Recently our team had a CSM leave on the West Coast who was managing around 25 customers. Since we are currently on a hiring pause within Customer Success, we elected to move someone from an acquisition of ours over to help with these accounts who is located in the Mid-West/East region. Ideally, for the longer term, we'd like to have someone on the West Coast own those accounts while then using the new team member on the East Coast to help support our growth in that region.
My question is.. how have you all handled a period of 6-9 months where you may not have a geographically ideal CSM setup for a group of customers? We will hopefully be hiring for the West Coast role sooner than later, but we can't leave those accounts untouched. Do you just take the hit and transition 2x in 6 months? Do you provide these accounts a hybrid management approach of some sort? Also, I understand that communication to the customer is key, so the question may be answered directly by polling that customer group and asking what they'd prefer.
Any best practices are appreciated. Thanks!