What are the biggest frustrations you have as a customer success manager?

As a customer success manager, one of the most important skills someone can develop is setting the right expectations and getting alignment between internal and external stakeholders. The biggest frustrations I've exeperienced come from when we haven't reached alignment. 

The best CSMs do this as part of their process whenever they work with someone new - internal or external. For example, a CSM's top priorities when being introduced to a client should be to set expectations about what they can offer the client in their working relationship (hint: a strategic, goal-oriented thought partner, not technical support), and to align on the client's business goals. When a CSM does this successfully they'll have meaningful interactions with the customer throughout the relationship and can line all the work they do together up to the client's business goals. 

When the CSM ties the value they and their product can provide directly to the customer's business goals, they prove the relationship to be important and ensure the renewal. 

What's frustrating is when they DON'T reach alignment. We've all had an experience similar to this one: you start the client meeting, introducing yourself and wanting to learn more about the customer's business, when suddenly the customer derails. He says something like, "hey, before we talk about that I was wondering, how do I pull a report from xyz product?" It puts the CSM in a difficult and frustrating position. On one hand, you want to be helpful. And let's be real, you're going to show them how to pull the report. On the other, you have so much more strategic value to offer the customer than providing technical Q&A. If you're not careful, you could spend the entire conversation answering tactical questions. What's worse is you will now have misalignment between the high level value you can provide and what the client will expect from your relationship, and you'll leave the meeting with no deeper insight into their business for the future.

However, the best CSMs can use situations of misalignment as opportunities. "Oh! You'd like to pull a report on the weekly scheduler activities? I can definitely help with that. So that I make sure we do it in the best way, can you help me understand what you're going to do with the report?" Or, "the product doesn't currently have the ability to export that information, but we do have a lot of ways you can work with it. Can you help me understand what you'd like to do so we can work together on it?" The CSMs can then use their responses to dig deeper into the customer's goals and daily workflows, and be a partner in problem-solving and achieving business goals. 

Weak leadership: A leadership that: 

• Does not establish clear RACI for the role
• Do not have clearly defined metrics or a clear path to achieve them
• Does not adequately staff CS operations team to help the CSM team
• Does not invest in tooling to provide people with the right CS tools to do their job well
• Does not remove organizational barriers for the CSM with cross-functional leaders such as services, support, products, sales etc.
• Does not establish clear Rules of Engagement to work with other teams (sales, architects, implementation, services) so that the CSMs don't become a catch-all

Here are some of the things that can frustrate CSMs from time to time.

• When the role is misunderstood or confused with that of Customer Service or a single point of contact for everything. When everything related to the Customer is dumped on Customer Success.  

• When internal teams are unresponsive or uncooperative. This can hinder the CSMs ability to provide high-quality engagement with the customer and be the trusted advisor.

• When sales teams fail to do a proper handover when the booking is completed

• When there is poor responsiveness from the customer key stakeholders or the stakeholders keep changing. Or when the customers' priorities keep changing. 

• When the partner responsible for the solution implementation does a poor job and throws it over the wall for the CSM to take care of.

The biggest frustration for me as a customer success manager was the lack of a shared success plan with my customer.

My objective was always to make the customer as successful as possible and ensure they felt their investment was worthwhile and directly contributed to the company achieving its goals.

Not having clarity on what that success looked like for the customer made it challenging to deliver on this and so I had to invest heavily in building the relationship, asking effective open ended questions and setting clear objectives and milestones from the outset. This didn't always work however it definitely helped me deal with more ambiguous situations.

It's still a misunderstood function, and there are many different ways to deploy customer success, leaving a consistently referenceable best practice methodology challenging. From my perspective, CS should not be seen as a cost centre but as a function that can drive retention and growth and impact a business's bottom line. It's crucial that CS leaders are data-orientated and that they can use metrics to demonstrate why companies should deploy CSMs, scale resources, and other relevant roles that support customers in the context of a budget setting and annual planning framework.

I think the most frustrating thing about Customer Success is that without agreement across the organization about the importance and role of Customer Success, it can become a catch-all. As the quarterback of the customer relationship, that means all things can fall to the CSM. If there are not very clear swim lanes, paths of escalation and role definition, this means the CSM may soon find themselves as;

• Customer Support

• Collections Specialist

• Renewal/Contract Manager

• IB seller

• Product Specialist

• Escalations Manager

While a great CSM possesses skills that can help in each of those categories, they cant be all of those things without burning out quickly.