It has been an incredibly frustrating and demoralizing experience under the current leadership. Morale continues to decline as the leadership fails to recognize or address the concerns of its employees. There is a complete lack of appreciation and motivation from executives, which leaves csm's feeling unvalued and unsupported. Instead of being encouraged, our teams are constantly made to feel as though we aren’t doing enough, no matter how much work is being done.
The executive leadership team seems completely out of touch with the daily challenges and workloads that employees face. They don’t seem to understand or care about the reality of the jobs, and instead, they impose increasing workloads alongside unrealistic performance goals. These goals come with no incentives, no pay increases and no recognition for the extra effort employees are forced to put in to meet these demands as the software continues to increase in complexity and systematic issues
There are very few managers who assist in these efforts as these specific managers try to keep up with the abundant amount of product enhancements and changes while a majority of other managers do not
To make matters worse, the reporting system is a nightmare. Our teams were constantly being measured on metrics that are rarely accurate, and the way their okrs are assessed seems to change on a whim, leaving us constantly scrambling to try and make manual calculations and employees feeling unsure of where they stand.
One of the most frustrating aspects is the rigid logic used for customer interactions. Calls with customers are the only type of interaction that counts toward csm's performance metrics, while any other form of engagement — whether it's email correspondence, task management, or proactive follow-ups — is completely disregarded. This leaves csm's focused solely on checking a box for 15 minute calls rather than genuinely solving problems or nurturing meaningful relationships with clients. It’s frustrating to have all other contributions reduced to a metric that doesn’t capture the true scope of the work or the value all interactions bring.
Customer success is shifting toward sales increases by putting an unfair burden on csm's. What was once a collaborative process to help identify natural leads for add-on or Pro products is now a hard requirement for every csm to hit set referral targets each quarter. This is despite the fact that customer success has no control over the type of customers being sold or the nature of their business as If a customer cancels an add-on product that was upsold by sales — regardless of whether they were involved in the referral process or not — these cancellations are measure against csm’s. This shift on pro products feels completely disconnected from the csm's role and adds to the ever-increasing pressures of customer relationship management and core product churn management.
There is a severe disconnect between management and employees, and the culture continues to become less enjoyable. Without meaningful changes, the customer success department will continue to lose talent and morale will keep deteriorating
