What is customer success management?

Customer success management is the process of tracking and guiding customers through their lifecycle using data and automation. The customer success role involves monitoring customer health, coordinating touchpoints and relationship building to reduce customer churn and drive expansion.

What’s the difference between customer success and customer support?

Both career paths rely heavily on soft skills, but their focuses differ. Customer support is reactive, addressing specific problems as they arise. Customer success is proactive, focusing on helping customers succeed before issues occur. Customer support teams handle short-term fixes while customer success managers build long-term relationships.

How can a CRM help with customer success management?

A CRM centralizes all customer data and gives customer success teams complete visibility into each account. The software helps track customer health, automate routine touchpoints and visualize where customers are in their lifecycle .

How does customer success management reduce customer churn?

Customer success management reduces churn by identifying at-risk accounts early. By tracking engagement patterns and maintaining regular touchpoints, customer success teams can spot warning signs and intervene before customers leave.

What are customer success management best practices?

Effective customer success management starts with strong customer onboarding to set expectations early. Schedule regular business reviews to check progress against success plans and adjust strategies as needed. Use your CRM or customer success software to track account management activities, monitor engagement patterns and identify problems before they escalate. Focus on proactive problem-solving rather than reactive support to build lasting customer relationships.

Customer success management

Build lasting relationships with Pipedrive’s customer success management tool

Customer success management helps customers achieve their desired outcomes with your product.

Tracking engagement is key. This means that if you can spot churn warning signs early, like decreased activity or missed touchpoints, you can intervene in a timely manner.

See how Pipedrive’s customer success management tools help you improve retention and create expansion opportunities.

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Reduce churn with customer success management software

Pipedrive helps you stay proactive with customers throughout their lifecycle and improve the customer experience.

Track customer health: Monitor engagement patterns to spot at-risk accounts early.
Centralize customer data: Give your team complete visibility into customer history and touchpoints.
Automate workflows: Schedule check-ins, renewal alerts and follow-ups automatically to meet customer expectations.

Pipedrive’s customer success management features

Manage customer pipelines

Create dedicated pipelines for onboarding, adoption, renewal and expansion to visualize the customer journey.

Monitor activities and goals

Track customer touchpoints, schedule check-ins and QBRs and set retention goals to monitor team performance.

Automate workflows

Schedule automated reminders for check-ins, trigger alerts for signs of disengagement and streamline recurring tasks.

Coordinate communication

Sync and schedule emails to improve time management and make sure no customer communications slip through the cracks.

Leverage reports and insights

Track data in a simple dashboard so you can optimize your workflows and initiatives to meet your customer success goals.

What to look for in a customer success management CRM

The right SaaS tool has features that help customer success managers (CSMs) stay organized and connected across your team.

Built-in email management: Monitor customer engagement through email opens and clicks.
Permissions and visibility: Control who can access sensitive customer data while ensuring every team has the visibility it needs.
Mobile access: Access customer data from anywhere with a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) platform.
Integrations: Connect with customer success management platforms like Custify to better understand and tailor to customer needs.

Stay on top of interactions with an activity calendar

Customer success managers juggle dozens of accounts with different contract dates, check-in schedules and milestone timelines.

Activity calendars give you a visual timeline of every upcoming customer interaction.

Pipedrive lets you filter by customer segment or activity type to prioritize your day. Its project management tool syncs with your email and calendar apps, gathering tasks in one place.

Learn more about Pipedrive’s activity calendar.

Track what matters with custom fields

Every customer success team tracks different metrics. Standard fields don’t always capture what matters most to your business strategy.

Custom fields let you track customer-specific data like health scores or renewal dates.

Use Pipedrive’s fields to segment customers, build targeted lists or filter for accounts where customer satisfaction may have dipped.

Learn more about Pipedrive’s customizable CRM.

Pinpoint which deals to prioritize with sales forecasting

Knowing which customer accounts present cross-selling or upsell opportunities and which are at risk of churn can be a challenge.

Forecasting reveals which customers are growing and which need help so you know where to focus.

Pipedrive’s visual reports track renewal and expansion revenue and predict customer retention rates to guide your decision-making.

Learn more about Pipedrive’s sales forecasting tools.

Over 500+ integrations

Expand the capabilities of Pipedrive with hundreds of apps and integrations

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How Pipedrive helps Falcon Social spot at-risk customers

Social media management platform Falcon Social needed a way to track customer success without building a separate CRM system from scratch.

The team extended Pipedrive beyond sales to map the entire customer journey. When a deal closes, all sales insights transfer into customer success pipelines to give the customer success team a bird’s-eye view of customer needs.

“Pipedrive helps us speak the same language as our sales team, bringing our teams closer together. In the end, it also brings us closer to the customers, understanding customer needs, as well as mapping their relationship with us. Win-Win.”

Read the case study

Keep customers engaged with Campaigns by Pipedrive

Managing customer success at scale requires more than one-to-one outreach. Campaigns by Pipedrive lets you automate emails and keep messages personal and relevant.

It includes:

Segmented campaigns. Target customers based on lifecycle stage or other attributes.
Automated sequences. Set up drip campaigns that trigger based on customer actions or milestones.
Performance tracking. Monitor open rates, click-through rates and responses to optimize your outreach.
CRM integration. All campaign data flows into customer records, giving you complete visibility.

Learn more about the Campaigns by Pipedrive add-on.