The Human Side of Customer Success

Why this matters

Any company is made up of individuals. Each of them has different motivations, different incentives and different ideas of what a successful outcome means — for themselves, their team and their organisation. The executive who signed the contract cares about different things than the person using the product every day. If you treat these as the same conversation, you will struggle to make progress with either. Getting this right is not about being good with people. It is about being effective at your job.

Key ideas

You always get the behaviour you reward. If the people you are working with inside a customer account are not doing what you need, look at how they are being measured. The IT team rewarded for on-time, on-budget delivery will behave very differently from the CS team rewarded for adoption and outcomes — and those two teams may be working at cross purposes without anyone naming it.

Motivations shift over time — and between individuals. What drives a new graduate is different from what drives someone a year from retirement. What motivates the champion who bought your product may be completely different from what motivates the person replacing them. Not everyone wants career progression, and not everything comes down to money. Some people just want to be left alone to do good work. You have to understand which conversation you are in.

Listening is a skill most CS teams underuse. Asking questions is not just about gathering facts. It is about understanding how people think, what they care about and how to reach them. If you pay attention to how someone answers a question — not just what they say — they will teach you how to engage with them. Chris Voss (Never Split the Difference) makes the point that "why" questions can trigger a defensive reaction. "What" and "how" often open up better conversations.

CS professionals are change agents. The job is not to train users on a product. It is to help people change how they work — and most people are resistant to that, often without knowing it. The same principles that apply to breaking an addiction apply here: a motivational poster is not going to do it. You have to meet people where they are and work from there. That requires emotional intelligence, not just process knowledge.

The five components of emotional intelligence matter in CS. Self-awareness, self-regulation, internal motivation, empathy and social skills are not abstract concepts. They are the difference between a CSM who can navigate a difficult renewal conversation and one who cannot. If you are dealing with a customer who is frustrated and at risk, staying composed, reading the room correctly and knowing when to push back and when to hold back is what determines the outcome.

Transparency is the baseline for trust. Do not make commitments you cannot keep. Do not let AI — or anyone else — set expectations you cannot meet. And know your own product and brand well enough to be honest about where it fits and where it does not. The relationship breaks when what was sold and what gets delivered are two different things. It is the CS team that inherits that problem.

The Breakthrough Challenge

What bold action can you take to apply psychological insight to how you engage with your customers — and your own team?

Questions for SaaS leaders

• Do you know what success means for each of the key individuals inside your most important accounts — not just at an organisational level?
• Where are misaligned incentives between your team and your customer's teams creating friction that nobody is naming?
• How much of your CSM hiring and training is focused on technical product knowledge versus the skills to change behaviour and navigate organisational politics?