Customer success: what it is, why it matters, and how to get started

Every business wants the same thing: satisfied customers who stick around and grow with your product. 

Getting there means helping customers realize value—quickly and without unnecessary friction. But if you’re waiting for problems to arise, you’re already behind. You’re repairing relationships, not actually building them. 

Customer success (CS) changes this. It’s proactive and strategic, helping you form lasting customer relationships, instead of seeking out fast fixes. 

Read on to learn what customer success means, why it’s so essential, and how to build or improve your CS function to drive powerful retention and growth. 

Key insights

• Start with outcomes, not activities. Focus on helping customers achieve their business goals instead of just tracking touchpoints or feature adoption—this creates genuine partnerships that drive retention and expansion.

• Use data to predict and prevent churn. Combine customer conversations with behavioral analytics to spot warning signs early, so you can intervene before customers become a churn risk. 

• Integrate across departments. Customer success works best when it’s woven throughout your organization—for example, your product team might rely on your CS team for information needed to build better features.

What is customer success? 

Customer success is a business function that helps customers achieve their desired outcomes with your product or service. It maintains an ongoing partnership between your company and customers that builds loyalty, reduces churn, and drives growth. 

Customer success teams are proactive instead of reactive. They don’t wait for problems to pop up—they work to prevent them, guiding customers toward value before roadblocks appear or user frustration sets in. 

For example, instead of waiting for a confused customer to submit a support ticket, your customer success manager might use product analytics to spot a troublesome usage pattern and jump in with resources or guidance to help. As a result, the user gets more value out of your product and satisfaction from your service right now—and is more likely to renew later. 

💡Pro tip: understanding where customers succeed (and where they get stuck) is essential for customer success. Tools like Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis help you see exactly how customers navigate through your product, revealing drop-off points and opportunities to intervene. You can even ask our AI-powered assistant Chat with Sense questions like, ‘Which journeys lead to the most engaged users?’ for quick help in identifying important patterns that inform your outreach.

Ask Chat with Sense to help you interpret user journeys throughout your product or site

Customer success vs. customer experience vs. account management vs. customer support: what’s the difference? 

These terms get mixed up all the time, and honestly, it’s easy to see why. All 4 of these functions are connected and often have overlapping responsibilities, but each has its own focus: 

• Customer success is proactive and focused on outcomes, helping customers get what they want out of your product

• Customer experience (CX) manages every touchpoint customers have with your brand (ads, onboarding, billing…you name it) to make sure their experience is a positive one

• Account management focuses on relationships and revenue—think contract renewals and keeping high-value accounts happy

• Customer support jumps in when things go wrong, such as bugs and technical issues

But these teams don’t work in silos. Customer success uses support ticket data to spot pain point trends. Account managers lean on customer success insights to time their expansion pitches perfectly. And everyone benefits from understanding the full customer experience.

So, the lines between these functions are blurred, but they all work together to keep customers successful and engaged. And because they share that goal, it makes sense for them to share analytics tools (like Contentsquare 👋) to understand customer behavior.

3 reasons investing in customer success pays off

Acquiring new customers is getting more expensive every year. Contentsquare’s 2025 Digital Experience Benchmarks report shows that the cost of an online visit surged 9% last year alone—and showed a 19% increase over just two years. Meanwhile, conversion rates dropped 6.1% year-over-year.

So, what do you do when marketing to new customers is just too costly or unpredictable? Keep the customers you already have happy and engaged—and that’s where customer success programs shine. Keep reading to find out how. 

1. Retention becomes predictable

With customer acquisition costs (CACs) rising across every industry, retention is more valuable than ever. But many companies still think of retention as damage control, a fallback in case outreach doesn’t hit its targets. 

Customer success flips this approach. Instead of scrambling to save accounts that have one foot out the door, CS teams track engagement and usage patterns as well as customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores to intervene before customers even think about leaving. 

💡Pro tip: get a clearer understanding of how to retain customers by drilling down into your customer segments and looking at how they behave when using your product. 

Using Contentsquare, you can filter behavioral data by customer type, lifecycle stage, or Net Promoter Score® (NPS®). For example, you might filter your heatmaps or session replays to see how new customers interact with key features versus how long-term users do. Then, you can proactively address any pain points these segments face.

2. Revenue from existing customers grows

Many businesses are so busy putting out metaphorical fires for annoyed customers that they overlook something essential: your happiest customers are often your biggest growth opportunity. When customers achieve their goals with your product, they naturally want to expand their contracts or upgrade their plans. 

Customer success teams spot usage patterns that signal readiness for growth since they’re in regular contact with customers and deeply understand their needs.

“I had a customer whose usage had dropped over two months, with the primary champion leaving the company and new stakeholders questioning the ROI,” says Inês Esteves, Customer Success Manager at Contentsquare.

💡Pro tip: use return on investment (ROI) numbers when presenting expansion opportunities to customers. Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification capability allows you to show customers how user experience (UX) improvements affect key business metrics like conversion rates and revenue. For example, you might show stakeholders that fixing a specific friction point could generate an additional $2 million in revenue—pretty compelling, right?

Use Impact Quantification to identify how any behavior or issue impacts revenue

3. Validate what customers need

Most customer feedback comes through 2 channels: support tickets (when something’s already broken) or annual surveys (when it’s often too late to act). 

Customer success, however, talks to customers regularly, not just when issues arise. But they don’t rely solely on these conversations. They combine qualitative insights from customer check-ins with quantitative data about how customers really interact with your product or site. 

This completely transforms customer conversations. Instead of asking, ‘So, how are things going?’ CS teams can say, ‘We noticed your team hasn’t explored our new feature yet, which could help with your goal of reducing checkout abandonment. Want us to help walk you through it?’

💡Pro tip: catch problems before customers even realize they have them. Use Contentsquare’s Frustration Score feature to automatically detect signs of user struggle like rage clicks and repeated form submissions, and rank them by business impact. With this data in hand, reach out to accounts that show an uptick in frustration patterns before small issues escalate into support tickets.

Use Contentsquare’s Frustration Score to spot issues like rage clicks and slow page load times before they become big problems

What does a customer success manager do?

Customer success managers (CSMs) have 3 goals: ensuring users derive real value from your product, preventing churn, and building customer relationships. But what tasks and activities do CSMs carry out to make daily progress toward these goals? Let’s take a look.

1. Guide customers to value

From day one, customer success managers work to quickly and smoothly onboard new customers, while ensuring they understand how the product can help them achieve their goals. 

After that, CSMs provide ongoing strategic guidance to customers, helping them discover new product use cases and features. When CSMs spot usage patterns that suggest untapped opportunities—like a customer manually tracking engagement metrics when automated custom dashboards could save hours of work—they step in with training and targeted suggestions rooted in a deep product knowledge.

2. Prevent churn

One of the most valuable—and challenging—parts of customer success is to identify customers at risk of churn. 

Traditional customer success metrics, like login frequency or feature adoption, are helpful, but today’s CSMs go deeper. They use analytics platforms to identify friction points and analyze customer sentiment to catch warning signs early. 

For example, a CSM might use Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool to see exactly where customers get stuck—zeroing in on increased rage clicks or confusing page flows—and pair that with feedback from the Surveys or Interviews tools to better understand what’s frustrating them. By turning on sentiment analysis and automated tags, they let AI do the heavy lifting, categorizing responses as positive, negative, or neutral to save time on analysis.

Once they’ve spotted even an iota of an issue, CSMs act fast by escalating technical issues to IT teams or coordinating with product teams to address feature gaps. The goal is always the same: turn potential problems into opportunities for deeper engagement. 

3. Build long-term relationships

Since CSMs stick with customers throughout their lifecycle with your business, they become trusted advisors who deeply understand their customers’ businesses. 

“CSMs should be seen as extensions of the customer’s team, genuinely invested in their success rather than just trying to prevent churn,” says Inês.

CSMs track customers’ needs and progress, providing support through implementation challenges and celebrating wins like improved product adoption. They share their customers’ product feedback with the company, influencing everything from product development to company strategy. 

They also collaborate closely with sales and account management teams to support renewals and expansions. Since they have deep visibility into customer usage and satisfaction, they can provide context that makes expansion feel natural instead of pushy.

💡Pro tip: if you notice that a customer keeps running into a specific technical issue, use Contentsquare’s Error Analysis to create a Jira ticket right then and there. Capture the full context with Session Replay, and send it straight to your development team. It’s a great way to bridge the gap between CS, product, and support—and show your customer you’re on it.

Contentsquare integrates with tools you already use, like Jira’s project management platform, to save you time and make collaboration a breeze

What’s next: create a strong and successful CS function

Whether you want to create a CS function from scratch or improve an existing program, our advice is the same: build proactive, data-driven partnerships that put customers first. 

These upcoming chapters show you how to turn customer success theory into practice across your organization: 

• Customer success metrics: discover the key metrics CS teams should track and how they differ across business models and industries

• Customer success strategy: get a step-by-step roadmap for building or improving your CS program

• Customer success software: explore the platforms and technologies you can use to carry out your customer success strategy

FAQs about customer success