Whilst we are still working towards this goal, we do not want to draw too many conclusions, however at the same time there are a couple of very strong indicators from the approximately 100 respondents that we have correlated so far, that we feel justified to discuss even at this early stage. These are shown below: 

One: Customer Success Management Workloads are High and Continue to Increase 

Situational Analysis 

Question 17 in our Survey asked Customer Success Leaders about their teams’ volume of work, or workload, and so far, a very large majority of these leaders indicated that workload was increasing for their teams. 

This is particularly interesting because our 2021/22 Survey responses also showed a strong increase in workload, so this would appear to be a trend that has been continuing for at least the last four years or so, and which does not appear to show any signs of slowing down. 

In addition, Question 16 asked respondents to rate the current level of their Customer Success Team’s workload, and again, the vast majority (87%) indicated workloads that were either Very High or High. 

Overall workload levels are important to monitor and manage. Whilst increased workload can lead to increased productivity, this is only true up to a point. Beyond that point, additional workload can become counter-productive, and studies have shown that increasing workload beyond what is reasonable can lead to reduced productivity, increased sickness including stress, increased presenteeism (showing up for work, but not working at full capacity) and increased staff turnover, leading to a potential loss of expertise (defined as a combination of knowledge, skills and experience) and therefore reducing team capabilities still further.* 

* Understanding Worker Well-Being Relative to High-Workload, Hernandez et al, International Journal of Environmental Research & Public Health, October 2021 

Recommendations 

Our recommendation to Customer Success Leaders is to carefully assess the current and planned workloads for all team members with a view to employee health and wellbeing, and where necessary to take steps to protect the health and wellbeing of any of their team members that they find might be either currently suffering from a debilitatingly heavy workload, or in danger of becoming such. 

We realise that one issue that many Customer Success Leaders face is budget and staff limitations combined with difficult team targets to achieve, and that this is often what is leading to increasing workloads for individual team members. One potential remedy is to help these team members to work smarter rather than simply work harder, and this can potentially be achieved through the provision of high-quality training on Customer Success Management best practices that focus on generating rapid results through the completion of simple, repeatable, documented processes. This is very much a focus of what is trained within our own Certified Customer Success Management Professional (CCSMP) training and certification program, for example. 

Two: Customer Success Management Responsibilities Continue to Grow 

Situational Analysis 

Question 07 in our Survey asked Customer Success Leaders about the range of their teams’ responsibilities. The question was a very simple one, just providing three options for CS Leaders to choose from whether their teams’ responsibilities were increasing, remaining level, or reducing. Interestingly, there was a small minority of Customer Success teams whose responsibilities are in fact reducing, but by far the most popular selection was to indicate growth. Once again this is a continuing trend that was also observed in our 2021/22 Survey responses.  

What interests us here in particular is two things. Firstly, a wider range of responsibilities within the Customer Success team would indicate wider requirement for sufficient levels of expertise (a combination of knowledge, skills, and experience) to enable a broader range of capabilities to be covered by team members. Within the survey we have asked some supplementary questions about more specific primary and secondary responsibilities that will allow us to address what these capabilities need to be in more detail in our final report. For now, we will be content in acknowledging the general trend.  

Secondly, the combination of increased workload (as discussed in the previous section) with the increased responsibilities that we reveal in this section, would appear to us to create a particular challenge for Customer Success Leaders to deal with. On the one hand, team leaders need their team members to work faster in order to get more done. On the other hand, they also need their team members to learn new capabilities in order to take on a wider range of responsibilities that the Customer Success Management team has had assigned to it. It would seem to us that this could be a difficult conundrum to face, since being more productive at what you currently do whilst simultaneously taking on and learning, mastering, and completing new tasks that you are as yet unfamiliar with or at least less experienced in, is either very hard or perhaps even impossible to achieve. 

Our recommendation to Customer Success Leaders is to treat these two challenges as one overall issue and plan a response that acknowledges and allows for both the need to do more things with the need to do things more productively. Our belief is that careful planning combined with the implementation of a best practice framework such as the Practical CSM Framework together with associated training and certification on its use will help to drive both increased productivity and increased ability to perform a wider range of tasks to the necessary standard.  

How to Participate in the Survey 

Complete the Survey 

If you are a Customer Success Leader in charge of managing a team of Customer Success Managers, and if you have not yet contributed to our Customer Success Management Training & Certification Survey 2022/23 we would love you to become a participant. It doesn’t matter where you are located, or how large or small your Customer Success team is; all responses are welcomed and go towards building up a true and accurate picture of the current state of training and certification within the Customer Success profession. 

Participating in the survey is very simple and should take you know more than 10 minutes on average to complete. For more information simply visit our survey page at practicalcsm.com/survey2023/ and watch the quick video to get a complete understanding of what we are doing, why we are doing, and how you can help.

By way of a “thank you” for your participation in our survey, we are giving away ten copies of our CEO Rick Adams’ book Practical Customer Success Management: A best practice framework for the rapid generation of customer success. All Customer Success Leaders who complete the survey form will automatically be entered into our free draw, and ten lucky winners who are drawn from this pool will each receive one of ten copies of this book, personally signed by the author himself.  

The draw will take place when we reach 200 completed surveys, and as we are giving away 10 copies, you stand a one in twenty chance of winning a signed copy of our book – that’s pretty good odds, so good luck! 

Get the Full Analysis & Report 

Help us to help the Customer Success Management profession as a whole and to help you and your team become as good as they can be, by completing the Customer Success Training & Certification Survey 2022/23. Once the survey has ended, we will be completing a full analysis of the data and then we will publish our findings in a full report, which we will provide free of charge to all survey respondents. 

Survey Information: practicalcsm.com/survey2023