The Customer Success Professional's Handbook

5Learn How to Empathize and Build Relationships with Customers

Of all the skills that a Customer Success Manager should master, the ability to empathize and build relationships with customers is of the utmost importance. It needs to be approached with a simple perspective in mind. Your customer is your customer because, at some point, an executive on their side decided to engage your company. You are in what is essentially an on-demand relationship; one that you've been thrust into. As a CSM, you are at the center of that business relationship. You need to quickly move it from the formal business arrangement, which can be a bit awkward at the beginning, to a far more human-centric and trust-based partnership. Getting to that state rapidly is vital in order to create a foundation of success with your customers.

To give you a different flavor on this “soft-skills” topic, we have distilled the critical skill of building empathetic relationships with customers down to these Seven Principles:

1. Be introspective and self-aware.
2. Communicate with intent, precision, and persuasion and become a trusted advisor.
3. Consistently follow-up to create and grow trust.
4. How to respond when you don't know the answer.
5. Stay focused and positive when situations are difficult and learn from them.
6. Engage people in-depth and with a #humanfirst lens of compassion.
7. Genuinely connect with customers because it is personal, and it is your business.

While some of these topics are certainly not new or unique, ...