End of 2022, nearly 200,000 people indicated holding a position as a customer success manager on LinkedIn. Customer success management (CSM) is thus the fastest growing business function. It was first implemented in selected service businesses, but currently CSM applications are spreading globally across industries.
This book provides a clear understanding of CSM for practitioners based on comprehensibly prepared knowledge from practical and scientific resources. The book can be used as a practical guide to learn about CSM process and the roles, necessary capabilities, and expectations toward customer success managers. Furthermore, it also shows how CSM differs from and, at the same time, relates to existing customer-related management concepts such as value-based selling, key account management and customer relationship management. The presented insights are not only relevant for customer success managers, but also for those aiming at such a position in the future. The bookis also useful for supplier and customer representatives who are connected with customer success management activities in their daily business.
Michael Kleinaltenkamp is a Professor Emeritus at the Marketing Department of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where he was a Professor of Business and Services Marketing and the director of the “Executive Master of Business Marketing” program from 1992 to 2020. In November 2013, Prof. Kleinaltenkamp was awarded an honorary doctorate from the University of Rostock, Germany. His work has been published in international Journals such as the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Service Research, Industrial Marketing Management, Journal of Business Research, Journal of Service Management, Journal of Service Theory and Practice, and Journal of Business and Industrial Marketing. At Springer, he has published several edited textbooks on basic topics in business-to-business marketing as "Fundamentals of Business-to-Business Marketing" (2015), "Business Relationship Marketing and Management" (2015), and "Business Project Management and Marketing" (2016).
Katharina Prohl-Schwenke is co-founder of the Customer Success Academy. The goal of the Customer Success Academy is to bring relevant research findings on Customer Success Management into the world of business, thus bridging the gap between science and practice. Previously, she completed her doctorate at the Marketing Department of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany, where she worked as a Research Associate. Her prior work experience also includes being an Account Executive for a Software as a Service (SaaS) provider. In this context, the idea arose to deal scientifically with the topic of CSM in the context of her doctorate. This has resulted in several publications in Industrial Marketing Management.
In terms of content, Katharina Prohl-Schwenke systematically and sequentially investigated what drives suppliers in B2B markets to implement CSM and how they actually implement it, how customers evaluate the CSM activities of their suppliers and to what extent CSM actually positively influences the repurchase behavior of customers and thus leads to the desired result for the suppliers - a low churn rate.
Laura Elgeti is co-founder of the Customer Success Academy. She completed her doctorate at the Marketing Department of Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She has published in Industrial Marketing Management and has won two best paper awards, national and international. Besides her research activities, she is interested in the conceptual design and teaching of courses. During her time at the university, she was able to test innovative ways of imparting knowledge. That is why she enjoys being on a mission with her Co-Founder Katharina Prohl-Schwenke to empower B2B companies to create and scale value to the customer. Namely, coaching how to put customers on the road to success and thus rely on the most sustainable growth strategy: success through customer success!
