2024 is coming to a close, and it can’t come soon enough.
It’s been a complex year with unprecedented job dissatisfaction within CS. Just last year we were sounding the alarm on CSMs quiet quitting due to overwork and too many responsibilities. It seems not much has changed, and in fact in some cases it got worse, with some CS teams reporting they’ve become “everything departments.”
Still, it wasn’t all bad – there’s been a lot of progress in recovering from the economic downturn we saw in last year’s wrap-up. Yet that progress has come with an unwanted side effect – an increased reliance on revenue metrics as success indicators, essentially turning some CSMs into salespeople cursed to scrounge for prospects among the customer base.
But don’t worry, we can see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we believe that customer success will emerge stronger, more impactful, and more data-driven on the other side.
2024 Changes, News, & Shifts in the Customer Success Industry
1. News and Shifts
1. 38% More Customer Success Departments Are Reporting to the CRO | SaaStr
It’s a somewhat expected consequence of the increased focus on value within CS. Now that we’ve reframed the need for proving value within CS, some companies have deemed it necessary for CS to report to Sales. The percentage of CS teams reporting to the Chief Revenue Officer has grown by 9% from last year, from 24% to 33%.
2. 67% of Customer Success Execs Now Have a Sales Quota | G2
If the previous entry wasn’t concerning enough, now 67% of CS leaders have sales quotas for their departments. The same survey saw 53% of CSMs say their roles have a strong sales focus, with a further 11% of those saying it’s entirely about sales. This during a year when more and more CSMs complain of burnout and excess responsibilities. Coincidence?
3. 91.8 % of CSMs Have Commercial Responsibilities | This is Growth
Continuing the trend, this recent report by Daphne Costa Lopes and This Is Growth highlights just how prevalent this trend is – with 91.8% of CSMs reporting direct commercial responsibilities. To quote Daphne:
“This focus triggered an overcorrection. In reaction to NRR pressures, many teams transformed Customer Success into what we might call “Sales 2.0” – prioritising commercial outcomes at the expense of genuine customer value. […] The pendulum is now swinging back towards a more balanced approach.”
– Daphne Costa Lopes, Global Director of Customer Success @HubSpot & Host of This Is Growth
4. Only 61% of CSMs Are Satisfied with their Job – Reddit Customer Success Compensation Survey | FairComp
Over the past year, there’s been an abundance of demotivated and burnt out CSMs dominating the online discourse around customer success. These opinions often surfaced in places like Reddit. So it’s no coincidence that FairComp decided to run a survey on the respective subreddit – showing just 61% of CSMs are satisfied with their jobs and a full 34% actively looking to change their jobs.
5. Customer Success Platform Market Size to Hit US$ 8.10 billion by 2032 | GlobeNewswire
Despite any goings-on and ups or downs in the industry, what’s clear is that CS platforms have proven the fundamental need for more actionable, specific, and complex datasets. Most CX and CS teams today use some form of customer engagement and retention software solutions. So it comes as no surprise that the CSP market is set to hit $8.10 billion by 2032.
6. Totango and Catalyst Merge – PR Newswire
Speaking of CSPs, last but not least, let’s not forget the surprising news report that surfaced in late February this year. It was announced that Totango and Catalyst, established names within the CS space, decided to merge into a single entity and provide a single, unified platform for their customers.
2. Opinions
1. Treat CS Like Value Exchange – What Can You Offer in Return for a Price Increase?
If you look at the Delta between what customers pay today versus what list price looks like at the moment, it is a very, very scary gap. Right? But I mean, what do we do about it? […] Do you go from current price to list price? It’s an option, but it’s not realistic. It won’t be well-received by the customer in most cases. Or do we talk about “this is where we need you to go, and these are the steps to get in that place” – lock the customer in for a longer period of time, phase the increase.
Of course, in these scenarios, CS is value exchange, isn’t it? So, you know, in order to ask for more revenue, we need to give something in return. So we’ve been thinking very carefully about “how does that practically look?”
– Christopher Warren Gash, VP of Customer Success at Sympa
Customer Success 2025: Actionable Strategies to Drive Growth
2. Get CS Ownership over the Customer Journey and Redesign It
It’s 100 percent in our interest to drive all of the internal initiatives that help us in retaining customers and upselling customers, and making sure that customers pay more money, stay with us for the longest period of time. So designing a better, a more seamless, even tidier customer journey is definitely one way to be leaders of the change that customer success needs right now.
Of course, it’s a collaborative effort, so it’s not like customer success is imposing our point of view on everybody else. They’re all very much involved in the process, but I think it’s because it’s very much in our interest to make sure our customers have a positive experience with us. That’s why we’re in the driver’s seat.
– Sara Arecco – Head of CS at Antavo
Customer Success 2025: Actionable Strategies to Drive Growth
3. Want to Use AI? Get Your Data House in Order First
I’ve been left a little flummoxed on this for our field so far, cause I’m not going to put an agent, an AI agent, on customers yet. Support? Whole different ball game – but for CS, I’m not there. I see health prediction has taken a huge jump forward with the empowering of AI. People have been doing it for the last 10 years with different algorithms, but that has taken a big jump forward.
I think the key is that none of these things can help you unless you have your data house in order. You have to get your data house in order for any of these tools to help you, whether it’s automation or whether it’s AI, because they all feed off of data – garbage in, garbage out.
– Porter Williams, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire
Customer Success 2025: Actionable Strategies to Drive Growth
4. Set the Right Expectations for Your CSMs
[CSMs] have a lot on their plates as it is. Adding expansion on their plates is number one, difficult from a capacity perspective. And number two, I think while CSMs are, you know, jacks of all trades in many cases, we’ve got to be very clear about what the expectations are on the CSM. What are the behaviors I want to see? What’s the profile of a CSM [in my organization]?
– Christopher Warren Gash, VP of Customer Success at Sympa
Customer Success 2025: Actionable Strategies to Drive Growth
2024’s Most Notable Challenges in Customer Success
1. Burnout and Layoffs
At a random glance, 6 out of 10 Reddit posts on r/CustomerSuccess reference severe burnout, the rest of which talk either about other negative aspects of their jobs, layoffs, or quitting. It’s fair to say if this continues, CS will become a job sector with an incredibly high turnover rate.
This corroborates our own research conducted in both early 2023 and 2024 which showed 50% of CSM have quiet quit or are considering doing so, a number which only worsened in the meantime.
2. Customer Success as an Everything Department
This has been a longstanding challenge within CS that just became more common during the economic hardships of 2024. When budgets get slashed, folks get laid off and revenue drops, the knee jerk reaction of many organizations is to have the remaining people attempt to do all the work left behind. Needless to say this doesn’t work (or rarely works, depending on each team’s respective CS tool stack) and the result is even more burnout and diminishing returns.
3. The Ubiquity of Sales Quotas amidst an Industry Shift towards Revenue
As evidenced by the news reports at the top of this article, one of the biggest challenges 2024 brought to CS was an increased focus on sales. Suddenly, CSMs who only had expansion as a stretch goal now had to deal with real sales quotas needing to be fulfilled if they wanted that precious bonus (which many need to make ends meet).
While shifting to a sales mentality and focusing on expansion might make sense for some CS teams, it’s certainly the case that CS needs to remain focused on its role in customer enablement and goal achievement, otherwise the churn rate CSMs work so hard to lower will creep back up.
4. Lack of Proper Resources for Customer Success
Amidst a landscape of slashed budgets and layoffs, it’s increasingly difficult for some CSMs to cover all their bases and service customers with speed, efficiency, and . But there are tactics, such as customer need prioritization matrices, that can help even the most bootstrapped customer success teams.
5. The Prevalence of AI
AI has made its impact in Customer Success just as in every other vertical in the business world. CSMs have started using it for customer health scoring, automated customer engagement, account strategies and more. One of the most novel cases we’ve seen is how ChatGPT Plus allows CSMs to create specific CS GPTs that can act as a personal assistant with advanced customer success knowledge. This Success GPT can help with onboarding, retention, as well as upsell tactics.
2024 Customer Success Must-Reads: The Best Articles, eBooks, and Studies
1. Articles
1. Why we’re failing new managers and how we can set them up for success | Fast Company
Greg Hull explores the gap between our expectations of managers, the training they receive, and their innate skills at performing said job. A very timely and relevant piece in relation to customer success, it talks about how organizations that “promote from within” can better arm their employees for success. Think things like: up-to-date training materials for job specifics, better software tools to help them navigate the new role, and management training to help those taking their first steps into such a position.
2. How to Build a Churn Prediction Model that Works | Custify Blog
Churn prediction is getting truly good along with the evolution of the software solutions and AI models that exist in the CS space. In this review, we go through a step by step guide to building a churn prediction model that’s truly future-proof and scales along with your organization. Learn how to conduct a churn analysis and use your favorite CSP and AI models to analyze datasets and create automation flows.
3. Inside 13 Customer Success Teams Data-Driven Approach To Empowering Clients | Built In
It’s always an incredibly valuable learning experience to hear how other customer success teams handle the specifics of the role. This roundup from BuiltIn collects tactics and opinions on how to use client-focused metrics to drive their success and, in turn, foster long-term and highly-valuable customer relationships.
4. Customer success isn’t a slide deck – it’s a real-time discipline. Sage shares its customer health scorecard approach | Diginomica
Jon Reel explores the difference between performative, sales-focused (even sales-led) customer success and real-time, predictive, and insightful customer success. He explores the example of Sage which uses customer health dashboards, scorecards, and informs customers of their current health score. It’s honestly an incredibly fresh topic that rings particularly true as we move into 2025, a year in which every CS team will increase their usage of the many “shiny new tools at our disposal.”
5. CSM Ratio: One-to-Many vs One-to-One vs Many-to-One vs Many-to-Many | Custify Blog
Back in May, we posed a question: how many CSM are actually necessary to adequately service a customer? What’s that golden CSM ratio and is there a formula an organization can rely on to find it? We explore the four possible models: one to many, one to one, many to one, and many to many – along with the pros and cons and subtypes for each model. By the end, any CS leader should have a clearer picture of how many CSMs they actually need.
6. Customer success is your secret growth engine – but are you using it right? | OpenText Blogs
Janet de Gruzman identifies key disconnects between the perception of customer success needs and the way organizations treat and manage their CS initiatives. Surprisingly, of the business leaders OpenText surveyed, 48% believe the CMO responsible for customer success, while just 41 have a dedicated CS function. The main causes? Lack of budget, skill gaps, and poor internal processes.
7. Unveiling the Hidden Struggles of Customer Success Managers | Solutions Review
Yet another review of CSM responsibilities and the reasons behind the high burnout rate in the CS space. While not new, this survey and suggestions in this piece echo what some CS leaders have been saying for years – we need better automation, more data visibility, better CS quotas, and more efficient organizational processes.
8. Customer Feedback Loops: Gathering Insights For Continuous Improvement | Custify Blog
In one of the most read guest articles we’ve had on our blog, Burkhard Berger, Founder of Novum, talks about putting together customer feedback loops so you can continuously collect and improve your products, services, and CX. There are many ways to do it, depending on your budget and how much time you can carve off for it.
2. Books, eBooks and Reports
1. Customer Success Uncovered 2024 (CSM Insights Report) | Custify
In early 2024, we set upon the task of updating our CSM insights we got last year during our analysis of Quiet Quitting in CS. The results? Minimal improvements and, in some cases, things actually got worse. We found 83% of CSMs still use Excel, while 18% of CSMs saw their tasks double due to restructuring and layoffs. At the same time, 45% of CSMs surveyed cited excess workloads as a key factor in their job dissatisfaction.
2. The State of Customer Success 2024 Report | Customer Success Collective
We’ve started to expect the State of Customer Success from the CS collective every year – and every year we’re struck by some new survey results that simply seem to come out of nowhere. This year, it was the fact that 25.87% of CSMs that are responsible for account expansion do not receive any sort of commissions or bonuses when they secure those coveted upsells, cross-sells, or renewals.
3. Mastering Customer Success | Jeff Mar & Peter Armaly
An overview of the need for customer success in today’s business landscape, as well as a deep dive on various CS-related topics such as creating customer profile, customer segmentation, financial tiering, and how to design customer engagement models amidst the rising complexities of the business sector.
4. The State of Customer Onboarding Report 2024 | RocketLane
Another report we appreciate that comes out every year is Rocketlane’s State of Onboarding. This year we saw a rise in the number of companies that charge for their onboarding – up to 42%, while 60% recognize onboarding as a separate job function. It would be interesting if we could find out next year how many of the 70% who wanted to improve their processes and CX actually managed to do so.
5. The State of SaaSOps 2024 | BetterCloud
One area of particular interest to customer success is SaaS Ops – specifically, how organizations manage and secure their software stacks. BetterCloud revealed that most SaaS organizations look to automate 64% of their management tasks in the next three years. However, on a concerning note, just 68% of apps are sanctioned by IT, while the same report shows us IT teams are in large part responsible for protecting sensitive data distribution across these apps.
6. Enhancing Customer Success Through Data eGuide | Custify
Better data can lead to better customer success processes, more actionable health scores, and increased customer retention and loyalty. But setting up a good data flow is a tightwire act – you have to maintain data hygiene, you need a person in charge of data governance, and you need to be careful, transparent, and compliant regarding what data you collect about your users. In this short guide, we talk to CS leaders about the best way to enhance CS with data.
7. The Global State of CX 2024 | CX Network Research
Customer experience is one of the key areas where customer success has a significant input. In fact, a good deal of CS leaders are also responsible for customer experience, and it makes sense seeing as the two go hand in hand. CX network’s report this year has shown an increase in CX focus this year with the ultimate goal of growing the customer bases. An interesting fact that supports other points we’ve talked about is that 66% of respondents said the pressure to prove their ROI has been increasing.
8. Customer Success Trends ‘24 | Daphne Costa Lopes & This Is Growth
In early 2024, we were pleasantly surprised to see a new CS Trends report from Daphne Costa Lopes and the team at This Is Growth. Backed by a solid methodology and strong data collection tactics, this report revealed stats like recurring revenue continuing to be the north star of CS for nearly 81% of companies. However, the best part about this report is Daphne’s thorough analysis and commentary on the results.
9. 2024 B2B SaaS Performance Metrics Benchmark Report | BenchmarkIt
Every SaaS business needs to operate on reliable benchmarks if it is to be successful. And seeing as CS has increased its focus on revenue and expansion, the metrics need to be that much more reliable.Fortunately, BenchmarkIt has set upon the task of reliably capturing a large array of relevant financial metrics and KPIs that B2B SaaS companies can use. Stats on metrics like NRR, GRR, Payback Period, and CAC Ratio are just some examples you can glean from this report.
10. Personalizing CX eGuide | Custify
Customers today chase personalized experiences and some actively run away from companies that don’t take their personal needs into account. That’s why we in customer success have to be extra careful in designing product flows that are customer-led and data-backed, not simply based on hunches or guesses. In this short guide, CX and CS leaders gave us their take on how to better customize experience for users.
11. State of AI in Customer Success 2024 | Gainsight
As AI adoption grows across the board, CS seems to be leading the charge with 52% of teams already using it, as per Gainsight’s report. While not required, most CSMs say AI raises productivity potential, particularly in the Onboarding and Product Engagement areas. 80% say AI increases efficiency while 39% are already using it to enhance customer lifecycles.
12. The Customer Success Flywheel | Atma Gunupudi
A book targeted to C-suite folks, the Customer Success Flywheel explores the advantages of customer success when it comes to business growth and revenue. Gunupudi artfully presents a well-defined picture of customer success that’s perfectly scalable to any organization of any size. His process of building a customer success team stands out as being highly actionable.
13. Automation in CS eGuide | Custify
As AI increases the need for operational efficiency with better data, automation stands out as an area that can improve both. Through automated flows, you can gather data points recurrently and also act on those signals. You can create flows that alert CSMs of churn risks and upsell opportunities, as well as any other playbooks you have in your organization. Read our guide and get expert insights on how to correctly work with automation in CS.
14. State of Workforce Mental Health Report 2024 | Lyra
As burnout and excess workloads take the CS world by storm, this report on workforce mental health from Lyra could not be more timely. Some of the more important stats reveal that 94% of US workers believe mental health benefits to be “very important” – a staggering rise from just 36% in 2023, while 40% are suffering from stress, 32% from anxiety, and 20% respectively from burnout and depression.
Other Must Reads
Over the past year I’ve found myself coming back time and time again to these two reports published in late 2023. These two reports reveal advanced stats on AI-related jobs, employment, and global labour markets:
- The Future of Jobs Report 2023 | World Economic Forum
- Future of Work Report | LinkedIn
3. Webinars and Podcasts
1. Customer Success 2025: Actionable Strategies to Drive Growth | Custify Webinars
As customer success, we are always responsible for the successes, but also failures of our customers. And that includes instances where we are completely in the driver’s seat and really driving success or sometimes even driving failure. And we’re responsible for that.
– Sara Arecco – Head of CS at Antavo
Anyone who’s known me for a while has heard me talk about spikes and plates. So, and I don’t think this is true in all SaaS businesses, but it’s at least been true in all the ones I’ve been working in, which is managing, once a customer is live, the amount of energy it takes to support them is fairly steady and kind of a long-term application of effort.
So it’s like a plate kind of thin and long. And onboarding implementation is spiky. It’s high intensity, it’s short-term, it’s very date-driven, and it’s urgent. […] You have CSMs with a bunch of plates of their steady accounts, and then they’ve got their onboarding. So those are spikes. If you have those spikes on top of a bunch of plates, people end up way over capacity.
– Porter Williams, VP of Customer Success at BrightHire
2. ROI Unpacked: Providing the Revenue-driven Value of CS | Part 1 and Part 2 | Custify Webinars
In my humble opinion, Customer Success is the one entity that intersects all business areas within a company. For an executive leader, this can be challenging to grasp. You have this one organization within your company that is almost like a superhero—it can swoop in to ensure a customer is benefiting from our solutions and also sit down with the product team to provide valuable insights for intelligent decision-making about our products and services. But for an executive leader, understanding this multifaceted role can be difficult. […] I believe it’s really because we wear so many hats; it’s challenging for leaders to fully understand our role.
– De’Edra Williams, EdTech SVP & Advisor for Women in CS
3. Andrew Ng Explores The Rise Of AI Agents And Agentic Reasoning | BUILD 2024 Keynote
You may have heard me say I think AI is the new electricity. That’s because AI is a general-purpose technology, like electricity. And if I ask you what electricity is good for, it’s almost hard to answer because it’s good for so many different things. New AI technology is creating a huge set of opportunities for us to build new applications that weren’t possible before.
– Andrew Ng, Founder of DeepLearning.AI
4. The Marketing Expert: How to Get More Sales, Loyal Customers, and Bigger Promotions
You should be out doing customer discovery. Before you write anything, you should be out interviewing customers or potential customers and validating the assumptions that you have about this market – is this a thing people will pay for? How much would you pay for it? Are there a big enough group of people that have this pain? And in a perfect world, that’s what we would all be doing.
– April Dunford, Founder of Ambient Strategy
5. Laying the foundation: Masterful onboarding techniques in CS | Custify Webinars
For me, it’s really important to define, as a team or as an organization, what time to value is. Without that definition, or that understanding of how your client will reach that first value and knowing what it is, it’s really hard to approach onboarding. Being able to get to that point is crucial. So first of all, defining it is key.
Second of all, knowing that with a lot of our platforms, there are many features you can cover in an onboarding. Value for one customer might be totally different than for another, especially if there are different paths to having that customer achieve their desired outcomes in the software. So, defining it first and then approaching the onboarding with that knowledge is vital. They might not be interested in certain features, and there might be one feature that really stands out to them. That’s where that customer is going to find value.
– Melanie Faye, CS manager at Keeper.App
6. AIM Podcast with Sunil Vadgama – Customer Success Director, MicroStrategy
In my view, AI, simply put, is just another method of using the tools and technologies out there in the market to pretty much make a far better sense of the data and the information that I already have stored somewhere within my organization. And eventually, I use that information to assist someone in making bigger and better decisions a little bit easier, a little bit faster. And to an extent, depending on how the background technology has been designed, it will eventually help people make differential decisions for them to eventually impact the business in a far better, positive manner.
– Sunil Vadgama, Customer Success Director at MicroStrategy
7. Navigating the Goodbyes: Tactical steps for handling post churn | Custify Webinars
If you’re a company with a small number of high-value clients, losing one can significantly impact deeper relationships, and personal contact might be more feasible and beneficial. I’ve experienced situations in companies with a few high-value customers where a departure truly felt personal, and keeping in contact on a personal level made sense. But for businesses dealing with mass and volume, maintaining personal contact with all churned customers can be quite challenging.
– Danielle Martin, Head of CS at TryHackMe
8. Mastering CS – Candid Leader Insights – Ep 15 – Keishla Ceaser-Jones | Custify Podcast
We’ve really been focusing this year on extending multi-year and focused on a really strong price increase strategy that supports the investments we’re making in the product. In addition to that, on the service side, we focus on what we call impact interactions. So we’ve identified our customer journey and the milestone moments. And there’s a lot of different interactions that teams have with a partner. And then we’ve said, these are what we call qualifying events for impact interactions. And we’re not focused on volume, but we’re focused on penetration across their partner base. So they have a threshold that they have to hit of meeting with a certain number of partners with the right types of value interactions that support the work, and we’ve had some statistical analysis about where partners who have had those interactions versus who haven’t, how that impacts their renewal expectations and rates.
– Keishla Ceaser-Jones, Sr. Director and Partner Success at EAB.
2024 Top Influencers in the Customer Success Space
Check out the full list with quotes and insights here.
2024 Custify Year In Review: Best New Features & Achievements
New Features
This year, Custify introduced groundbreaking features designed to simplify workflows, boost productivity, and deepen customer engagement. Here are the highlights that made 2024 an exceptional year for our product:
CustifyAI: Smarter Workflows, Better Insights
- AI-Generated Customer Summaries: Save time with automated, comprehensive overviews perfect for updates and handovers.
- AI-Generated Follow-Up Tasks: Turn email content into actionable tasks effortlessly.
- AI-Generated Conversation Summaries: Quickly review discussions with distilled key points and insights.
Custify Chrome Extension
The new Custify Sidekick Chrome Extension helps CSMs manage accounts efficiently and improve retention directly from their browser.
Reimagined Task Management
Enhancements like table views, task collaboration, checklist assignments, and calendar integrations ensure smoother workflows and better team coordination.
Customer Portal Enhancements
Updates include:
- Health Score Block: Highlight historical trends without revealing current values.
- Attribute Evolution: Showcase numerical changes over time, ideal for QBRs.
- Drag & Drop Sections: Customize portal layouts effortlessly.
- Tasks Block: Filter tasks by status (All, Open, Closed).
- Embed External Entities: Integrate Google Docs, Trello Boards, YouTube videos, and more directly into the portal.
Time Tracking
Monitor and log time spent on key activities to optimize resource allocation and gain actionable insights into team efficiency.
These highlights reflect Custify’s commitment to empowering Customer Success teams with the tools they need to excel in today’s dynamic SaaS environment.
Awards & Achievements
Predictions and Expectations for 2024 in Customer Success
Based on our research, 2025 is going to be yet another important step in the road to leaner, more efficient customer success that puts the needs of the customers front and center in your team’s mindset. Here’s an overview of what’s to come:
- AI is going to become mandatory. CSMs that want to stay relevant will need to use at least the basic version of their preferred AI model, but can even graduate to dedicated CS bots (such as the sales & success GPT).
- Better In-App experiences. Customer success often happens outside the product – in an email, a Slack chat, or in a call. Instead, in 2025 we predict it’s going to happen more and more inside the app itself – with guided tutorials, analytics, and more.
- CS continues to have to prove its value. Global CS adoption has come a long way in 2024 but if the stats above are any indication, we’ve still got a lot to go pushing this boulder uphill until everyone understands the value of CS.
- CS as a philosophy. Dave Jackson, CEO at TheCustomerCo, believes there’s a “very bright future for companies that focus on the success of their customers”, but for that to come true, we need to “fundamentally change how we understand and deliver success for customers” and “implement the long-standing view that CS is a company philosophy.”
We surveyed 14 CS industry leaders and gathered more predictions for 2025 in our Customer Success Forecast for 2025.
Conclusion
So there you have it – the best of the best when it comes to insights into customer success over the course of the last year, and some sneak peaks as to where it will evolve in 2025. For more actionable points, be sure to stay in touch with us at Custify – whether through our customer success platform, or our blog, webinars, podcasts, and emails. We keep our finger on the pulse of CS so you can be ready for the next big shift!
