The Customer Success Professional's Handbook

2Defining the Customer Success Manager Role

Customer Success is the business methodology of ensuring your customers achieve their desired outcomes while using your product or service. Customer Success Management is the process of proactively orchestrating and managing toward your customer's achievement of their desired outcomes. It aims to align client and vendor goals for mutually beneficial results. It logically follows then, that: “A Customer Success Manager is the qualified individual that engages with the customer, acutely assesses their needs, strategically aligns the use of your products or services to achieve those needs, and ensures that the customer attains their expected outcomes by tactically and proactively taking actions all along the way.”

Goals: Increase Retention, Reduce Churn, Drive Growth

As a Customer Success Manager, retention is the most crucial thing you will be measured on. Technically, retention means the rate at which you keep your customers over a certain period and the revenue associated with your customer contracts. Retention is not just the act of keeping a customer. It is a process that starts with Sales but lands mostly on you, the CSM, to foster the customer to be successful with your product or service. Your purpose, simply stated, is to help a customer stay your customer.

Why? Because in the digital subscription-based age, the relationship can sometimes terminate with a click of a button. The cost of acquiring new customers can be expensive, ...