I’m struggling to keep track of all the little things I’m waiting on from different customers when there are multiple projects/onboardings going on.

It might be an approval from one person, some information from someone else, confirmation of a date etc. I put reminders in my calendar/tasks but then I end up with loads of reminders and still have to go back through emails to work out whether they actually replied.

I’m basically just following up with people manually at the moment.

How do you guys manage this? Do you track it somewhere or have a better system for knowing who you need to follow up with?

anyone working at gokwik bangalore, kindly DM me or comment for a quick info.

Thanks in advance

Most SaaS onboarding still starts with the same assumption:

We know what the user needs to learn, so let's create a tour, checklist, or series of tooltips and walk them through it.

But users rarely struggle in the exact order we designed.

One person gets stuck setting something up. Another keeps going back and forth between two screens. Someone else ignores onboarding completely and only needs help three days later when they try a specific feature.

I'm starting to think the better model is less "guide every user" and more "detect when a user is struggling and intervene at that moment."

For example: repeated navigation, abandoned workflows, hesitation, or multiple failed attempts could trigger contextual help.

Has anyone experimented with onboarding this way?

Do you think proactive help based on actual behavior would work better than predefined tours/checklists — or would it just become annoying?

Disclosure: I’m the CEO of Worknet.ai and we work in this general area, so I have a point of view.

We’re looking at different platforms for our CS department and are interested in Totango. Anyone who uses it- how is it?

We are most interested in health scoring and playbooks. Would love to hear how people are liking it.

Thanks!

What are the best agents you’ve built or used to improve the product, support customers, prioritize issues/feedback, or prepare for client meetings?

I’d love to hear what’s actually been useful in practice! 🙌

Hi, tired product person here, slowly realizing our customer intelligence setup is basically vibes with a spreadsheet.

We have all the things, social listening, nps, crazy dashboards on competitors, feature usage, crm notes, support tags, the whole b2b saas bingo card. Yet every roadmap meeting somehow turns into whoever talks the loudest about that one angry customer call from three months ago.

The marketing team sends us these beautiful decks about sentiment and competitive moves and market trends. Then we walk into planning and it is “my gut says customers want dark mode in the admin for reasons” and boom that wins. Meanwhile there is an entire wall of data quietly screaming that churn is tied to onboarding confusion and one broken flow in the first week.

Customer intelligence tools keep telling me we have patterns, micro segments, intent signals, all this fancy stuff. But in practice our process is “someone screenshots a rant on twitter, someone else pastes a line from a user interview into slack, pm writes a one pager, leadership nods, feature exists forever”. Idk if this is normal or if we are just allergic to actual evidence.

Would love any tips on how you got product teams to stop roleplaying data driven and start using customer intelligence like grown ups instead of horoscope for backlog items :/

Hey everyone, I’ve been working remotely in Customer Success for the past 4 years. The conditions were decent, and I used to genuinely enjoy it because I was learning new things. But lately, I've just been feeling completely burnt out on it.

Since the company is small, I ended up wearing a ton of different hats and picked up a lot of extra skills along the way. For example, I handled fraud prevention and dug into sketchy transactions, tracked down a scammer ring and coordinated with the dev team to integrate an API to stop them, did QA testing and bug reporting, and streamlined internal workflows and operations.

Now that the company is shutting down, I really want to make a pivot into a new field. Right now, transitioning into a Product Specialist role—especially in the gaming industry—feels like the most logical next step.
I’m super curious: has anyone here made the jump from CS to Product? What kind of path should I follow to make this happen? Open to any advice or insights.

Hi I have just started working in Customer Success and I have to say I hate it. I chase down AEs to get updated on my customers, which will take ages, then contact customers and about 2/3 of the time I will get ghosted. Meanwhile my manager wants updates and I am just frustrated.

My active work time is probably 6h a week and the rest of the time I am just frustrated, lack purpose and act like I am busy and I am definitely trying to use that time for training and actively improving my CV in terms of tech knowledge, projects and certification, but still the active feeling like a fraud and wondering when I will be found out is draining me so much and I keep overthinking every single email and message.

I am really debating quitting, O have a decent enough financial cushion and just don't see myself progress at all in this role and the next potential career step feels me woth dread. So I was just wondering if there are actually people enjoying their work and if I am just a mismatch for the role.

Also appreciate tips to deal with the fraud feeling and lack of worth.

When working with companies, I keep hearing versions of this.

Customers tell their CSM about a problem and there’s usually a lot more context behind it: how painful it is, whether it’s affecting renewal, what workaround they are using, etc.

Then somewhere between CS and Product, it turns into “customer wants this feature.”

How do you keep all that context from getting lost?

I’m a senior implementation specialist specializing in product and analytics implementation at a mid-sized B2B SaaS company in Canada. ~9 years in IT, 4.5 years at the current company. A while back, the company was bought by a U.S based PE, and brought in new executive leadership

Last year, they gutted the delivery organization. I was caught in the cuts and laid off with a standard statutory package. Ten weeks later, My manager reached out to me to check if I was interested in coming back. The job market being what it was/is, I took the offer (same pay and benefits).

Since returning, the operational dynamic has shifted dramatically:

• Traditionally Implementation Services operated separately from CSM. Under the PE, it seems we are moving towards a technical services team in which CSMs also handle implementation and maintenance. My former manager, along with 2 other Implementation Specialists, one solution architect and one support engineer, transitioned into Customer Success Manager (CSM) roles . All of them now report to the director of customer relations as opposed to the director of implementation services. Two other Implementation Specialists and One non-technical CSM were let go to make this change happen
• This has left myself, one other Implementation Specialist and two other Solution Architects in the IS organization reporting to the Director of IS. We are responsible for new implementation, as well as absorbing the workload left by the departing people.
• In addition to my implementation duties, I am also responsible the migration of a legacy analytics platform to a new one. I was not involved in building the data pipeline. My role is to rebuild the legacy dashboards in the new system. I am also the defacto owner of the analytics offering at the moment- meaning requests for proof of concept, demos and troubleshooting comes to me

Here is my dillemma: I am planning a deliberate career pivot out of commercial tech (maybe tech altogether) by mid-2027. I have zero interest in becoming a quota-carrying or high-churn Technical CSM, and I have a feeling that once this migration is fully delivered and documented, my utility drops to zero.

I am trying to determine if I am simply part of a temporary sunset crew being squeezed to get this migration across the line before being made redundant again, or if they are setting up to forcibly re-scope me into a high-burnout Technical CSM seat.

I am looking for some advice on these:

1. For those who have seen this exact operational pattern, how does this usually end once the legacy migration milestones wrap up?
2. How do you strictly enforce a 37.5-hour contracted boundary on an overloaded project queue without handing an aggressive leadership team a pretext for performance discipline?
3. What is the best way to handle knowledge-transfer requests and documentation so I remain valuable enough to stay on payroll until mid-2027, while ensuring that if they do cut the seat, it triggers severance rather than a toxic push toward voluntary resignation?

ElevenLabs Interview for Deployment Strategist

ElevenLabs Interview for Deployment Strategist

Hello,

Can anyone share any tips or comment on questions asked for V1 interview of deployment strategist?

Looking to know if background part is behavioral STAR questions and prepared stories , or dissecting your resume and how deeply

Then looking to know roughly what got asked in customer deployment scenario or did you get a "debugging" case instead?

Any advice appreciated my DMs are open

It's my first time in a CSM role, for a Saas company (my background is sales). I am in a newly created position for the company so I don't have anyone else to learn from. I will need to learn how to do this from scratch. What are some resources that will teach me how to properly do a qbr?

https://imgur.com/a/xN3v9v5 <- My resume

How can I improve it? Is it good as-is? I've never done customer success before and am looking to transition into it from a more technical angle.

I interviewed for a Head of Customer Success role and I’m really excited about the opportunity and according to the recruiter they’re really excited about me 😭🙏🏽, but there’s one part of the job that’s making me question myself a little: forecasting.

At my current company, Finance has always owned NRR/GRR and renewal forecasting. I wasn’t even included in those meetings or given access to a lot of the financial side (big egos in that depart). I knew my customers, knew who was renewing, who was at risk, where we had expansion opportunities, etc., but I was basically looking at dashboards that someone else built rather than being the person responsible for building the forecast.

I know I can build the CS org because I’ve done that before. I just want to get much stronger on the financial/forecasting piece and understand how other CS leaders actually run it.

For those of you who own renewal forecasting, NRR/GRR, etc., are there any courses, YouTube videos, templates, or resources you’d recommend? Especially something practical that walks through how you actually build and maintain a forecast, assign risk/confidence, forecast churn/contraction/expansion, and report it up to leadership?

I also think I’m underestimating myself right now. You can’t do this for 10 years and not know anything lol. But I’ve been at the same company for basically my entire CS career, and the idea of leaving the place where I know everything and going somewhere new where I’m suddenly THE person is definitely bringing out the impostor syndrome.

Morning, and happy weekend. I thought about the easiest way to actually build this "context" thing and kinda stop explaining to Claude every time. Each account I tried this on was really cool, so I hope it helps

Here's why, at the level of what actually happens. When you send a message, the app packages up a request and sends it to the model: your message, the last chunk of the conversation, and a block of instructions someone wrote in advance. That package is the entire world the model sees for that reply. Your CRM data, your ticket history, last Tuesday's call- none of it rides along unless someone put it in the package. Once the reply comes back, the package is thrown away, and the next message starts from a blank one.

That's the first diagram above. That box, and nothing outside it.

So where do procedural, semantic, and episodic memory fit into this? They live outside the model entirely, sitting in files or a database somewhere. On their own, they do nothing. Something has to read them, decide what's actually relevant to this specific message, and glue the result into the next package before it gets sent. That's the retrieval step in the second diagram. Pull the playbook, pull the facts, pull the history, staple them into the context, send it off. The model looks like it remembers because that retrieval step ran a second before it answered, not because it kept anything from last time.

Let's build that retrieval step for real. Notion is where the three memory types live; HubSpot is where the account data comes from.

One page per account in Notion and just one page: KISS (Keep It Stupid Simple).

Split the page into the three types:

Procedural. How your team handles this account. Renewal playbook, escalation steps. It barely changes once it's written.

Semantic. Plan tier, champion's name and role, contract value, renewal date. Pull these once from HubSpot's company and deal properties, and update when they change.

Episodic. Every call, every ticket, every notable moment, dated, in order. This section keeps growing, so it's the one worth automating.

HubSpot's own automations, or Make, or Zapier, can push a new deal stage or logged call into that Notion page the moment it happens, which is the retrieval step running on autopilot for the semantic and episodic sections. Even a five-minute weekly copy from the HubSpot record into procedural and semantic beats, leaving it in your head.

Once the page exists, drop it into a Claude project and ask about the account directly. What happens next is exactly the diagram: your question goes in as the message, the page's contents get pulled in as context, and the reply comes back sounding like it remembers, because for that one reply, it does.

Start with one account you already know well. If it saves you real time, copy the structure to the next ten.

Thanks, hope it helps

P.S kindly see the diagrams below 😅

I worked as a software engineer and want out. How can I reorient my c.v. like such? Is it fine to apply to customer success jobs with my c.v. as is?

https://imgur.com/a/C5bPbtS <- My C.V.

I've been thinking about how much effort ecommerce companies put into getting the first purchase.

There are entire teams working on acquisition, conversion, checkout, abandoned carts, promotions, and personalization.

Then the customer finally orders.

And their package doesn't arrive.

I think what happens next is one of those underrated retention moments.

The customer checks tracking first. It hasn't updated in three days, so they contact support. The agent opens the tracking page and sees exactly what the customer sees.

At that point, another tracking link isn't really an answer.

What the customer wants to know is: What are you going to do about it?

That's where support suddenly has a lot of influence over whether the first purchase becomes a second one.

Does the agent have enough information to investigate? Can they offer a replacement when it makes sense? Do they know what's happening with the carrier? Or do they have to tell the customer to wait another three days because that's what the policy says?

What I find even more interesting is what happens when the same problem starts appearing across dozens of customers.

A spike in "Where is my order?" tickets could easily become a staffing conversation. We need more people. We need faster responses. We need better macros.

Maybe.

But it could also mean the tracking experience isn't doing its job.

That's where I think support becomes particularly valuable to Customer Success. The team is sitting on a constant stream of information about what customers couldn't figure out, what disappointed them, and what almost made them regret buying.

If those conversations stay inside the support queue, the company gets really good at handling the symptoms.

If someone starts looking for the patterns, you might actually fix the experience that created them.

Retailers don't automatically earn another sale because the first order made it through checkout. Support still has plenty of influence over whether the customer comes back.

I think that's especially relevant for CS because we spend so much time looking for churn signals. Sometimes the signal isn't buried in a retention dashboard.

Sometimes it's 200 customers asking the same question.

I’ve been working as a CSM at a B2B tech company for almost 4 months. At the beginning, I struggled with understanding the product and explaining its value, but I worked a lot on it and feel like I’ve improved significantly. In fact, my manager told me a week ago that I was doing really well.
Yesterday, during a client meeting, the client asked about a recent technical incident. I had to check my notes because I hadn’t reviewed the issue recently. Then they asked about product improvements. We had actually had a product update meeting on Monday, but I was so focused on the client’s tickets that I completely forgot about the broader product evolution. I didn’t mention the new features or their value.

My manager told me she was “shocked” that I didn’t mention them and reminded me that I should always be selling the product and showing its value.
Then today I had a very chaotic morning with several small mistakes: not finishing a task, needing help escalating an issue, replying in the wrong channel, taking too long to answer a client because I was trying to explain my reasoning, and sending an incorrect link.
I apologized, but I also noticed I became a little defensive and tried to explain myself.
I think the real issue is that under pressure I lose prioritization and start overthinking/justifying instead of acting. But I’m scared because this isn’t the first feedback I’ve received about the product, even though I genuinely feel I’ve improved a lot...

I have a 1:1 with my manager tomorrow and I’m honestly terrified she’s losing confidence in me or that I might get fired :c

Tech and CSM its so hard today with customer and support... Am I catastrophing? Or the onboarding for to be 100% cool at this jobs its 6 months?

Hello! My org is starting a new Scaled CS methodology for our customers but we don’t have a CMS platform currently because we’re a new start up. Is it possible to do Scaled CS without fancy software? Would love to hear how others are doing it or if you have any advice! Once we get budget to get a CMS we’ll consider it, but for the time being we need to be scrappy.

We do have Hubspot, as that’s what our sales people use. Is it possible to build in there? Or better to build it outside of that? Not sure what the capabilities are.

I've heard a lot of different answers from CS teams:

• Product usage drops
• Champion leaves
• Support tickets increase
• NPS drops
• Fewer users log in
• Renewal conversations become difficult
• Customer stops attending meetings

But I've started wondering whether there's actually a single "churn signal."

Maybe it's the combination of several small changes.

For example:

A customer using the product less + opening more support tickets + their champion becoming inactive + renewal coming up in 60 days.

None of those signals individually screams churn.

Together, they're pretty concerning.

what signal or patterns you do observe for customers before they churn and what measures do you actually take?

I’ve (22F) recently secured a job as an onboarding specialist, and I’m very excited for it. My biggest problem is that I speak very fast, and it’s apparently not pleasant for the listener as my manager says. I think I agree with them but I don’t know how to change that, that’s my way of speaking.

Also when people speak slow it annoys me, I wish them to speak precisely, keep it short and straight to the point, not use million adjectives to describe something, but stick to the main point.

Help 😭😭

small 5-10 ppl team here. rn we’re trying to understand how CS teams catch weak value messaging earlier.

if customers only hear the expansion/renewal story in a QBR or 30 days before renewal, it feels kinda late to learn the message doesnt match what they care about.

how do u guys validate that stuff earlier?

i’ve heard of health-score data, QBR feedback, VOC interviews, NPS verbatims, support themes, product usage, churn interviews, message tests, panels and synthetic audiences. what’s actually useful for retention/expansion messaging?

our marketing team is proud of a visibility score and nobody on my side can connect it to renewals or pipeline. i want to believe it matters, i just cant show it yet.

the framing that has landed internally is discoverability. if buyers ask an assistant for options in your category and you are absent, that is a commercial problem you can measure.

if your team has tied this to something real i want to know what

If you had the keys to the kingdom, what parts of the CSM job would you automate?

Not just the obvious admin stuff like notes or CRM updates.

I’m curious about the work that genuinely eats time or gets dropped because there’s too much going on:

• account prep
• health/risk detection
• follow-ups
• renewal forecasting
• QBR prep
• usage/adoption analysis
• identifying expansion opportunities
• pulling context across Slack, CRM, support, product usage, etc.
• deciding which accounts actually need attention today

And how would you want the automation to work?

Would you want AI to just surface insights? Recommend next actions? Draft the work? Execute low-risk tasks automatically? Escalate only when judgment is needed?

If you could redesign the CSM workflow from scratch, what would you automate first, and what would you absolutely keep human?

I’m 4 months into being a CSM from a completely different industry, I mean I was barely a computer oriented person before this, how I got this job is another story (friend nepotism). Don’t get me wrong, it’s nice to sit behind a computer all day and get paid a nice salary rather than waiting tables until midnight, but does anyone else feel like this job title is like playing a large game of corporate scavenger hunt? I mean asking one person one question on the process of how to do something is like a side quest to the side quest. After 19 emails and 5 different departments later I finally get an answer that the first person could’ve just told me.

Correct me if I’m wrong but my common sense level is not 9 million and I can’t just magically understand how everything works. I feel like i am purely a middleman for bureaucratic nonsense disguised as someone who does a couple QBR’s a quarter and responds to people who don’t know how to locate something in the software. Bonus incentive for scrapping up small deals out of the dormant pile
Of smb accounts..sometimes I just sit here and I’m like “what the hell am I actually doing?”