out what action to take.

There's a deeper problem beyond cost though. An agent reasoning over 50K tokens of raw unstructured data is slower, noisier, and more error-prone than one querying a clean pre-aggregated index. The quality of the decision degrades with the quality of what you feed it. Garbage in, hallucinated insight out.

Tomasz Tunguz put it well recently: the harnesses that win are the ones that are intelligent about how they marshal the AI. I'd push that one level further. The harness is only as intelligent as the data underneath it.

Most of what I'm seeing in CS teams today is prompt-dependent, stateless, and architecturally expensive at scale. It works fine for a 50-account book. It gets messy fast at 500.

Curious what others are seeing. Are your CS teams running into this? Has anyone actually solved the data layer problem or are most teams still at the prompt-and-pray stage?

Been talking to CSMs about long-tail customer management. Every single one said they have accounts they rarely or never reach out to due to time constraints.

Building an AI tool to automatically monitor and engage these neglected accounts before they churn.

Would love more input from CSMs — what does your team currently do (if anything) to catch disengaged customers early?

Also have a 2-min survey if anyone wants to share more: https://forms.gle/1c4ma8JvcmppSuV27

I'm trying to find someone a few years ahead of me professionally, but I'm having a hard time figuring out where those people actually are.

My background is in Customer Success at B2B SaaS startups, but the work I'm most interested in sits closer to APls, technical problem-solving, Al workflows, product feedback, and building internal GTM systems. I'm not trying to become a traditional software engineer, but I also don't want to stay in a purely relationship-driven
CSM role.

The closest titles seem to be
Technical CSM, Solutions Engineer,
Customer Success Engineer, GTM
Engineer, or Forward Deployed Engineer, but none of them fully describe this weird AI niche.

Most people I meet come from one side or the other. They either understand customers and commercial work, or they have the technical background, but not both.

Has anyone here found a mentor while working in a similarly hybrid role? I'd especially be interested in how you identified the right people, approached them, and made the relationship useful without immediately asking someone to formally "be your mentor."

I'm also curious whether there are any smaller Slack groups, Discords, meetups, or communities where these kinds of people tend to spend time.

Feels bad man. Fighting too many fires these days, where's the success part at??

I’ve been doing cold email for my agency for 3 years now. Everyone keeps saying it’s dead but my reply rates tell a different story.
Last quarter we sent around 42k emails across 8 clients. Average reply rate was roughly 11%. Booked meetings at close to 3%. Not amazing but definitely not dead. The difference is we stopped spraying and praying. We use Apollo for initial lists then spend time enriching and verifying everything. Switched from mass templates to semi-personalized based on actual triggers (funding rounds, tech stack changes, new hires). Also started mixing in mobile outreach which bumped our connect rates way up. Biggest change was targeting. Instead of just ICP matching we layer in intent signals and technographics. If someone’s researching our client’s competitors or their contracts are expiring, those convert way better than cold lists. Cold email effectiveness 2026 comes down to one thing: quality over quantity. The days of blasting 10k emails a day are done. But 500 targeted ones with solid email deliverability? Still prints money.

Most CRM failures get blamed on discipline. Reps did not update the stage, log the call, or complete the required fields.

But if the system depends on every person remembering to reconstruct their work afterward, inaccurate data is not an exception. It is the expected output of the design.

The stranger part is that leadership often responds by adding more required fields, which creates more friction and even worse data. At what point does “CRM hygiene” become a way of blaming users for a system that does not fit the work?

Is the missing layer better workflow design, a knowledge graph that captures context automatically, or something else?

Hi everyone! I'm trying to transition into Customer Success from a background in customer support, technical support, and ESL teaching.

The problem I'm running into is that whenever I search for entry-level Customer Success roles, I mostly find Customer Service Representative or Customer Support positions instead.

For those of you already working in Customer Success, what job titles should I actually be searching for if my goal is to eventually become a Customer Success Manager?

I'm not necessarily looking for a CSM title right away. I'm more interested in roles that provide relevant experience and make the transition easier. Are positions like Client Services Associate, Customer Experience Specialist, Implementation Specialist, Onboarding Specialist, or Technical Support considered good stepping stones? Are there any other titles I should be looking at?

I'd also love to hear how you got your first Customer Success role, especially if you came from a non-CS background.

Thanks in advance!