CSMs get judged on a LOT of metrics, and are constantly hounded when one of them drops. It's unreasonable to be expected to respond to e-mails within 2 hours AND reach out to all customers at least once every two week with proactive & strategic material AND take care of all project management AND attend all the internal meetings AND conduct quarterly business reviews with all your customers - who by the way, don't actually want to do because they're also busy - AND everything else. There's only so many things you can work on if you want to keep your sanity and not work 15-hour days.
Too many internal meetings. Granted, not all of them are explicitly mandatory, but management notices when you don't attend and you get verbally berated anyway.
CSMs are the *only* people in the company who get "rated" by at least 5 different other teams in the company, and by customers as well. It's a lot of pressure to keep all of those ratings up.
Ever since they created the Customer Operations Manager role to manage the CSMs, there's been a *lot* of micromanaging.
When things go wrong, upper management demands to know what *YOU* did wrong. Yes, sometimes, it's our fault. But sometimes, failure is inevitable and instead of being asked why we failed and how we should handle it in the future, it would be much better for morale to show empathy, put them in our shoes and see how difficult it is.
Speaking of which, a lot of customers are *not* suitable for our platform and services, but they get sold - and often times oversold - anyway, and then CSMs have to deal with them for a whole year. You basically get set up for failure.
When researchers mess up on a study (or multiple studies) it's also your responsibility, even though it's not your job to do research, because your supposed to know everything - and I mean EVERYTHING - about the customer, so nothing should have gone wrong.
Internal tools are a pain to use and when we make product requests, it's hard to get them pushed through.
Big changes happen often and without your input.
They recently hired an exec who has caused a lot of friction/drama with people, turned the Customer Success team into sales - essentially, and just gives off a really inauthentic aura that makes most of us uncomfortable. He comes from a very corporate background, which stuck to him, and doesn't mesh with our company culture. And while he claims that he knows how miserable we are (which everyone seems to have noticed, and obviously not a good sign), nothing he's done so far as shown us that he actually cares. In fact, he doesn't take feedback well at all - after starting at UT, he created an account manager role called Customer Growth Executives, which the majority (if not all) of CSMs (and even CGEs) did not feel comfortable with, because it gave the impression that they were there to increase the dollar amount of contracts - which is true, but he meant for it mean that CGEs were there to support the customer and grow their business. After almost all the CSMs and CGEs said they felt like it meant increasing the dollar amount of the contract and were therefore using the title of "Account Manager' instead, he ignored us all and "decided" that it was going to be CGE.
Pay is not up to par with the industry standard. When some of us raised this concern, upper management told us that when Client Success Coordinators became CSMs, it was due to an internal reorg and not an actual promotion - which is true, *however* that internal reorg also gave us at least twice the amount of work, so the slight increase in our salary was not justifiable and STILL below industry standard.
These are just *some* of the things that are driving CSMs crazy - and away from the company itself.
