Customer Success

Recent years have witnessed an ever-growing interest among business practitioners in customer success. Despite the growing managerial emphasis on customer success in the business press, academic research in this field is still at its infancy and a sound conceptualization of this emerging construct is still lacking. Based on more than 300 job profiles and job descriptions of customer success managers, we rely on content and word-co-occurrence analysis to explore how firms implement customer success management in their organizations. Next, we contrast job descriptions of customer success managers with those of customer experience and key account managers. Combining insights gained from our explorative analysis with a review of managerial literature, we suggest working definitions of customer success, customer success management, and the position of customer success manager. Finally, we identify promising avenues for future research on customer success in business markets.