Of all the skills that a Customer Success Manager should master, the ability to empathize and build relationships with customers is of the utmost importance. It needs to be approached with a simple perspective in mind. Your customer is your customer because, at some point, an executive on their side decided to engage your company. You are in what is essentially an on-demand relationship; one that you've been thrust into. As a CSM, you are at the center of that business relationship. You need to quickly move it from the formal business arrangement, which can be a bit awkward at the beginning, to a far more human-centric and trust-based partnership. Getting to that state rapidly is vital in order to create a foundation of success with your customers.

To give you a different flavor on this “soft-skills” topic, we have distilled the critical skill of building empathetic relationships with customers down to these Seven Principles:

1. Be introspective and self-aware.
2. Communicate with intent, precision, and persuasion and become a trusted advisor.
3. Consistently follow-up to create and grow trust.
4. How to respond when you don't know the answer.
5. Stay focused and positive when situations are difficult and learn from them.
6. Engage people in-depth and with a #humanfirst lens of compassion.
7. Genuinely connect with customers because it is personal, and it is your business.

While some of these topics are certainly not new or unique, Customer Success is a new profession that demands different business motions and requires a more human-centric focus. In line with that approach, we are incredibly fortunate to work at a company that has genuinely put a concerted effort into defining, practicing, and living out a stated set of core values. We believe these values and stated purpose translate and apply to the Customer Success profession in general. Not only do they serve as our North Star, we sincerely believe they should be considered the ethical standards of behavior for all Customer Success Managers.

Anthony Kennada masterfully described the advent of Gainsight's core values and purpose in his book Category Creation: How to Build a Brand that Customers, Employees, and Investors Will Love.¹ He stated, “From the early days of the company, we knew that we wanted to build a company that behaved in accordance with the following principles:

• The Golden Rule: Treat people the way you'd like to be treated.
• Success for All: Our ‘bottom line’ requires us to drive success for not only shareholders, but also customers, teammates, their families, and our communities around us.
• Childlike Joy: Bring the kid in you to work every day.
• Shoshin: Cultivate a ‘Beginner's Mind.’
• Stay Thirsty, My Friends: Have ambition that comes from within.”

However, the core values weren't enough. Anthony goes on to affirm “We decided on the WHY that would keep us going long beyond the day-to-day. Our purpose at Gainsight is: To be living proof that you can win in business while being human-first. Human-first means always thinking about people in the decisions you make about business.”

Now let's take a look at the seven principles of building relationships with customers.

1. Be Introspective and Self-Aware

In order to be human-first, you have to be fully aware of the first human you encounter every single moment of existence: which is YOU. One of the most essential characteristics of a great CSM is being self-aware. We all come with our own stories and backgrounds. There are indeed things we have learned and experienced that add value to what we have to say and give. Sometimes they are not so good and appear as idiosyncrasies, peccadilloes, or even baggage. Your story (the good, the bad, and the ugly) will impact how you approach your customers.

Before you try to solve your customer's challenges, you should take the time to consider your own biases. For example, if your stress levels or anxieties are running particularly high, that energy will undoubtedly transfer to your business situation and customer. As much as we think we can engage with minimum emotion while doing our business-jobs, the simple fact is we are human, and our emotions and behaviors are perceivable and can be contagious. Before you approach your customer to establish and grow a genuine relationship, acknowledge your stress levels so you can have a better chance at controlling them in a better way for you, your company, and especially your customers. Be genuine about your fears and anxieties and do your best to “let it go.”

In the same manner that you examine your fears, be candid to yourself about your goals and hopes for success. These can be positive incentives that inspire your customer relationships. The author Susan Sontag once said, “Courage is as contagious as fear.” Ponder that for a moment. If you give an effort to being genuinely curious, humble, respectful to fellow human beings, and show a desire to partner with your customers for their success, your mental status will default to be positive. Make that your core and operate from it. There is an honesty to your emotions that will reflect in your behavior. They are not techniques to be adopted. They must be real.

While it may be easy to dismiss all of this as non-business fluff, the best CSMs are very self-aware and emotionally connected to the people they serve. Yes! Emotionally connected. This profession is very much a human endeavor, requiring mastery in human engagement. This applies even to the tech-touch CSM that never speaks to a customer directly. In fact, they have to approach their work with an even greater focus and consideration to the real people at the other end of their automation engagements.

You must also be aware of not overextending confidences so that it breaches into hubris. Authentic confidence is found in humility. It's a careful balance to maintain for sure, especially since you must “own the room,” “be the expert,” and “drive your customer.” To many, humility implies weakness. It is ironic that the word humility has its roots in Middle English and Latin, and it means “of the earth” or “not far from the ground.”

True humility means you are grounded. You can relate to others that are “of the earth.” It means you are human. Being humble means you know to assert yourself in a positive way that enables others to follow your leadership. Humility also means that you know that you are not full of yourself. There is room for more knowledge, and there is more to learn. Continually learning and improving is the mark of a great CSM.

The Customer Success Manager Credo

One of the best exercises that Dan Steinman, Gainsight's first Chief Customer Officer, required as part of the vetting process of hiring new CSMs in the early days of Gainsight was to have candidates create and deliver a personal “Customer Success Manager creed.” It was intended to be a short one-page personal proclamation of how you would carry out your duties as a CSM at Gainsight. Dan gave no further instructions. The assignment was brilliant! It forced the candidate to come up with something original and personal; something substantive that would resonate for Gainsight, executive management, peers, and customers. Over the years, we've shared this tactic with a number of customers. They too adopted a similar practice and some even required it of their existing CSMs as part of an off-site team-building activity. It is a timeless exercise. Figure 5.1 shows an example of an actual Customer Success Manager creed that was submitted by a Gainsight candidate (now an author of this book):

• Be Joyous, It's Contagious

  Have fun, laugh, laugh-a-lot, love your work, let your passion show.

• Evolve You

  Be a better version of YOU than you were a few breaths ago.

• Do Right/Be Kind

  Have a superhero desire for doing the right thing but do so with humility and kindness.

• Be Dependable

  Honor your commitments; do things NOW!

• All Things Are Possible

  Move through life as though it is impossible to fail; we have your back!

• Be the Expert

  Be the expert in the room about our products & methodologies.

• Improve Your Product

  Be the #1 advocate for product improvement to our product team.

• Listen & Learn

  Be permanently poised to listen and learn from our customers.

• Establish Value

  Build customer loyalty by providing value & meaningful solutions that evolve with their changing needs.

• Know Your Customer

  Know your stakeholders well; make sure our Product Value is aligned with their success.

• Create Stickiness

  Every customer engagement is an opportunity to create additional product/brand loyalty.

• Celebrate Success in a Big Way

  Retentions & upsells are the lifeblood: celebrate and proclaim successes!

• Wear Many Hats, With Confidence

  Do whatever it takes to get the job done; kick ass and do everything with confidence.

• Step Out-of-the-Whirlwind

  Every day, tackle at least one goal outside of your whirlwind.

Assess each of the commitments through your own personal lens. What would yours look like? What personal truisms would you include? How do you perceive yourself and how do you want others to experience you? If you want to be a great CSM, you have to be introspective and self-aware. Doing so will establish a solid foundation for you as a CS professional to better serve your customers.

2. Communicate with Intent, Precision, and Persuasion: Be a Trusted Advisor

The term trusted advisor is so overused that the meaning has been diluted. In fact, you probably can't find a consistent definition. Let's turn then to David Maister and Charles Green, authors of The Trusted Advisor, for their affirmative attempt at standardizing the phrase. A trusted advisor, according to Maister and Green, “is the person the client turns to when an issue first arises, often in times of great urgency: a crisis, a change, a triumph, or a defeat.”²

Now ask yourself, will your customer urgently reach out to you when there is a crisis, a change, or a win, or a loss? For many, the answer should be an immediate “yes,” in particular if it's in the context of your product. However, ask the question from a broader perspective. Does your customer urgently reach out when they have a strategic business-level crisis, a company-wide change, a huge success, or massive company failure unrelated to your product? The answer will likely be a “no.” As a CSM, however, you absolutely want to forge a deep trust relationship so you can answer in the affirmative.

Being considered a true trusted advisor means that you understand the customer's business with a level of intimacy that goes beyond the purview of your engagement. You understand the roles and various influences of the people you interact with and how they are measured by their organization. It means you understand their objectives, their goals, and their pain points. It means you clearly know their definition of their success and more importantly how you can help them achieve it. This level of intimate understanding demonstrates that you care about their business first. It also shows that your product complements and is at-service to their goals, not just to your company objectives.

So how do you attain the status of becoming a true trusted advisor? Start by communicating with intent, precision, and persuasion.

3. Consistently Follow-Up to Create and Grow Trust

One of the most important traits of a CSM is to have consistent follow-up. It outwardly demonstrates to your customers and your coworkers that they matter and are worth your time. Do you send an email almost immediately following every customer engagement? Consider this angle: you should want to be better than all the other CSMs from different vendors that your customer engages on a regular basis. You want to be the CSM that always follows up immediately after a call or meeting and the one with a reputation of remarkable consistency.

At Gainsight, we have a very aspirational yet very serious policy of responding to emails or internal messages within 24 hours. It's woven into our company culture. It's aspirational because it is REALLY hard to adhere to that kind of timeline when your inbox can be fed with over 250 new emails a day. It's serious because we do our best to hold each other accountable when we don't respond in that timeframe. The overall result, we hope, is a culture of hyper-responsiveness to one another, to our customers, partners, and prospects.

Customer Success Managers don't have the luxury of playing email-victim. As much as everyone at Gainsight would love to always meet the 24-hour rule, the truth is we don't hit it 100% of the time, and we feel terrible. Personally, it doesn't make you feel good because you know there is a person on the other end waiting for your response or acknowledgment. As a CSM, you must master the skill of follow-up. Are you a master yet of your inbox? If you are, please share your secret sauce with the rest of the world. If not, it's time to try a different tactic because no matter your disposition on this topic, customers in the digital economy expect an ever more rapid and consistent follow-up.

4. How to Respond When You Don't Know the Answer

There's an old adage, “fake it until you make it.” While this approach can be applied in many customer situations, you would be best to not employ it as a CSM. So how do you respond when you legitimately don't know the answer?

Ultimately, it is a question of trust. Humans are very good at deciphering the truth. We've spent a lifetime practicing. If you are ever in a situation when you're not very confident of an answer, your best approach is to not make something up or dance-around a possible response. Your customer, a human on the receiving end, will perceive even the slightest fault in your tone or message. Rather, be fully transparent and don't use phrases that raise uncertainty like “I'm not sure.” Rather, follow these guidelines to ensure you don't lose your customer's trust in situations when you don't have an answer:

• BE DIRECT: it's okay to state that you don't know the answer to a question. However, you must provide a follow-up commitment target in hours or days.
• STATE WHAT YOU KNOW: while you may not know the full or conclusive answer, it's likely that you know or have information that is pertinent. State what you do know to the customer in the context of your discovery. It will affirm your understanding of the question and will convey that the forthcoming answer will have more precision.
• COMPLIMENT: compliment the customer on how great a question it is but don't be patronizing. Be sincere, especially if it's a question you haven't heard prior. Again, provide a follow-up commitment target in hours or days.
• PAUSE: pause and think before responding. It demonstrates contemplation and steadiness on your part; that you are considering all of the known options before just blurting out that you don't know.
• NOTE THE STEPS YOU'LL TAKE: be sure to convey to the customer the various steps and persons you need to speak to, as well as the timeframe required to derive an answer.

Whatever you do, don't be apologetic for not knowing an answer. You have to be as confident in stating that you don't know an answer as when you do know the answer. You are, after all, human. Customers are too, so they get the occasional gaps in knowledge. In order to maintain and grow your customer's trust in you, be sincere in your response and follow-up in the timeframe you provided.

5. Stay Focused and Positive When Situations Are Difficult; Learn From Them

In the world of customer success, there will be many ups and downs literally throughout your day. You could be on a call in the morning and have the absolute best engagement ever with the largest customer in your book of business. Then, the very next call could be your most loyal customer telling you the news that they will not be renewing their annual subscription with you, despite all of the history and recent efforts to meet their changing needs.

Staying positive no matter what hits you requires a grittiness and a spirit of determination that is steadfast. The CS profession requires an almost fundamental disposition of positivity. Almost like a salesperson. They are driven by an optimistic belief that every lead is a potential close-win deal. Similarly, CSMs should be driven by an optimistic belief that every customer within their purview has the potential to succeed, resulting in advocacy, renewal, and expansion.

You are constantly pulled in a thousand different directions and you must consistently display a fortitude to do what is right for the customer, right for your shareholders, and what is right for you. For example, while you may be committed to ensuring your customers and your shareholders attain their goals, you can't sacrifice your own personal health if it means working 80 hours a week all the time. That's just not sustainable. You have to stay true to your mission of ensuring that the customer is attaining their desired outcomes while considering your company goals and your own work-life balance.

Being a CSM can be an amazingly rewarding experience, but it can also be exhausting. Some days you feel like you're never winning. All your customers might be complaining about something or you may feel like you're not able to give all of them the attention that's needed. You will have wins and those will be awesome! The Customer Success Manager literally can be the difference between a customer renewing and expanding versus churning and cancelling their contract. It's about finding the balance and inner strength to stay in the game because great CSMs foster great customers.

At some point along your journey as a CSM, you'll cross a threshold where you'll say to yourself, and maybe even to your boss, “BRING IT ON! I can take on any account. There isn't a customer situation that I can't handle. I am the super-Customer Success Manager and I can conquer the world!”

6. Read People In-Depth and With a #HumanFirst Lens of Compassion

Everyone has a story. They have unique backgrounds, histories, challenges, struggles, achievements, and everything in between. Your customers are people. The best CSMs spend as much time learning about the individuals at their customers as their customers' businesses. Ask questions to learn about your customers' backgrounds, experiences, and why they have come to believe what they do. Engage them genuinely to learn more about them.

Reading people is understanding them through a lens of compassion, and it requires “insight.” Most definitions center on the word “intuitive” and how it leads you to a deeper understanding of a person, a thing, or a situation. Intuition is the “ah-ha” moment when there is an instantaneous or quickening of understanding. It goes beyond knowing the facts or following a scripted playbook. It is the consumption and processing of all the inputs about your customer at any given time. Yes, that includes dashboards and Health Scores. It also consists of conversations, listening to the tone of their voice during a call or their phrasing and choice of words in an email, and looking into the eyes of your client. Sometimes it is perceiving that there is something wrong when an otherwise happy and healthy customer becomes unresponsive all of a sudden. Logic may suggest “Everything is fine. Their recent NPS score is great.” You may even find yourself reflecting “I spoke with them last week. Why should I investigate?” You dismiss the “gut feeling” because all the practical information refutes it. Yet, there is still this urge from within that something is wrong. That urge, prompt, or gut feeling is a type of insight that you should follow.

The security expert, Gavin de Becker, wrote at length about insight and intuition in his book The Gift of Fear. He believes that what many people attribute to an almost supernatural state is fundamental to every human being. This “gift” is higher than logic and is very much a part of the cognitive. De Becker stated, “Intuition is the journey from A to Z without stopping at any other letter along the way. It is knowing without knowing why.”³

If insight and intuition is a “knowing,” how do you use it as a CSM? If a customer calls and is unpleasant, maybe even yelling at you, you might later find out it had nothing to do with you, your product, or the customer's experience but rather something stressful in their personal or work life. Yet, you somehow knew. You allowed yourself to handle the situation with compassion instead of jumping immediately to conclusions or firing back at your customer. It is a very human process and you have permission to be human. In fact, you are encouraged as a CSM to lean into the human trait of intuition and insight, even with all the data, telemetry, technology, and automation. Customer Success Management at its core is a human endeavor.

Knowing how to discern the best path forward in any situation is an elemental trait of great CSMs. In business, it is rarely about making a good or bad decision, a legal or illegal one, or even moral or ethical one. It's really about deciding which path is good, better, or best for all your stakeholders. If you have a heart with great intention to do what is best for your customer and you believe you have the customer's success in mind while also considering your company's objectives, you almost can't lose. Sure, there will be occasions of failures or shortcomings but those are rarely intentional. When you leverage your natural human insight along with all the other data-inputs and can respond with recommended paths forward, your customer relationships will blossom.

7. Genuinely Connect with Customers: it is Personal and it is Your Business

As a CSM, you have an imperative to honor the relationship you were handed. Think about all of the money, time, effort, and energy spent on getting and sustaining the customer to this point. It is now in your hands to foster and grow. For far too long, businesses have conditioned their employees, and entire generations, with the mindset that business is business and not personal. One of the reasons the customer success profession is thriving is because it has changed that distorted approach to engaging customers. It is personal, and it is your business! This is the long-haul relationship we are after and there is an intimacy that should be attained with your customer. Of course, we are not alone in this belief.

Mary Poppen, Chief Customer Officer at Glint, believes in the need for a shift in business processes and mindsets to be more empathetic, both for the customer and the employee. Ultimately, she wants to see the customer become the hero – something that she believes is only possible through intimate customer relationships. Although Mary has over 20 years of business consulting and executive experience and holds a master's degree in industrial/organizational psychology, it was a sincere passion for this subject that drew us to her.

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The ability to build relationships with customers is the highest virtue of your role as a CSM. Sure, there is a business imperative to customer success that drives revenue and we will certainly progress into the business tactics in the subsequent chapters. Your mindset and focus as a CSM, however, has to shift from you or your company to that of your customers. Moreover, your customers, at the core, are people who want to succeed just like you do in their jobs and in their lives. How awesome is it to be in a role, as a Customer Success Manager, where you are encouraged to advocate for someone else's success?

The Seven Principles covered herein hopefully have given you some additional skills and ideas for introspection. Putting them into action will allow for a more human-centric focus in your day-to-day efforts as a Customer Success Manager.