What causes stress in customer success teams, and why?

Last month, ChurnZero’s article on customer success trends for 2024 came with a warning for CS teams and their leaders from one contributor. 

“2024 is when “more with less” starts to see diminishing returns,” predicted Ryan Johansen. “Burnout gets worse and starts to have a larger effect on attrition, performance, and customer interactions.”

Now a successful stress management and productivity coach who works with go-to-market SaaS teams, Ryan was once a customer success leader, until burnout prompted him to become an expert on stress within the tech industry.  

We caught up with Ryan to discover why stress looms so large in customer success, and how CSMs can better navigate the stressors of 2024’s lean-running, efficiency-focused SaaS economy.

CZ: 2023 was a stressful year in customer success and SaaS. Will we really see additional stress for CSMs in 2024?

RJ: There’s a CS person in my network who works for a company that’s had to go through a couple of different reductions. They’re being forced to do more with less—yet they keep running the same playbook. 

They’re missing their goals and then being forced to go through it again, and they’re not changing how they do things. This is just one anecdotal example of how doing more with less can fail, and why I made that prediction. 

Customer success is a role where, internally or externally, you have a ton of people vying for your attention. The role naturally pulls you in a lot of different directions and it’s easy to lose control of your day or feel like you’re letting everyone down. When CS teams are spread too thin, it can cause people to burn out. 

CZ: What are the causes and accelerators of stress in customer success?

RJ: In customer success specifically, I think everyone attributes stress to working too much. And don’t get me wrong—that can certainly lead to stress, but there are other causes that don’t get enough attention. 

Not being empowered. Not being in control. Not feeling like what you’re doing is making a difference. There are a lot of psychological things that can add up to it too, which are much more difficult to solve—you’re not going to fix that with a meditation app. 

One challenge that’s specific to CS, from a mindset perspective, is that there’s no winning moment. In sales, you book a deal, it’s celebrated, and people are thrilled. In customer success, you work really hard to renew a really difficult client, and… well, that’s what was supposed to happen. If there’s more failure in your role than can be counterbalanced by the things that go right, the role can feel very lopsided. It weighs on people a lot. 

Think about an innocent situation where things are promised to a customer and… I’m not saying that it’s marketed one way and sold another way, but we all know how the sausage is made and the promise isn’t always the reality. Customer success can be a role where people come to you with problems more often than they come to you to celebrate. 

If you’re a CSM who feels like you’re always playing catch-up, try the tips in this webinar for running your day effectively, reducing distractions, and get the right things done. 

CZ: How does burnout manifest itself on a customer success team?

RJ: The important thing to note is that burnout affects people very differently sometimes. From a manager’s perspective, some of the people you worry about might be totally fine. Other people might be struggling but are putting on their poker face, because they’re worried about a stigma, about their boss thinking less of them—which was what I did in my own case. 

Often, you notice burnout from its side effects, rather than someone saying something. You see things like lack of engagement. You see people struggling to focus. Poor decision-making can be a symptom of being constantly in a fight-or-flight condition. You tend to see increased conflict, which leads to bad morale. 

Bad morale spreads, with two consequences for a CS team. First, the people who are talking to customers the most—the people responsible for most of your revenue—are miserable. That’s not a good look, and it’s not a very smart thing. 

The other consequence is that when someone leaves a burned-out team, there’s now a bad cycle in which everyone else inherits that person’s work. Now, the remaining members have even more work, and they think: am I really doing this? Maybe there are greener pastures out there.

CZ: Having been on this journey yourself, what habits have you built to keep stress away?

RJ: Trying to avoid stress, or to keep it away, is unhelpful. 

I point this out at the start of almost any engagement I do with a company. Looking back on my own journey, the most harmful thing I was doing was trying to get rid of stress or remove stress. It leads you into a difficult thought cycle where stress becomes a bad thing to be avoided. 

While chronic stress does create a lot of problems, acute stress is simply a bodily function.

It’s your brain telling you that there’s danger. Learning this, and learning that your brain isn’t always right, made a huge difference for me. Your brain does its best, but it might have the wrong information. We’re not our ancestors protecting ourselves from predators. It’s not life or death when we get an email that a customer has a problem. Yet, our brain might associate it with the same thing, and we feel fear, which is uncomfortable. We want to get rid of it or avoid it. 

What made a huge difference for me was learning to manage stress, instead of avoiding it.  I learned techniques like box breathing, where you can sit with that difficult feeling, then use it in a more linear way to handle the cause of the stress. 

When you change your relationship with stress, really good stuff happens. Now, instead of getting that email, telling myself that I’m a huge failure, and procrastinating to avoid it, I can face it and move on. 

Another quick, bang-for-your-buck exercise is to write out three things a day that you’re grateful for, or three things you did well that day. When I had a good day, which happened fairly often, I would write out everything I liked about work. Anytime I had a win, I would write it down too, because a good mood is as contagious as a bad one. On days when things didn’t go right, those days where you feel like a total failure, I could look at that and have objective data to show that not everything was going completely poorly. 

CZ: When should a CSM ask for help with stress, and why is it hard to do?

I’m a big advocate for professional help, and for finding a therapist, but I also know that can be really challenging. And asking a manager or a colleague for help, whether it’s because you’re in a bad mental state or because you’re struggling with something at work, is difficult. But it’s one of the most impactful things you can do. 

Often, the biggest story in your head is that you don’t want to be a burden—or, what if they don’t want to help me? It’s a story that’s easy to believe, but it isn’t usually grounded in reality. 

Here’s a helpful way to reframe the fear of seeking help: Imagine the roles are reversed. What happens when a friend asks you for help?

You’d probably feel honored that someone trusts you and cares about your feedback enough to open up like that. In the majority of cases, most people want to help. 

Stay tuned for part two in our series, in which we’ll discover how CS leaders can help their teams navigate the everyday stresses of CS. Until then: 

• Why should you avoid email at the start of your workday? 
• How can CSMs stop feeling guilty for not completing their daily tasks? 
• Is there such a thing as the secret to big improvements in productivity? 

Find the answers, and more customer success stress management tips from Ryan Johansen, here. 

If you want to learn more about Ryan or have him work with your team, check out his website for more information and resources.