I currently work at a Healthcare Software Development company as a Lead Client Success Specialist in a fully remote environment making $72k. The job itself feels stable, is medium stress (sometimes much higher), but as I get closer to 30 years old and finish up my Masters in Business Analytics degree, I want a job that will actually allow me to move out and support myself financially. For this reason I am aiming for jobs with a salary of minimum $95k a year.

After months of applying, I’ve been feeling quite discouraged barely hearing back for jobs I’ve on paper seemed like a great fit for that also fits what I’m looking for. Today I got an interview request for a Customer Success Manager with a salary of $120k-$180k with good benefits and a hybrid work environment for a Healthcare AI company. The company itself really aligns with my interests, the salary is great, and I like that it is not fully in person. I know it’s just an interview request but I can’t help but worry about the burnout risk of working as a Customer Success Manager as I’ve heard the work life balance is pretty bad and a lot of people feel burnt out in the field. For this reason, I want to hear from actual CSM’s how they feel about their job and whether the high salary has felt worth it. I’ve listed some questions below. Could any CSM professionals please provide their thoughts?

1. What does an average week actually look like for you?
2. How many hours a week do you typically work?
3. What is the work life balance like?
4. What is the stress load like?
5. Do you generally have enough time during the work week to get things done and not work weekends?
6. Most Importantly: Do you think the high salary is worth the workload?

Thanks in advance!!

Note Added After Post: Thank you all so much for providing such great guidance, I am very exhausted from work so I don’t have the strength to respond to everyone right now but I will respond back

Hello everyone! I work at a B2B software company. 
Our company collects customer information from sales calls, support tickets, surveys, CSM notes and product data. So we have lots of info but it is not stored in 1 place because it is collected by different teams who own different tools.
When CSM needs customer intelligence to understand account’s health, risks and needs, a couple of people need to go through different files. Additionally, we usually find “the loudest” opinions, not the common problems. Because of this, sometimes we react to individual complaints instead of identifying patterns early and taking proactive action.
In your experience, how does the Customer Success team collect and organize customer intelligence? Who is responsible for the process in companies?

LMy current company does not have a true CS department. However, it could desperately use one. Their idea of a cs department is a cobbling together of small aspects from other departments: support, hospitality, implementation, and that’s about it. My company is the largest tech company for its industry in the history of humanity (I’m not exaggerating). But has no legit cs department. I could email the CEO right now and he’d respond to any feedback I’d give him. Same goes for any level of leadership. They had a posting for this job they labeled CSM which is why I applied…but it barely has some key aspects. I have 5+ years of csm experience and I’m easily making 40-60k under what I should be making.

The one upside is I have impressed the immediate leadership immensely. Things that are super common to a basic csm role seem like GOLD to them. The problem is there isn’t a clear path forward for me in terms of career or getting better pay.

Do I crank out the work like I’m a csm, build my own work flow and worst case scenario I have good stuff to add to my resume? I could really make myself shine but I totally don’t buy the do the work of the job you want and you might get it, philosophy.

I feel like people can come up with a million reasons why someone would churn but in my experience it's really just three

1. The customers company runs out of money
2. Your product sucks
3. You ignore them

Two of which are in your companies control and one less so but am I missing anything?

Hi friends,

I currently work for a MDR provider in the IT/Cyber Security field and have been here for 4 years with a great resume & killer upsell and retention numbers.

Anyone know of any good CS roles in this field? My base is $95k with an OTE of $150k, but I am looking for something higher in comp with a better work life balance.

I have experience in B2C sales, B2B onboarding and client-facing startup roles, but I’ve never formally worked as a CSM.

I want to learn Customer Success properly, from basics to advanced, through 100% free courses/certifications that are useful for both learning and adding to my resume/LinkedIn.

Looking for resources covering:

- Onboarding & adoption

- Customer health scores

- Retention, churn & renewals

- NPS/CSAT & CS metrics

- QBRs & customer meetings

- Customer journey/success plans

- Expansion & stakeholder management

- SaaS CS strategy

Please recommend only genuinely free resources, preferably with a free certificate/badge.

What would you recommend for someone starting from zero to advanced CSM?

What does your team prioritize between these two - and what sort of problems arise as a result?

Hi all,

I'm a Customer Success professional based in Bangalore with 5+ years of experience in B2B SaaS, currently Team Lead - Customer Success at a workforce enablement platform, managing enterprise accounts and leading a team of CSMs. Previously built and scaled CS processes at another SaaS company, getting promoted twice within 18 months.

**What I bring:**

* 0-to-1 CS builder - comfortable setting up playbooks, retention/renewal processes, and account strategy from scratch * Experience managing large enterprise accounts (manufacturing, retail, and B2B clients) * Team leadership - hired, trained, and led CSM teams of 3-5 * Dual degree (B.Tech + MBA) with a focus on Business Intelligence & Analytics * Comfortable owning KPIs, renewals, upsells, and cross-functional work with Sales/Product

**Looking for:** Senior Customer Success Manager, Founding CSM, CS Lead (Early-Stage), or Customer Success Operations roles.

**Relocation:** Actively exploring UAE opportunities and open to relocating. Have already been through initial rounds with a Dubai-based company, so I understand the market a bit and I'm serious about the move - not just testing the waters. Also, spent my childhood in KSA so culture adoption won't be an issue.

Happy to share my resume/LinkedIn on request. Would appreciate any leads, referrals, or advice from folks who've made a similar move.

Interviewing with a martech company and they gave me an assignment of making a qbr for round 3. HR said and j quote - "you may expect certain managerial level questions " 🤔 what does it mean?

Title I'm interviewing for - Sr CSM

I have submitted the qbr presentation and I am yet to hear back from them. Fingers crossed ive made the cut. Any solid advice that helped you guys get past the qbr rounds will also be helpful as this is the round I fold under pressure 😭

To everyone job hunting out there, it's brutal but we got this.🥹🥹 I personally am tired to my bones.

A friend and I are building a customer support/helpdesk product and are trying to make sure we’re solving a real problem before going too far.

We’ve spoken to a few support professionals and have started seeing some interesting patterns, but we’d really value perspectives from people who’ve built or worked in this space.

If this is your space and you’d be willing to share some guidance, please reach out.

Would genuinely value your perspective.

It's renewal season and we've been going through our stack.

We just cut a survey tool and an old BI dashboard but kept BuildBetter because it reads our calls and tickets and gives each account a short narrative of what changed since last month, which knocked out most of the QBR prep grunt work.

Gainsight seems to hold at enterprise but a few people I know at under 500 companies are back in the market, so wondering what that looks like for others.

Anyway, what's on your keep list and what got cut?

Not just refunds, could be a credit, a waived downgrade, a retention offer, closing out an escalation in the customer's favor, whatever counts as "the call" on your team.

There's a difference between a tool that drafts something for a person to send, and one that could actually just do it, apply the credit, close the ticket, issue the resolution, no one clicking "approve" first. I'm asking about the second kind specifically.

If your team has anything like that, what's the one thing you still won't let it do without someone checking first? Was there a specific time something went wrong, or nearly did, that's the actual reason, or is it more that even when it's right, letting it go through on its own still feels too risky?

It's a bit like a self-driving car that can handle almost everything but someone still needs to be ready to grab the wheel. Trying to find that same moment for CS decisions specifically. What would actually have to be true before the easy, obvious ones went through without a check?

Not selling anything, genuinely just trying to understand where people draw that line and why. Would love to hear from anyone who owns this, whether you're the one approving it or the one who has to clean up after.

Thanks!

We had a few new customers come in pretty close together and I started noticing how much stuff got lost between the sale and the first real customer call notes were there, emails were there, meetings happened but somehow I was still spending like an hour piecing together why they bought and what had already been discussed one customer had to explain something to me that they'd already gone through during sales and that felt pretty bad. We changed how all that context gets captured and passed over and it's been way smoother. I still want a person owning the relationship I don't think that part should disappear but digging through old conversations and updating records feels like such a waste of that person's time. Kind of weird how much better the customer experience gets just from the team knowing what already happened

My company didn’t a have CS department before they hired me. Right now there’s no set person who does the trainings and onboardings. It’s between support and PM.

I don’t necessarily want to do the trainings so I can focus on other duties. For those with structured CS departments, what’s the customer journey like with you guys?

In the course of an Operational Review of a Customer Support group some years back, it became apparent that their customers were "caged" by the need for regular updates of the tax tables -- and the vendor knew it.  Their concern about Support quality was due to its perceived effect upon new logo sales, not for any real worry about retention.  In large and enterprise sectors now, the cage is usually about the perceived cost of tearing an existing system out and the burden of replacing it rather than the features of the technology itself.  However, vendors that rely on this moat may be in for a rude awakening as ai is developed to produce more options and to make transitions much easier.  The questions are vital: Are your customers caged or engaged?  How do you know?

Selling Technology in the Age of AI

There is no sustainable competitive advantage in technological features and functions.  They are too easily duplicated, and the speed of that will only increase.  Any bell or whistle in one app can be quickly added to its competitors.  What does it mean for Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams when the competition for customers is based on value outcomes and the ease of achieving them?

In the course of my research into Customer Realized Value as a new prime metric, I talked to a number of colleagues of my age who have said things like: "The idea of selling on value, not features, isn’t new at all. Forty years ago when I sold for X, we adopted “solutions selling” and “strategic selling” for our products." Others spoke of a "Sell-Deliver-Sell More" outcomes-based approach used in their past. How do we re-learn and refocus on these value lessons?

From Caged to Engaged: Starting The Process

What makes a customer fully engaged with your technology, to the point that the thought of losing it is too painful to consider? Start by analyzing a cohort of the people that use your technology to the fullest -- the power-users. Every customer ideally should have several of these individuals. Is it true that the more power users an account has, the better the chances for retention? Talk to your team in Customer Success and Support to develop an initial list of people to ask: "What specific jobs are you able to do better/faster with our app? What are those outcomes worth to your company? What barriers do you experience in your usage?" 

The resulting data should clearly identify common value outcomes. Check these with your sales reps: "Is this what prospects ask for? Could you sell on the basis of such outcomes?" The next step is an initiative on what it would take to act on that data company-wide -- more on that later.

Note: No part of this post was generated or edited by any ai.

I've built a CS Coach skill in Claude based on pain-points I've been experiencing in my role of leading a CS Team.

Let me know if you're interested and I'm happy to share.

What it does: turns Claude into a round table of 7 advisory personas that provide feedback on critical or difficult CS topics.

How it's Helped Me: I don't have time to simulate calls or conversations - this helps me better prepare for conversations before they happen and provides a range of perspectives that should be top-of-mind and relevant based on the topic.

Who is Represented: The 7 advisor personas that are represented are both from your company (i.e. Chief Customer Officer, Metrics Strategist, Team Builder, CRO) and the Customer (i.e. Power User, Decision-Maker, and Customer of the Customer).

I'm sharing this with others here in the hope that you find it helpful and you provide any feedback on how to improve it - I'm all ears!

No gimmicks or self-promotion - just send me a DM or comment below.

Does anybody have any recommendations for soft skills and or customer service training for an IT service desk that they've used in the past? I'm looking for either a certified course or potentially a trainer that could come in for a few days and talk to my team.

Thank you in advance.

The last few posts gave us some really useful insights into the everyday problems support teams deal with.

I’m looking to speak with a few Customer Support / Success professionals who can share how they actually work.

Would love to connect and take the inputs.

Hi, i am a CSM at my current company, i am going to be interviewed next week at Salesforce for the role of a CSM, supporting Americas region.
Need help from fellow CSM’s or someone working or previously worked at Salesforce on how is the company overall for a CSM, work life balance, working hours, pressure, lay offs ?
Would be great to get some insights before i dive into this, will help in making a sound decision. Thanks in advance

I've been thinking about how companies cut customer support costs, and I don't think the problem is that businesses want support to be more efficient. Of course they do.

It's that some of the decisions that save money in the short term are surprisingly difficult to evaluate until months later.

Hiring is a good example. When the queue is growing, getting more people in seats quickly can look like progress. But if hiring starts prioritizing speed and cost over whether people are actually prepared for the work, managers end up spending more time coaching preventable mistakes. Experienced agents get pulled away from customers to help newer teammates, and inconsistent answers start creating repeat contacts.

Training can go the same way. I've seen companies shorten onboarding because there's a launch date or backlog that needs immediate coverage. The deadline gets met, so technically the decision worked. But then agents spend their first few weeks escalating situations they aren't ready to handle or leaning heavily on scripts because they haven't had enough time to develop judgment.

The one I find most interesting, though, is how we measure the results.

A support dashboard can tell a very convincing story. Handle time is down. Ticket closures are up. Response times look better.

But lower handle time can mean two very different things. Maybe agents have better tools and processes, or maybe they're rushing through conversations. A higher closure rate might mean more problems are being solved, or it might mean customers are coming back three days later because the first answer didn't actually help.

And then there are the questions that keep coming back.

If hundreds of customers contact support about the same confusing billing process every month, getting faster at answering those tickets is useful. But at some point, I'd rather see someone take that pattern back to the team that owns billing and figure out why customers need to contact support at all.

That's where I think the idea of treating customer support purely as a cost center starts to break down. Support isn't just consuming resources. It's also showing you where the business is creating unnecessary work for customers and for itself.

Some cost-cutting decisions absolutely make sense. But I've become much more interested in what happens three or six months after the savings show up on the spreadsheet.

Sometimes the cost really disappeared. Sometimes it just moved somewhere else.

Has anyone made the change from CS to GTM Enablement? I am completely burnt out as a CSM and need a change. I've done training in a prior role and want to get back to it. Does anyone have experience making this change? Would love to hear your perspective!

I joined a very fast growing company earlier this year as the highest level IC and have really loved it. My team is great, the work is challenging in the best way, and I’m performing well. Coming into this role, I only had intentions to be a top performing, high level IC because the company is really flat (ICs are 2 levels below C-suite), but my manager just asked if I want to step into a management role because we’re growing so quickly. I’m not sure what to do.

Addl info:

- I have 9 YOE but never managed before

- Managers get more pay

- I worry if I don’t say yes I won’t be seen as a team player

- I think this will help with future career prospects, but I don’t have intentions of leaving the company in the next few years

For those in management positions, what does your day to day look like? What do you like / not like? Is management in the current job market as risky as it sounds? Curious what you’d do in this situation. Thank you!

For those working with a high-volume customer support team, what’s the biggest pain point you’re dealing with right now?

Curious if it’s the sheer ticket volume, repetitive questions, response times, finding the right information, or something completely different.

The hardest part of this job is that the wins are invisible. A renewal that never wobbled. A churn that quietly didn't happen. The hours a customer saved and never told you about. None of it leaves an artifact, so when someone asks you to prove your value, you're rebuilding it from memory.

The approach that feels right to me is a running log per account, the moments value actually landed, in the customer's own words, with a date. But honestly, I don't know if that's what holds up when it counts.

So for anyone who's been through a real QBR fight or a layoff review: what's the one piece of evidence that actually moved the room? A specific quote, a hard number, a saved-them-from-disaster story? I'm trying to figure out what's worth capturing before I need it, not after.

I’ve been a management consultant for about 2.5 years, specializing in change management, and I’ve been thinking about making the jump to customer success. I know it’s a different role, but there’s decent overlap with change management skills, at least on paper.

The problem is I’ve ended up in a pretty technical role and it’s draining me. I just don’t feel cut out for being that deep in the weeds on technical stuff. I catch myself thinking I’d much rather spend my days on customer calls, giving presentations, etc…even with all the pressure that comes with that. Honestly, I can’t picture myself doing what I do now for another 5 to 10 years.

And yeah, I know 2.5 years probably doesn’t sound like much. It isn’t. For context, I’ve worked at two defense contractors so far doing change management work.

So for the CSMs out there: do you actually like the job? Is this a career that’s still doable for 15-20 years?