The Complete Customer Success Manager Course [2026]

Identify and align your organization's customer success strategy with corporate vision and budget, clarifying the customer and company contexts to set actionable objectives and tactics.

Define the customer success manager role, clarify duties and performance targets, and emphasize cross-functional teamwork to maximize customer value, renewals, and upsell opportunities.

Identify essential assets and resources for customer success managers, including a customer management system or health score tool, while keeping setup simple and using templated questionnaires and tools.

Plan and prioritize your time as a customer success manager by aligning activities with your company's customer success strategy, managing deadlines, and reserving time for unplanned and routine tasks.

Master the Rappi task model to categorize customer success activities into research, analysis, planning, action, and evaluation, enabling balanced time allocation and focused action for faster value delivery.

Follow the critical path to value creation by balancing research, analysis, planning, and action tasks within the pc esmf framework, delivering onboarding and adoption outcomes.

Target senior management and C-level stakeholders, determine who needs to attend, and demonstrate the meeting's value and outcomes to secure executive consent.

Master phase one preparation by learning how a CSM gathers information, plans action, and ensures readiness for a smooth, value-driven customer engagement across steps 1–6.

Access information for customer engagements by researching the pre-adoption team, the account manager, and company data systems, including the CRM and internet, before the first meeting.

Coordinate an internal handover by engaging sales, solution architects, and service teams. Capture customer, solution, contract details, outcomes, milestones, stakeholders, and reporting needs to accelerate onboarding, adoption, and value realization.

Understand the customer as a whole and research essential information from the CRM and colleagues to align outcomes with the sold solution, including bill of materials, architecture, and renewal considerations.

Identify the customer's initiative and purpose, align it with the vision, and define, document, and track outcome requirements, milestones, inputs, outputs, and capabilities.

Identify internal and customer outcome requirements and manage stakeholder perspectives to drive adoption and measurable success, aligning engagement priorities, change management, and potential revenue impact.

Identify all third parties and assess their influence on decisions, then capture current status and information gaps to shape a concise engagement strategy and roadmap.

Prepare for a new customer engagement by using the customer research checklist workbook, building an engagement strategy and roadmap in the engagement workbook, and storing outputs in a central repository.

Define commitment in customer success by securing explicit agreement on onboarding, adoption, and value realization. Outline the CSM's role, timelines, milestones, and a proactive partnership to deliver measurable outcomes.

Learn how customer success managers communicate with diverse stakeholders, use consultative questioning and active listening, and plan meetings to drive onboarding, adoption, and value creation.

Develop a stakeholder management strategy using the Raissi matrix and stakeholder management matrix to categorize stakeholders, assign responsibilities, and tailor plans, with monthly reviews and centralized documentation.

Learn how onboarding gets customers up and running quickly after purchase, from the customer's perspective, and compare paid and not paid approaches while reducing time to value and payback periods.

Explore generic and customized onboarding models, learn how to create reusable onboarding packs, tailor customer-specific packs, and decide when onboarding becomes chargeable professional services.

Assess onboarding requirements, distinguish generic from customized onboarding, and craft tailored plans with templates, milestones, and success metrics to ensure efficient customer adoption.

Explore tools for phase 3 onboarding, including the onboarding scoring tool, requirements capture templates, a multi-sheet workplan, and the CSM activity tracking template to plan, execute, and report onboarding progress.

Define adoption and explain how to plan, manage, and measure change across onboarding and adoption, including proof of concept pilot and value pilots, the evolving vendor role in customer success.

Understand adoption as achieving maximum value by addressing non-linear complexity from impacted users and identifying knowledge, skills, and attitudes to meet adoption requirements for direct and indirect stakeholders.

Explore multiple research techniques for customer insights, including interviews, workshops, surveys, focus groups, existing documentation, observation, and shared previous customer experience.

A customer success manager coaches adoption research, evaluates research techniques, ensures accessible findings, and guides stakeholder management to drive adoption and opportunities for professional services.

Determine adoption requirements by building consensus on outcomes among key stakeholders. Identify impacted processes and capabilities, plan and measure adoption using workshops, the adoption requirements questionnaire, and targeted research.

Identify and group impacted users into impacted groups (igs) based on shared changes, assess KSA gaps, and document adoption planning requirements for effective change management.

Determine communication, training, and support requirements for adoption, outlining information dissemination and addressing attitudinal issues. Compare task-based versus functionality-based training and plan phased delivery.

Capture and classify adoption barriers and risks with the SPL and stakeholders, distinguish known vs unknown risks, and outline an adoption plan owned by the SPL and customer.