Best Of
Re: Outsourcing Customer Success/Account Management
Great topic — and one that’s becoming more relevant as CS teams are being asked to do more with less.
I think outsourcing parts of Customer Success can absolutely work — but with clear boundaries and expectations. Here's what I've seen work well:
When Outsourcing CS Does Work:
Scaled/Tech-Touch Programs: For lower-revenue or high-volume accounts, outsourcing onboarding, check-ins, and renewals (through playbooks or CSM-as-a-Service models) can maintain quality without burning out internal teams.
Tactical Support: Tasks like data cleanup, QBR prep, product training, or basic support follow-ups can be handed off with minimal risk — as long as knowledge transfer is tight.
24/7 Global Coverage: Outsourced CS teams in different time zones can help extend support hours and responsiveness without bloating headcount.
Where It Often Fails:
High-Touch/Strategic Accounts: These customers expect deep product knowledge, trust, and continuity — hard to deliver if you rotate in an outsourced rep who isn’t embedded in the company culture or roadmap.
Choppy Handoffs: Poor communication between internal and outsourced teams can confuse customers and erode trust.
Lack of Contextual Knowledge: If your product or customer journey is complex, you need context to guide success — which is tough to outsource.
My Take:
Outsourcing Customer Success tasks is doable — but outsourcing the CS relationship is risky unless you’re treating it like a true managed partnership with shared KPIs, training, and oversight. It’s not a plug-and-play function like payroll or IT support.
That said, with the right vendor and structure, it can drive scale without sacrificing experience.
Would love to hear if anyone has structured outsourced AM/CS teams around segments — or built in hybrid models?
Re: What value do you see in Certifications? An example is the Gainsight cert tests on best practices in
My Gainsight certs have been able to get me past the recruiter even when I didn't have the minimum required time in position. It is my skills that I lean on in the interview phases.
What I also find is that many companies vary in terms of Customer Success core competencies and a certification can help bridge some of those gaps. example are companies that currently do not have their CSMs responsible for upsell and cross sell can learn more about these efforts through certification
Office Hours?
Hello All
I hope everyone is enjoying the holidays!
It has been a while. When are the next Office Hours?
Sales to CS handoff process
Does anyone have a handoff template/process from sales to CS that they've found effective? I'm finally in a company where I feel the support/alignment from the sales org, and always trying to find the balance between bureacratic documentation vs. "hey we really need this information." Ideally would like to use HS, but still think these folks would work best with a template. Any thoughts/help/experience?
Jung Kim
Re: Office Hours?
Hi @Tim Gilhooly! I am working to build out our Office Hours hosts, but am planning that we kick off our 2025 series on Wednesday, January 22 at 1pm EST! This year we are going to align topics quarterly but bring a lot of different subtopics within each umbrella topic…should be a great line up!! My plan is to get these up and listed asap so you can register and get them on your calendar…
Re: Looker Users - Sound off!
@Patrick Ruster, yes, I've worked with them and they're great. I'll make an introduction on LinkedIn.
Re: How do you identify and measure successful client engagement?
Such a great question, @kmcgrew. In past lives I facilitated CABs, focus groups and user groups, and measuring the business impact of these activities was exceedingly difficult. A big factor is self-selection bias, which muddies cause and effect. For example, did participation cause higher engagement, or because they were more engaged they participated?
One suggestion is to ask a sampling of interested participants about the outcomes they expect (and why) from such a session, and then measure afterwards if and how well those outcomes were satisfied. I would steer clear of anything NPS-oriented that speaks to future behaviors (referrals, renewals, etc.) because it's not fruitful. A recent meta-study showed that stated intentions predicted future behaviors only about 27% of the time.
Hope that helps! Good luck.
Re: How do you identify and measure successful client engagement?
I agree with what Ed stated above. I'd also be careful with trying to accomplish too many things or measure too many things from one event. I'd identify 1 or 2 very clear expected outcomes and then measure if that expected outcome actually occurred. Is the event something that you're doing to just facilitate networking within your customer base (if so, you may not really have a way to measure success besides a survey afterward). If an intention of the event is to increase customer engagement on your platform, then you should be able to track those that attended and if their usage increased in the 3 months following the event (and you should be clear on what usage means - just logins, specific actions, etc.). I think being thoughtful and intentional around the purpose of the event will naturally point you to how to measure it's success.
In terms of your question on how to support networking for your customer base, we had several different in-person events in high volume areas throughout the year, as well as our annual user conference. On an ongoing basis we encouraged cross-customer communication in our community platform through different engagements, question prompts, etc. and rewarded customers for not just answers to our questions but also answers to other customer questions.
Re: Aligning Marketing and Scaled CS
@William Buckingham Wow! I very much appreciate the time you took to share this with me.
I have a weekly meeting with our marketing team. I can’t wait to discuss this with them.
Happy Holidays,
Tracy
Re: CS Run Office Hrs - Looking for some data
I thought I would mention that I was inspired to revisit OH programs after listening to this great session by Samantha David.
https://podcast.digitalcustomersuccess.com/2186702/episodes/16208946-building-automations-that-enhance-customer-experience-with-samantha-david-of-monday-com-ep-081
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