{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.023266219239373602, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0026845637583892616, 'mean_word_length': 5.557184750733138, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
An Industry/Academic Perspective on Customer Success Management

This editorial addresses the age-old service problem, where B2B customers fail to realize value and become dissatisfied, which leads to churn and reduced profitability of the vendor firm. Specifically, we focus on how proactively servicing customers can reduce churn rates by ensuring that customers realize promised, recurring, and sufficient value. The issue of churn is becoming increasingly critical as firms transition to digitaland subscription-based service offerings, which greatly reduces switching costs. In these models, which depend on recurring revenue, reports from industry demonstrate that traditional customer service and support efforts are not sufficient in retaining customers. A primary driver of churn from increased service efforts is the inability of firms to proactively engage with customers to cocreate value. To overcome this problem, customer success management, which we operationally define as “the proactive (versus reactive) relational engagement of customers to ensure the value potential of product offerings is realized by the customer,” is becoming a common industry practice. Customer success management is needed because within dynamic relationships (Zhang et al. 2016), customers that aren’t properly engaged (i.e., helped in maintaining value as offerings expand and change) can feel neglected and betrayed, which drives migration toward negative relationship states. Given its focus on retaining customers, this new form of B2B relationship management is quickly being adopted across firms that offer full-service solutions, yet the topic is largely absent from the literature. Thus, our editorial is intended to spur new research on customer success management and proactive customer engagement. In the remainder of this editorial, we first review relevant literature that provides a foundation for customer success (CS). We then describe the customer success manager (CSM) role, followed by an agenda for future research that provides an initial starting point for investigation by service scholars. Finally, we close with a mini case study from GE Digital to showcase the potential impact of CS programs within service firms.