Last month, Jared Orr made three strong recommendations, from a CSM’s perspective, on how to lead CSMs to success. I wanted to complement his suggestions with three of my own, written from the perspective of a VP of customer success.
In both cases, we’re addressing the findings of the 2024 CSM Confidential Report, which reveals that while CSMs are generally happy, motivated, and dedicated in their roles, the majority are struggling with heavy workloads and goals that don’t feel realistic.
First, what’s going on? There’s no question that the last two years, RIFs have affected CSM’s workloads. As well as losing headcount to RIFs directly, companies have seen CSMs leaving in anticipation of a RIF, adding pressure on those who remain.
CSMs’ roles have also changed, with technical CSMs assuming commercial responsibilities that used to be the domain of account managers. They may get paid more, but that doesn’t help them cram the extra responsibilities into a 40-hour workweek.
The discipline required for remote work might not be helping either. The freedom to get your work done whenever it suits you can work against against you if you take long breaks, then try to power through in the evening without as much brainpower.
As a CS leader, however, you’ll notice that all three of these issues are somewhat outside of your control. The good news is that there are several areas of focus in which you have the ability and the mandate to make a big difference.
1: Establish clear lines on task ownership and priorities.
Let’s consider a familiar scenario. A CSM gets a message from a customer who thinks something is broken in the product. This may be true or not, but the CSM knows that the easiest way to find out is to jump in and troubleshoot. After all, it’s only a 30-minute task, and while it technically belongs to the support team, it makes sense for the CSM to do it rather than push a frustrated customer to another point of contact.
Customer success is relationship-driven, and the CSMs had the right instinct in working to protect the relationship. And CSMs should possess strong technical knowledge of their product for several reasons. But what if it happens twice in one day, or more?
In smaller companies where task ownership is more likely to be blurred, especially between CS and support, this is especially common. Likewise, if a company culture emulates urgency and firefighting, the more urgency CSMs place on every interaction.
This is how CSMs’ core goals become deprioritized. When it becomes the norm, CSMs must work longer hours to hit those goals, often while feeling less confident in their own effectiveness. As a CS leader, you can address this effectively in two ways.
While most CSMs understand the purpose and impact of their goals, staying focused on core objectives can be challenging in a relationship-driven role.
First, set clear priorities and define what is urgent and what is not, and how to communicate this to your customers to set clear expectations. If everything is considered a top priority, nothing is truly a priority. Aside from this, customers may also believe something is broken, but in reality the product is not behaving exactly how the customer expects it to. So, we need to coach and support CSMs to have these conversations and coach CSMs on balancing long-term impacts and immediate issues.
You’ll need to dig into how often these urgent situations really come up, and how much revenue is typically on the line. Then, compare that revenue to the opportunity cost of systematically driving revenue elsewhere.
Second, hold CSMs accountable for managing their focus and using available resources. For instance, instead of waiting for answers in Slack, they should use knowledge bases to find answers or leveraging various AI assistants, saving time and improve efficiency incrementally. Even when there aren’t too many priorities, CSMs should aim to manage their day-to-day tasks better.
2: Combat burnout with service models and capacity management.
In our survey, we asked the 22% of CSMs who feel unhappy in their current role to list the causes of their unhappiness. 59% of this group listed burnout as a factor.
It’s true that burnout often hinges on personal factors outside of your control as a manager. It’s also true that the longer your CSMs experience unmanageable workloads, the more likely they are to experience burnout or its ripple effects.
Related: How customer success leaders can help their teams manage stress.
Even if you’ve helped your CSMs with the prioritization discussed above, they may still be overloaded. You can address the issue, however, by creating or updating proper service models.
A service model ties into customer segmentation characteristics, such as revenue size, to clearly define and differentiate the level of engagement that each customer gets. From here, you can determine how much time this takes a CSM to provide, including preparation and follow-ups.
Now, you can understand whether your CSMs’ books of business are too big for them to fulfill your service model based on a 40-hour workweek—minus the internal engagements such as one-on-ones and team meetings that are easy to forget when assessing capacity.
The closer you can get to this ideal, the better you’ll be at helping CSMs manage their time and understanding that you have their back. And if you’re not even close, it’s on you to speak up to company leadership and say: we need to do this, because our CSMs are unable to put their best foot forward for our customers.
3: Enable your CSMs to work smarter with training and tools.
Even if your projected service model doesn’t allow you to accommodate your CS team’s book of business, and more headcount budget is out of the question, training and tools give you extra leverage as a CS leader.
First, a customer success platform like ChurnZero isn’t optional any longer, especially if your competitors are already taking advantage of time-saving features like Customer Success AI. While you already understand this, other leaders in the business might not be as close to these processes as you are, so it’s down to you to build a compelling case.
For example, focus on how a CSP can offset costs and identify upsell opportunities, because highlighting specific benefits and cost savings to CFOs is crucial. You may be able to eliminate other tools by consolidating their functions into one platform, which helps justify the investment. Point out specific automation that might avert hiring additional support staff, or roles that the CSP can carry out without hiring a full-time employee.
Only 20% of CSMs agree strongly that they have the support, tools and training to accomplish their goals.
Meanwhile, create more growth and training opportunities for your CSMs, especially around new hire onboarding and technical product training. All too often, CSMs often get thrown into the fire with basic training only. Companies need to invest more in technical training and balance it with soft skills training, like negotiation and de-escalation tactics.
There are numerous CSM certification programs which include things like managing difficult customers. Having a customer swear at you on a call doesn’t happen often, but when it does, and you realize you’re not equipped to handle the situation, it can really impact your confidence, which in turn impacts your performance and your overall happiness in your role.
A final note: pay attention to first-time managers too.
If you’re a director-level leader or above, look out for new managers who might be struggling too, especially if they’ve been promoted from CSM roles.
Often, for example, they’ve retained some of their old customers, or have a hard time letting go of old customer relationships. For this reason, it’s harder to make the switch to management in CS, and it means extra workload that diverts new managers from managing. Leaders need to draw a harder line on this. At a minimum, make sure your managers aren’t taking on new customers.
Lukas Alexander is ChurnZero’s vice-president of customer success. He has over a decade of experience successfully building and scaling global customer success teams, and elevating Net Revenue Retention (NRR) year over year.
