The top 2024 customer success trends predicted by industry experts

It’s an exciting time to be in customer success. New technologies, best practices, and strategies, combined with an industry-wide drive for sustainable, profitable growth, have made CS teams the revenue-building stars of every SaaS organization.

On the other hand, economic headwinds continue to constrain CS budgets and headcounts. Every investment dollar is harder to obtain, and CS leaders and their teams face more pressure than ever to deliver results.

“2024 will continue to see the chief customer officer move into the leadership phase,” predicts ChurnZero CEO and co-founder You Mon Tsang. “Their task: to build customer success into the best-performing department: a center of excellence that integrates technology and people. Their ownership of NRR will earn investment internally, and the expectations on them to deliver will go sky-high.”

How will customer success teams evolve and adapt to meet those expectations, and what challenges will they encounter? We asked ChurnZero’s industry network of CS experts to weigh in.

Expanded roles and responsibilities: how will customer success evolve in 2024?

Customer success teams will be expected to take on expanded commercial responsibilities that enable them to measurably contribute to top-line revenue growth, predicts Hello CCO CEO and The Chief Customer Officer Playbook author Rod Cherkas.

“They will not become salespeople, but they will become more confident in their unique ability to uncover growth opportunities, build relationships with critical internal champions, tell stories that demonstrate value to their customers, and contribute to accelerated expansion growth. CSMs will evolve their skills and capabilities to meet the needs of customers and their executive teams. CEOs and CFOs will finally see how CSMs can drive expansion growth in a predictable, repeatable way.”

How do other industry experts see customer success goals evolving?

“The landscape of customer success will shift significantly, with a heightened emphasis on commercialization,” says Growth Molecules founder and managing partner Emilia D’Anzica.

“B2B and B2C companies across industries will increasingly recognize the pivotal role that customer success plays in retaining existing clients, driving revenue, and fostering sustainable growth. Statistics show that customers, more than first-time buyers, are more willing to buy new products and more of them because they already have a trusted relationship with your brand.”

“2024 will be the year SaaS companies put their money where their mouth is when it comes to securing and expanding their base,” says Eric Hansen, head of CS at Maxio.

“As growth rates slowed in 2022 and 2023, there was a lot of pressure on SaaS businesses to double down on their customer bases, but many companies weren’t prepared to execute thoughtful strategies that require buy-in from multiple departments. 2024 will be the year that CS teams create and execute on segment-specific playbooks that combine products, service offerings, and proactive engagements that align to value.”

Customer “QBR fatigue” will continue to increase,” says Bob London, “as they tire of and decline to attend meetings that are all about the vendor. Vendors can win in this environment by making meetings more about THEM – the customer, using authentic curiosity and deeper listening skills to understand how customers define value.

Specialization, fractional hiring and more: how will customer success teams change in 2024?

“With most companies under pressure to do more with less, customer success teams will have to specialize in one of two categories,” predicts LeanScale CEO and co-founder Anthony Enrico.

“They’ll either need to be deep technical experts, and manage end-to end-implementations and customer success, or they will need to be revenue-focused and carry expansion quotas or expectations. Pure ‘relationship management’ CSMs, with access to onboarding specialists, product specialists, and account management layers, will become a structure of the past.”

“SaaS companies will opt to hire fractional or part-time experts to supplement their in-house customer success teams,” says Naomi Aiken of Techtonic Lift.

“Hiring from the fractional workforce allows businesses to access focused and specialized expertise, on an as-needed basis, without the commitment or price tag of full-time hires. Hiring fractional experts has been a common practice in other industries for decades; in 2024, CS teams will embrace this workforce model in scale while remaining cost-conscious.”

But how will customer success teams fare under the pressure?

“I’m calling it now,” says CS management coach Ryan Johansen. “2024 is when “more with less” starts to see diminishing returns. Burnout gets worse and it starts to have a larger effect on attrition, performance, and customer interactions. Companies that address this proactively will build some goodwill and get through these tough times. Companies that don’t do this might keep those employees without other options, but will see lack of engagement and poor morale.”

Meanwhile, Swati Garg, founder and CEO of Melo Associates, has an upbeat outlook on customer success hiring in 2024.

“After the challenging job market we saw in 2023, 2024 will be very different,” Swati says. “We are already seeing more activity, and that is a very positive sign for companies and job seekers. The market is asking for more domain experience, stronger technical acumen with the use of AI in everyday work, and coming back into the office. I anticipate a continual demand for new skills in customer success, as more specialized roles are being created. Hiring and teams will continue to grow at a steady pace.”

Scale, efficiency and growth: How will CS leaders unlock more in 2024?

In 2024, managing for uncertainty—whether economic, political, or even geopolitical—will pressure CS teams to demonstrate their ability to deliver improved financial performance with tighter budgets, says SuccessChain co-founder Jason Whitehead.

“There will be an increased focus on scaling CS impact, and on removing low-performing CS staff. Similarly, SaaS organizations will increasingly rely on using interim and fractional CS staffing to test out candidates before making permanent hires.”

“I expect that the return to sound business discipline we saw in 2023 will continue all the way through 2024,” writes ESG‘s Peter Armaly. “That environment will continue to pressure leaders to find ways to optimize and streamline and, as a result, many will perceive that AI and other tech can provide quick ways to introduce efficiencies. While that can be true in some cases, the efficiencies are not as easy as the hype alluringly suggests.

“Successful customer success leaders in 2024 will find ways to declutter their minds and their programs. They will be less distracted and more focused on finally, and completely, building out the fundamental building blocks of customer success. Most importantly, they will be more serious about empirically proving that their teams’ effort positively impacts customer goals and vendor revenue. One major result will be that the customer success organization becomes better equipped to be a full participant in the Go-to-Market (GTM) strategies that have taken enterprises by storm.”

Meanwhile, customer success teams will continue to struggle with scalable customer engagement, predicts Donna Weber.

“As digital customer success continues to gain traction in 2024, it’s imperative to stop enabling customers one at a time. Instead, educate and enable customers with a one-to-many approach. One-to-many customer enablement allows customer success managers to do more by leveraging their expertise as strategic business advisors. Start with simple self-paced courses, in-product guidance, and live online webinars and workshops.”

What role will AI and new technologies play in customer success in 2024?

According to ChurnZero’s You Mon Tsang, 2024 will be a tipping point for the adoption of AI in customer success, ushering in an era of change.

“Customer success teams and leaders will witness the remarkable and tangible benefits of AI,” says You Mon. “Not only in enhancing customer interactions and satisfaction, but also in boosting CS productivity. This, in turn, will drive AI deeper into the CS workflow. And trust in AI will grow, empowering it to drive increasingly sophisticated, personalized, and reliable automation, and interact with customers with minimal oversight. This all begins in 2024.”

“I expect to see businesses leveraging advanced analytics and AI to drive hyper-personalized, digital customer success experiences for ALL customers,” predicts Valuize CEO and co-founder Ross Fulton. “From tailored next-best outcome recommendations for customers based on real-time data, to digital customer education content personalized for individual users, companies will, at last, successfully integrate curated high-touch with scale.”

Companies will continue to leverage artificial intelligence and machine learning to better understand, manage and monitor the ever-changing success path of customers, writes Kia Puhm of DesiredPath.

“Augmented customer journey mapping (holistic understanding of the customer journey), dynamic customer success playbooks (real-time adaptation to changing customer behaviors and market conditions) and predictive customer journey monitoring (proactive and cost-efficient management of customers through the journey) form the intelligent framework that will enable companies to learn from the patterns of their most successful customers and drive smarter, faster revenue growth.”

“AI will be used more and more across the industry,” says Jeff Kushmerek of Infinite Renewals, “but it won’t be a major factor affecting success rates or strategies. Instead, customer success teams should focus on following the processes outlined, with AI being “signals” that affect the health score and can trigger plays.

“AI is going to begin to drive customer ROI analytics with the ability to baseline a KPI current state, track progress, and show the value of the technology’s impact to the business, says LandNExpand CEO Jackie Golden. “Software companies that incorporate AI into their products in this manner will change the game.”

“I’m really excited about how customer success platforms are shaping up,” says CSM Practice CCO and CEO Irit Eizips. “They’re going to be supercharged with cool features, making it easier for us to understand our customers’ journeys like never before.

“With AI getting into the mix, we’ll be able to predict what our customers need and want, helping us connect with them in a more personalized and proactive way. It’s all about making our customer interactions smarter and more tailored – and I think that’s fantastic!”

“Customer-centric organizations will have to increase their commitment to email deliverability best practices in 2024,” notes Evan Klein of Satrix Solutions. “Churn reduction and churn prediction strategies become less effective if customer feedback and sentiment can’t be solicited at scale, like for online customer experience surveys. With email service providers like Gmail and Yahoo, as well as corporate email filtering and anti-spam software tools, getting more sophisticated and restrictive, communicating with existing and prospective customers via email will require a deeper understanding of email deliverability tactics and approaches in the years ahead.

Stay ahead of 2024’s customer success trends, challenges and opportunities.

Whatever 2024 brings, we’re here to keep you one step ahead with resources, ideas, and fresh thinking on everything CS.

• Sign up for an upcoming ChurnZero webinar or pick one to watch on demand.
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Featured photo by Denny Müller