FAQ
Does the Full Certified CSM Professional Program (CCSMP) cover everything I need to become certified as a Customer Success Manager?
Yes! The Full CCSMP program includes all of your training and certifications. Click here to review the detailed list of what’s included.
How long does the Full Certified CSM Professional Program (CCSMP) take to complete?
To an extent the length of time it takes you to complete all four ten training modules and pass all four certification levels is up to you. There is roughly 50 to 60 hours of content (depending upon individual capability), so if you studied at a rate of say four hours per week you should be able to complete the program within 12 to 15 weeks (around 2.5 to 3.5 months).
Can anyone become a Customer Success Manager? What knowledge, skills and/or experience do I need?
There are a wide range of customer success roles out there, including junior “first job” type roles all the way up to Vice President for Customer Success roles where you would be reporting directly to the CEO and a member of the Board of Directors. Of course just as with any job you do need to have some basic aptitude. However if you can pass the free online aptitude test for this course then you should be capable of holding down a CSM role.
How do I know the Certified CSM Professional Program (CCSMP) is for me? Do you provide a money back guarantee?
At PracticalCSM.com we offer a “no quibble” 14 day money back in full guarantee. This means that you can purchase this training program in confidence, knowing that if you try it and do not like it then you can get your money in back in full with no questions asked, so long as you meet the following criteria:
Firstly you must have tried out the content, so you need to get at least half way through Module One, which means viewing the lessons up to lesson 1.5.
Secondly, you must NOT have started Module Two (because we are not in the business of giving away all our training for free).
We believe that allowing you the opportunity to try out as much as you wish of Module One in order to make up your mind, but not proceeding further unless you are willing to commit to your purchase is fair on you and fair on us!
Is the Certified CSM Professional Program (CCSMP) taken entirely online?
Yes, this is a self-study program and all of the materials are available online. Some of the materials you must study whilst actually connected to the Internet, other materials you can download and study remotely (for example whilst travelling).
I do not have much money, can I pay in instalments?
Like most professional training and certification programs, the CCSMP program must be paid for in full up front in advance. However the 50% scholarship option of course means that (assuming you meet our scholarship criteria) you will only have to find half of the fees yourself, amounting to just $718.50 of the full $1,437. Your payment of the balance must be made in full and in advance using a credit or debit card. We are sorry but we do not offer any exceptions to the above.
Does the Certified CSM Professional Program (CCSMP) guarantee that I will get a job as a Customer Success Manager?
Much as we would love to do so, even we cannot guarantee that you will find your perfect role, and this is quite simply because there are so many variables that are outside of our control, including you yourself of course! Not everyone is cut out to be a CSM, and that is why we provide a 14 days money back guarantee (see separate Question on refunds).
What happens after I complete the training and become certified as a Level 4 CCSMP?
Once you have completed the training and passed the two final exams you will become certified as a Level 4 CCSMP and you will automatically be sent your certificate (in electronic format).
Course Content
Module 1 – Customer Success Fundamentals
The Customer Success Fundamentals module provides a basic overview of the core themes and concepts of Customer Success. To explore this topic we will be answering the following questions: What is Customer Success and why is it important? Who is Customer Success important to? What is Customer Success Management? What types of situations does Customer Success Management apply to? and… How can Customer Success Management help to increase a company’s sales revenues and profitability? We will then discuss 14 tenets (or guiding principles) of customer success that will outline the role of the CSM (or customer success manager) in ensuring that customer success occurs and that its benefits are realized by both the CSM’s own company and its customers.
Module 2 – Business Fundamentals
It is critical for customer success managers to have a sufficiently detailed level of business awareness, yet relatively few CSMs ever receive any training or even any formal information about how businesses work and additionally, relatively few CSMs come to the role already with this knowledge. In this module we will be examining the connection between customer success managers and business awareness, the reasons why businesses exist in the first place, how businesses create value for their owners and who else businesses create value for, and how expenditure and profits are calculated. We then will take a look at how businesses work in terms of how they are organized, what they do, what resources they need and what relationships they have with other entities. After this we will discuss the principles of business management, including the things that influence change within a business and how business strategy is formulated.
Module 3 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 1: Preparation
The secret to most professions lies in the preparatory work, and this is no less true for Success Management than for any other type of work. The start point for Customer Success Managers, when faced with any new customer engagement, is firstly to prepare themselves by performing research and analysis to understand the customer, its challenges and initiatives and the details about the solution it has purchased. After this, the CSM needs to prepare the customer for the upcoming onboarding, adoption, and value realization work that lies ahead of them if they are going to generate successful outcomes from the purchase and utilization of the CSM’s company’s solutions. This module takes CSMs through the processes and steps needs to ensure that both they themselves and their customer’s stakeholders are fully prepared and ready to proceed with making the customer’s initiative successful.
Module 4 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 2: Commitment
It is very hard to achieve high-quality results when the CSM is not fully aligned to the customer’s needs and/or when the customer and its stakeholders are not fully committed to an agreed course of action that involves the CSM to whatever greater or lesser extent is necessary. It is therefore essential that CSMs take the time to ensure that their work with the customer and its stakeholders is effective. Doing this involves establishing good working relationships with those stakeholders, and holding high-quality meetings, where the right questions get asked. It also involves analyzing and identifying who will be involved in the engagement and how they should be managed. Finally, it involves the joint creation of a Customer Success Plan that everyone has agreed with and is willing to adhere to.
Module 5 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 3: Onboarding
A core aspect of any Customer Success Manager’s role is to get customers up and running and utilizing the solutions they have purchased from the CSM’s company as swiftly and as painlessly as possible. Doing so reduces any possible frustration felt on the part of customers’ stakeholders caused by unnecessary delays or additional and unexpected workloads and brings forward the “Time to Value” (or TtV) experienced by the customer so that overall the customer gains the best possible results from their purchase in the shortest possible time. This course describes the steps that CSMs should take during the initial Onboarding process, which is all about getting the customer acquainted with what they have purchased and ensuring they understand what needs to be done in order to get their users up and running and generating value with the products and/or services they have purchased.
Module 6 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 4: Adoption Planning
Adoption is such an important part of the job of any Customer Success Manager that we have divided it up into two separate modules – this module that you are currently studying which is called Adoption Planning and the next module which is called Adoption Implementation. Adoption planning and adoption implementation require two quite different sets of skills and process steps to complete. In adoption planning, we will take you through what Adoption is and how it works, and we will look at Adoption from the perspective of end-user change management. We will review how to understand the KSA (or Knowledge, Skills, and Attitude) needs of each impacted user, and the differences and similarities between directly and indirectly impacted users. We will review the adoption requirements workshopping process and how to gain consensus agreement from all necessary stakeholders that user adoption requirements have been correctly researched and documented. Finally, we will turn to what tools and techniques are available to help the CSM produce a meaningful adoption plan.
Module 7 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 5: Adoption Implementation
As you already know from the previous module, Adoption is such an important part of the job of any Customer Success Manager that we have divided it up into two separate modules – this module that you are currently studying which is called Adoption Implementation and the previous module which is called Adoption Planning, and adoption planning and adoption implementation require two quite different sets of skills and process steps to complete. In adoption implementation, we will focus on the practical steps that CSMs can take to help their customers implement their adoption plan to get their users trained and upskilled on the processes they need to complete in order to use the new products and/or services that their company has purchased. We will look at how to use project management concepts and best practices to help manage the adoption process, how to prepare for project kick-off and how to manage people and conflict. We will review tools, for task management, how to measure and report on adoption activity and how to handle problems if they occur.
Module 8 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 6: Value Realisation
A critical aspect of any Customer Success Manager’s role is to help customers to generate measurable value from the solutions they have purchased from the CSM’s company. It is only by realizing value from a solution that a customer will want to renew or increase their existing service contracts and/or make additional product or service purchases. From the CSM’s company’s perspective, helping customers to understand the value they are getting and therefore to continue to purchase more of its solutions is precisely what Customer Success Management is all about. From the customers’ perspectives, the value realization stage is also critical, since it is during this stage that they actually start to realize a return from their investment in the CSM’s company’s solutions. This module explains how CSMs can help customers both to maximize the actual value they attain from their solutions and also to measure and report on that value.
Module 9 – Practical CSM Framework Phase 7: Preparation
Becoming a proficient and capable Customer Success Manager cannot happen overnight. Once you have learned the basic processes and best practices for the core activities that CSMs are involved in, you then need to put your learning to practice and try out those processes and best practices in real customer-facing situations. In this way and over time, the experience can be gained and lessons can be learned to refine, improve and hone the CSM’s capabilities to the level needed to become fully capable as an expert Customer Success Management professional. But it’s not enough just to do the work. Alongside the preparation, onboarding, adoption, and value realization activities that CSMs will perform as they work with their customers, they also need to evaluate both their own performance and that of the overall engagement in order to understand what is working well and what is either not working well or even not working at all. Then the CSM can take proactive steps to repeat what works and fix what does not work, and this process of ongoing evaluation and improvement is what this module is all about.
Module 10 – Putting It All Together
Part of any experienced and qualified professional’s capability is the ability to identify challenges and obstacles to success and to deal with those challenges and obstacles in an efficient and effective manner. This final module in the series discusses how to prepare yourself in order to avoid such problems in the first place, and also how to deal with such challenges both through taking a “partnering approach” with customers in order to maximize the qualities of the relationship and the benefits for both parties and through identifying and overcoming the most common traps and pitfalls that Customer Success Managers are likely to come across during their customer engagements.
Final Exam Part A & Part B
Once you have completed all of the training modules from 1 to 10 its time to take the exams! Exam A is a knowledge test, comprising 60 simple questions together with “multiple choice” answer selections to choose from. This exam is very similar to the end of module tests you will already have experience, except that the exam is timed (max time is 60 minutes) and you will have 60 questions to answer. Exam B is more a test of your ability to apply best practices in real world scenarios and comprises eight detailed fictious case study situations followed by a question. This exam must be completed within 45
