
Why No One Responds to Your Customer Success Managers - siddharthdeswal
https://hackernoon.com/why-no-one-responds-to-your-customer-success-managers-a371caaa9aaf
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user5994461
What is a "customer success manager" in the first place?

Nowadays, every time I subscribe to a new SaaS service I get some emails from
their "customer success manager".

Not sure what they are supposed to be. It looks like "customer support" but
sometimes I get email from support AND from customer success managers. Go
figure.

~~~
notahacker
"Customer Success Managers" are typically expected to be much more proactive
about contacting customers to encourage them to use the service more and get
feedback: their role is to keep retention rates high and generate upsell
opportunities (which often explicitly targeted to do so) rather than reduce
the backlog of customer support tickets.

Of course, it's also a shinier, happier job title for people doing traditional
respond-to-tickets customer support or account managers tasked with renewing
licences on an annual cycle (or both in some companies). But SaaS companies
often have big enough margins, complex/varied enough products and use cases
and need to understand their customer bases for it to be worth having a
dedicated team sitting in between sales and tech/admin support trying to make
sure that people that don't report problems and aren't regularly renegotiating
contracts don't get ignored until they cancel. There are also a lot of
industries where being contacted periodically to discuss how they might
optimise the app for their current workflow or objectives is a source of value
rather than irritation, and helps convince companies they're getting a service
rather than a cookie-cutter CRUD app for their 50k per annum.

~~~
sukilot
The shocking surprise is that customers don't like being pestered by a
salesperson masquerading as a support agent.

~~~
user5994461
Given all comments. The customer support is indeed a sales guy responsible for
contacting the customer, getting feedback, giving some advise and help...

Yes. All these things are part of sales. Especially in B2B context.

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dworin
This echoes some of my recent frustrations with customer success organizations
to a T. I'll also add in that many customer success organizations feel like
the Post-Sell Upsell Sales Team rather than the Make My Customer Successful
Team (upsells might be a goal, but it shouldn't feel that way to customers).

At most SaaS companies, customer success is designed as a slightly-better
support function, rather than a value-added consultative function. This is
actually an evolution from the old model, where you'd have a more expensive
professional services function that accompanied enterprise software purchases,
usually because the implementation itself required a great deal of technical
sophistication that the cloud has made obsolete.

Customer success managers tend to be lower paid than consultants who have
domain expertise and strategic thinking skills. They also typically handle a
much larger client load, which makes it hard to invest time in relationships,
and have automated their work to the point of annoyance, which makes it hard
for them to individualize.

On the other hand, it's not always such a great idea for a company, especially
a SaaS company looking to make an exit, to have their own professional
services function, let alone a paid services function. Consultants are
expensive and have much lower margins than software. They also add headcount
and bring down valuations when it's time to sell the business. That's why most
software companies a partner ecosystem around their software, rather than
trying to do it in house.

Based on my experience, there are a handful of customer success organizations
that get this right. But as a discipline, customer success is still meandering
around trying to figure out what it really is. At most companies, the legacy
is in a customer support function, not a professional services, consultative
sales, or account management function. So that's the level of service you get.
I'll be interested to see if they'll respond to feedback like the posters and
evolve towards a more consultative model.

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LastZactionHero
In the small startups I've been a part of, the Customer Success Manager has
been more like the interface for the user to parts of the product we haven't
had time to refine.

Our teams are still small, so this person has been essential in helping out in
places where the product isn't as refined as we'd like: training, setup +
onboarding, UX roughness, etc.

They've also been helpful in understanding our customer's pain points, so we
can best direct our modest resources. We regularly learn more about what our
product should be from these interactions.

Our users are also very non-technical, so they've been a helping hand getting
slow-moving organizations on board. That that end, they _regularly_ receive
positive feedback from our users, and are essential at reducing churn.

I can understand why the author had an issue with Hubspot and Google- these
are well established companies with refined products and larger teams.
Certainly seems like you could end up as a salesman.

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brudgers
Mailchimp is an example of successful 'customer success'. But it took a really
long time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12642824](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12642824)

