When I joined ESG last April, I thought I had a pretty good idea of what Customer Success was and how its concepts played a role in the world of business. But boy, was I in for a world of surprise when it comes to the breadth and depth of Customer Success as a discipline and an industry. Luckily, while walking down the yellow brick road of CS, I’ve had the guidance of my co-workers (who happen to be CS professionals and experts) and a wealth of resources to get me up to speed.
Customer Success might be a relatively new industry when compared to its counterparts in Sales, Marketing, Product, etc., but there are a ton of helpful resources out there on just about every topic imaginable. In fact, there are so many CS resources out there, chock-full of juicy content, I’ll admit that I may have found myself lost in the abyss a time or two.
So, for any fellow CS newbies that may be feeling a bit overwhelmed on where to start, here are a few of my go-to resources that helped get me up to speed and that I still find myself coming back to:
- TSIA (their meatier content is gated for members only, but even their publicly available blogs are fantastic)
- SuccessHACKER (humble brag – I’m now a certified Customer Success Manager (CCSM) Level 1!)
- ESG’s Resources (can’t leave out the fact that being on the Marketing team at ESG threw me headfirst into our rich library of resources on day one)
I’m in constant awe of how complex and ever-changing Customer Success really is, and I don’t know that I’ll ever stop feeling that way. I’ve spent a good part of the last ten months learning about the many ways Customer Success is vital to any SaaS organization’s overall success and health. And to truly be a “student of the game” as our CEO Michael Harnum puts it, I must keep up with this quickly growing industry and its many terms, acronyms, and lingo on a weekly basis.
Like being thrown into an unfamiliar world and embarking on a journey to the Emerald City, being fed a ton of information in a new industry can be overwhelming, and joining a new industry almost always includes learning what feels like a million new terms. I’m grateful to have colleagues to ask what they all mean (like I’m sure Dorothy was grateful to have the Tin Man, Scarecrow, and Cowardly Lion alongside her on her journey) but not everyone is so lucky!
Whether you’re a CS rookie (like I was) or a seasoned CS professional, having one place with any and all CS definitions, calculations, and lingo consolidated would be extremely useful, right? Well, we went ahead and did just that!
Download Customer Success Definitions, Calculations, and Lingo…Oh My!