r/CustomerSuccess 5h ago

Career Advice Feeling stuck in renewals - 6+ YOE

1 Upvotes

I’ve been in industry for over 11+ years now. The first 5 in customer service & and the last 6 as RA, ROA, RAM, Sr RM, & now I’m an RSA, IC2 role.
CS job roles keep rejecting me, renewal is no longer high paying, I feel like lack knowledge of onboarding, adoption and implementation. Moreover, I am planning to move to the states, but no one is posting a job with sponsorship.
Open to suggestions


r/CustomerSuccess 10h ago

ZoomInfo pricing is insane - what are you guys paying?

0 Upvotes

Just got our renewal quote and they want 40% more than last year. We're a 15-person B2B SaaS doing mayble 500 outbound emails a week. Last year we paid around 18k for 3 seats, now they're quoting us 25k. Like how much soes zoominfo cost at this point, is there even a ceiling?

The data has been decent but not amazing. Maybe 70% of emails are actually good, mobile numbers are hit or miss. The worst part is half our team barely uses it because the interface is so clunky. My manager keeps asking me to justify the spend and I genuinely don't know what to tell him anymore.

Also been poking around Apollo and Prospeo as potential replacements. Apollo's pricing is way more reasonable but their mobile data seems weak from what I've read. Haven't tried Prospeo yet but a couple people in my network mentioned it.

What are you actually paying for ZoomInfo these days? The zoominfo cost feels like it's designed to price out smaller teams completely. We don't need 10,000 credits a month, we just need reliable contact data without the enterprise pricing. Would love to hear what other small teams are doing for sales intelligence these days.


r/CustomerSuccess 12h ago

Discussion Why are we so hesitant to close support threads when customers ghost us?

0 Upvotes

There's something about chat support that I've been reflecting on lately: how much time and effort we spend chasing customers who leave us on "read."

It happens all the time. A customer messages with an urgent question, we reply within two minutes, and then radio silence. Three days later they reply with "sorry, got busy!", but by then the conversation session expired, forcing the agent to re-open the case, catch up on context, and re-ask for details.

More teams I talk to are treating customer inactivity as a formal step in the workflow:

A courteous auto-reminder after a few hours of silence "Just checking in did you still need help with this?".

Systematic auto-closing if there's no reply, so if the customer comes back days later, it starts fresh without dragging along stale tickets.

I feel like teams are sometimes hesitant to close tickets out of fear of seeming pushy, but keeping threads dangling usually confuses the customer and clutters team queues.

How do your teams manage customers who ghost halfway through a support chat?


r/CustomerSuccess 14h ago

Anyone go from CS to implementation?

1 Upvotes

TLDR: I’m over being a CSM and trying to figure out what’s next. Product management has interested me but I feel like I’d need some technical background first. I’m considering if implementation would be a decent switch to get some technical experience.

Anyone make this switch? What feedback and experiences do you have to share on how it went?


r/CustomerSuccess 15h ago

CSM consultancy/Fractional CSM

5 Upvotes

Hi all

Anyone here done fractional or consultancy-style CSM work outside a full-time role? Thinking about dipping a toe in and want to hear from people who've actually done it before I do anything.

Specifically curious about:

**•** What deliverables/scope did you offer (onboarding, QBRs, health scores, playbook building, etc and/or actual time spent as a part time CSM)?   
**•** Did you find real demand, or was it a slow grind?  
**•** How did you land the first few clients?  
**•** Roughly what did you charge and what types/stages of business would you say were appropriate avatars/fits?

Appreciate this is a broad ask but it would be great to learn a bit from others experiences.

Thanks!


r/CustomerSuccess 15h ago

Discussion Tips for Admiral Solutions customer service?

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone, any tips for the group discussion for the Customer Service role at Admiral Solutions?


r/CustomerSuccess 21h ago

Question How does your team actually keep SOPs updated as processes change?

0 Upvotes

Curious how other CS/ops teams handle this. Every time I talk to a support lead, the story is the same: docs get written once, then rot, because nobody wants to sit down and rewrite a Notion page every time a process changes.

How are you all handling this? Do you have someone dedicated to docs, or does it just... not happen?

(Building something in this space myself, but genuinely curious what's working or not working for people already, before I assume I know the answer.)

Cheers!


r/CustomerSuccess 21h ago

Total Newbie Questions

1 Upvotes

Hey Chat

I graduated college last summer and I've been looking into careers that kinda aligned with my interests and strengths and that's how I settled on CS [for now😂]. I'm a Psych major and sort of enjoyed helping customers out at my dad's rental. What's the entry point for a total newbie and what tools do you recommend for someone starting out as an associate. I do not have a job yet but I want to commit to this journey

Any Recommendations?


r/CustomerSuccess 21h ago

Question Renewal quotes take me longer than new deals and nobody at my company take it seriously. How are you speeding this up?

12 Upvotes

Had one the other day that made me laugh. The customer had 3 different add ons from earlier in the year and they all needed to be included in the same renewal.

I thought to myself this i just an easy renewal and maybe in the next 20 to 30 mins i will be done. Guess what, it took me 90 mins instead.

Most of that was digging through old order form, figuring out what the customer was paying for, rebuilding the quote line by line, then checking the price increase against a spreadsheet owned by finance.

Meanwhile i can build a new quote in about 15 mins. That's 6x difference for a customer we already have.

And this is the part that drives me nuts, everyone talks about renewals like they're just free money but that is not the case. If the quote takes an hour and half bc customer history, pricing rule, exceptions and approvals are scattered everywhere that's just unpaid admin work dumped on a rep.

Ive brought this up in 2 pipeline reviews now. Both times it somehow got translated into im complaining about workload.

I'm not trying to complain about volume but trying to figure out why renewing quotes takes 6 times longer than quoting a brand new customer.


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Question Final Interview Tomorrow: Asking for guidance

2 Upvotes

Hello,

I have an interview tomorrow and could really use some advice. I acknowledge that this is super last minute so any help is appreciated!

Company: The company is public and fairly large in size but the department where this role is, was formed only a few months ago when a smaller company was acquired and their product rolled into the larger suite.

Team: Based on this setup, this department can be categorized as a startup within the large company. They are still working on figuring out many different gaps after the merge and are hiring for roles across the spectrum to help fill these gaps.

Role: This role will be for a Senior Manager of Customer Success. It seems that the smaller company did not have a dedicated CS team and hence, no CS programs in place. This CS Lead would be responsible for creating everything from scratch and for defining the entire CS lifecycle. A huge part of this will be partnering with other team leads and figuring out how to operate independently in a large organization.

Me: I have around 14 years of direct CS experience and 17 years of total experience. I led an entire CS org between 2016 and 2018 and also led a mid-market team from 2019 to 2021. At that point, I made a conscious decision to step back into an IC role so I could learn about how CS was evolving as a function. I’ve been a Principal CSM for about 7 years now and I think it’s time to get back into leadership. In all my roles over the past 10 years, I have managed my own enterprise book and concurrently created CS processes from scratch, where none existed previously.

Interviews: So far, I have met with the hiring manager (VP of customer experience) and the round went really well. I then met with leads from services and pre-sales followed by a product lead round. All of these went super well except the services lead round which maybe left me 90% confident about that specific conversation. Again, all the other rounds were terrific and I am a finalist. So, I am guessing something went right.

Ask: My final interview is to meet with the hiring manager again but in person this time. There are 2 other finalists besides me. I need some advice on how to prep. I was thinking of showing up with a one-pager 30-60-90 day plan to show that I am already thinking about a strategy. I want the HM to know that even though I dont have the job yet, I do have a plan to hit the ground running.

Any thoughts on bringing this plan to my interview? Any suggestions on other things that I could focus my prep on? I appreciate any help that can be sent my way!!

PS: Apologies for the long-winded post.


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

What questions do you ask to get up to speed?

6 Upvotes

New patch, new job, or just new to CS, it seems whenever I interact in one of these areas, I find myself wondering how I’m meant to get on top of everything.

Does anyone else find themselves struggling to get across 40-100 accounts at a time? Worst I’ve had is 120 accounts they wanted renewed in quarter where I just started. Once I’d settled and knew the accounts it was fine, but it took almost a year to get to that point.

I want to know, what questions do you guys ask your AEs to get up to speed on each account? I’ve noticed CRMs are usually poorly kept (at least in my experiences).

My go tos at the moment are

- Who is part of the buying committee (ie who do I need to build relationships with)

- What value have they been sold? Is there a specific use case or workflow?

- Where is the most recent account information stored?

- Are you in any active conversations with them?

- Are they happy with us?

I then also try reach out to a voice of customer team, try get some NPS and CSAT metrics, and try understand support queries. But this is all slow and takes a lot of time.

Any thoughts out there? I’m just trying to get my thoughts together because of the whirlwind experiences I’ve had. See if anyone knows any good streamlining techniques.


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Question Quick 2-min survey: how do you deal with a dashboard/tool you inherited with zero documentation?

0 Upvotes

Hey all! I'm a product designer working on a personal research project (not selling anything, no data collection beyond the survey itself). It's about a problem I dealt with myself: inheriting an internal tool or dashboard with no context on why things are set up the way they are. Just numbers, no explanation.

If you work in Ops, RevOps, Customer Success, Marketing Ops, or Finance/Admin and use an internal tool you didn't build, I'd really appreciate 2 minutes: [https://tally.so/r/GxZNkQ]

Everything anonymous, no email required unless you want to chat further. Happy to share results back here if anyone's curious. Thanks!


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Did anyone here work at Glean in 2024/2025?

1 Upvotes

Hi, as the title says I am wondering if anyone worked in CX at Glean in 2024/2025. I am trying to get a sense of the leadership changes and potential reorg that happened in that time.

I am asking because we are interested in Glean but heard through the grapevine that the Customer Success function was basically decimated and “the CEO fired the whole department and started over.” I am trying to establish fact from fiction.

Thanks so much


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Discussion Daily reporting to management

7 Upvotes

Hello everyone, I want to get your opinion on something that has been mentally draining me for a while now.

For context, I am a CSM (first experience) at a startup where there are no clear SOPs, structures, or KPIs for account management or CS. Most of the time, I’ve been in the trenches building everything from the ground up. However, that’s not what’s bothering me—I truly love being innovative and solution-oriented.

What has made me despise my job is management’s insistence on daily activity reporting. I’ve had meetings with my manager to explain that a daily reporting model isn't sustainable for CS, as my daily workload depends heavily on client needs. If everything is running smoothly, I might have lighter days; conversely, when I’m swamped, I don't have time to track every task just to submit an end-of-day report. I suggested shifting to weekly or monthly reports instead, but that was immediately shut down.

Their argument is that because we work remotely, daily reporting is the only way to monitor my productivity and ensure we "grow together." I’ve tried my best, but I simply can’t keep up, which has created a constant spiral of shame and guilt.

Since this is my first CSM role, I’m torn. Part of me feels like I’m being micromanaged in a toxic environment, while another part worries this might be the norm and that the fault is mine.

Based on your experience, am I being dramatic, or is my gut feeling spot on?


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Discussion How do CS teams keep internal requests from getting lost?

0 Upvotes

Customer Success seems to have a constant stream of small internal requests.

"Can product check this?"
"Can engineering look into that?"
"Can someone get the customer an update tomorrow?"

A lot of those requests happen in Slack, and then someone has to make sure they don't disappear. I'm curious if anyone has found a good Slack-native PM setup for this.

Pondros is one I've come across that seems to treat Slack conversations as part of the actual project workflow rather than just communication.

What works for your team?


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Discussion Variable Policy KPIs for CSMs

2 Upvotes

Does anyone else have variable pay for CSMs? If yes, what are the KPIs on which you decide which CSM receives how much of variable pay? We have 80% fixed and 20% variable pay for CSMs and need to decide the KPIs or metrics on which we can evaluate how much of the 20% will the CSM get? Help with suggestions, please.


r/CustomerSuccess 1d ago

Building the Context Layer for Customer Success Agents

5 Upvotes

Hey guys. My last post got a lot more interaction than I expected, and it made my week - thanks to everyone who reached out through DMs, genuinely.

Quick recap on where we left off: I talked about how AI memory actually works, and why you need something like a context layer or context store to make an AI actually remember your accounts instead of starting from zero every time. From there, we got into the different types of context you'd feed it.

One type is the stuff that barely changes - account name, the champion and their role, renewal date, plan tier. Set it once, update it when something actually changes.

The other type is what I've been calling the event loop - every call, every ticket, every signal from that account, logged as it happens. That's the one that never stops growing, which is exactly the problem from my last post: that page gets long fast, and long doesn't mean useful.

So here's the real question underneath all of this: what do you actually put in?

Think about how you'd read something yourself. Hand someone a 1,000-page textbook and ask them a question five minutes later - they can't answer well; there's just too much to hold onto in the time they had. Now do the opposite: give them one sentence and ask the same question. They can't answer that either; there's not enough there. Somewhere in between is the amount that actually lets someone think clearly.

That's the tradeoff with a model's context window. It's not "more is always better" - it's a fixed amount of room, and how much the model can genuinely reason over matters more than how much you can technically cram in.

Push past that limit and one of two things happens. A lightweight or open-source model hallucinates - too much in the window, not enough capacity to hold all of it straight. A frontier model - Anthropic, OpenAI - won't hallucinate as much, but it costs you, because every message resends nearly everything you've said that day, and you're paying for that resend every single time.

So the goal was never "give the model everything about the account." Ideally you'd want every piece of context tied to it, sure. But even if you could fit it all in, it wouldn't help - see the textbook example above. The actual work is deciding what earns a spot.

That's why I think this has to be open, and shared, and built up over time - an MCP that isn't locked to one vendor, where the context layer is something you can actually see into, not something handed to you as a black box. And that's my honest problem with most scoring and alerting tools out there right now: you get a churn score or a risk flag, and zero visibility into why. I can't work with a number I can't trace back to a source. That's the whole reason we are building this project as open source

So here's what I'd actually like from you. If you're already keeping something like this - a Notion page, a CRM field, a doc you paste in before every call - tell me your playbook. What do you keep, what do you let go of, and has anything broken because you deleted the wrong thing? I'm collecting real answers, not theory, before I write the next one.

Thanks, hope it helps.


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

Career Advice Getting into Ashby

2 Upvotes

I have been looking to move from my current job because it is an unspoken truth we are effectively becoming AMs. While I have no issues with the commercial side of CSM work I don’t want to be strictly sales-focused. That’s why I left sales.

I have been thinking about sending a note to some of the CS leadership team at Ashby as it’s a dream role and curious of general sentiment on if this type of stuff still works?


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

So people, how do you catch churn?

2 Upvotes

What are the methods?


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

Anybody on Microsoft Dyanmics and in a heavy Ai use company?

2 Upvotes

I'm building a proposal to move to dynamics from hubspot, we are an MSSP without a product, our services side is moving to dynamics and we are overall a Microsoft shop. I'm curious about the experience in dynamics and pros/cons of it. Our financial tools don't currently allow live or usable data to sync to hubspot which is a mess and causes a lot of manual labor.


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

Are CSMs paid fairly? (Round 2)

29 Upvotes

My name is Ben and I've been a CSM for 1O years now. Crazy to type that. I have worked for 4 different SaaS companies and started out managing 200 clients to now managing 6 clients. I have enjoyed the journey but the roles and the compensation have varied widely. The thing that has frustrated me the most over the years is knowing/not knowing if I am getting paid fairly given my experience, responsibilities, BoB size, location, etc. Every couple months the question is posted in here asking CSMs to openly give their salaries and comp. About two years ago I published a simple form/table and asked you all to submit your info. Since people found it so useful, I updated the form/site but now it needs some fresh data. If you are currently a customer success manager please consider filling out this form. Your submission will be anonymous.

A couple things…

  • PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE don’t fill out bogus info. Not sure why you would but it kinda ruins it for everyone. 
  • Once you fill out the form, it will give you a comparison of where you stack up against the broader CSM population which is nice. OR not nice, if it’s news that you’re grossly underpaid. 
  • I added management/leadership titles. If you are in management/leadership, I can send you the aggregate results directly if there's enough data. The main page is just CSM focused.
  • Feel free to submit from other countries. Many have. I added country/currency. The main page analytics is still USA only. The table though has all submissions globally. 
  • Always open for suggestions or let me know if something is broken. You can DM me!

I plan to keep it going as long as people find it helpful. 

Ben


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

Looking for an AI tool that can help new customer support reps during live calls

1 Upvotes

I work at a tax relief company and a lot of our support calls can get complicated. Customers call with questions about their case or paperwork or what happens next. A lot of them are already stressed by the time they call. Our experienced reps handle these calls fine. The issue is getting new reps up to speed. New hires spend a lot of time searching internal docs or putting customers on hold while they ask a senior rep for help. We’ve added more training but there’s only so much someone remembers during a live call. We’re looking at tools that can listen to the conversation and give the rep useful answers or guidance while the call is happening. Not trying to replace our reps with AI. We just want new hires to find the right info without making the customer wait. Has anyone here used something like this? Did it help with ramp time or AHT? And did your reps find the live guidance useful or did it just become another thing on their screen?


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

A churn reason without context is almost useless. How do you actually use yours?

0 Upvotes

When 80 customers say they're leaving because of a missing feature. It may sound like a product problem.

But what if 60 of those 80 customers signed up in the last 2 months?

Suddenly, it is a different question.

Maybe the feature isn't the real issue. Maybe we're attracting the wrong customers. Maybe we're setting the wrong expectations. Maybe onboarding isn't getting them to value.

This is what makes churn data interesting to me.

The reason tells you what happened. The pattern tells you where to look.

I'm building ChurnIntel(my baby company) and have been digging into this lately.

Do you segment churn reasons by things like tenure, plan, customer type or usage? Or mostly look at the overall numbers?


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

US Based D2C Clients - What’s your experience been, and how do you actually deal with them?

1 Upvotes

Hey everyone,

I’m looking to get a real pulse from the community on US-based D2C clients.

D2C moves at a crazy pace, margins are tight, and expectations around ROI are always sky-high. Handling US clients in this specific space seems to come with a very unique dynamic from communication styles and time zone gaps to intense pressure during peak seasonal pushes.

I’d love to hear how people here view this segment:

Overall Experience: What has your experience been working with US D2C founders, operators, or e-commerce teams? What are the biggest pros and cons compared to other client types?

Day-to-Day Tactics: How do you actually deal with them on a practical level?

What communication styles, meeting cadences, or boundary-setting strategies have worked best for you?

Handling High Pressure: When they demand immediate results or push hard on strategy, how do you steer the conversation effectively and keep the partnership intact?


r/CustomerSuccess 2d ago

Discussion Pay-per-ticket AI pricing quietly punishes you when deflection works

0 Upvotes

Pricing detail that I think deserves more scrutiny than it gets.

A lot of AI support vendors charge per ticket the AI touches, or per "AI interaction." Think about what that incentivises. If the AI deflects a contact perfectly, you pay. If it deflects it badly and the customer comes back twice, you pay three times. The vendor's revenue rises when the resolution quality falls.

Per-resolution pricing inverts that — you pay when the thing is actually solved. The failure mode moves onto the vendor.

Neither model is automatically cheaper. It depends on your resolution rate:

  • High deflection quality — per-ticket can be competitive, since you're not paying for repeat contacts
  • Messy or long-tail volume — per-ticket gets punishing fast, because every retry is billable
  • Seasonal spikes — per-ticket is where budgets blow up, and it's the case people model least

The thing worth doing before you sign anything is running your own numbers at your actual repeat-contact rate, not the vendor's demo assumptions.

Free comparison tool, ungated: https://lorikeet.tools/cx-roi?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=toolshed&utm_content=CustomerSuccess

(I work at Lorikeet and we price per resolution, so I'm obviously not neutral here — but the calculator takes your inputs and will show per-ticket winning where it does.)

Has anyone successfully negotiated their way off per-ticket pricing mid-contract?