Customer success has become an essential driver of retention, and growth, for businesses. However, for customer success team leaders, the increasing pressure to deliver exceptional results under tighter margins can feel like walking on a tightrope.

For example, 72% of customers expect immediate and personalised service. This means you have to worry about providing top-notch customer experiences while still being cost-efficient. Over time, this can lead to low team performance, burn out and even high attrition rates.

In this article, we’ll be sharing actionable strategies to help customer success leaders like you overcome margin pressures while scaling your team to meet growing demands.

The Impact of Margin Pressures on Customer Success Teams

Margin pressures often come from a combination of several factors. This includes budget constraints, rising customer expectations, and the need to show that the team is generating high ROI.

Since leaders in customer success have to deal with driving value with very low resources, leading to challenges like:

• Not being able to attract, hire, train and retain top talent due to reduced budgets
• An overburdened team on the brink of burnout as there might be more accounts to manage
• A loop of firefighting churn risks (reactive support) instead of proactive support like improving onboarding
• Not enough budgets for essential tools and technologies to scale operations
• Being unable to provide high-touch customer engagement due to the increasing number of customers needing this
• More pressure to upsell or cross-sell instead of providing value
• Low training and development which will make it harder to stay-up-to-date on product knowledge and best practices
• Difficulty in proving the ROI of customer success efforts

These challenges, if left unaddressed, can result in higher churn rates, employee burnout, and low customer satisfaction.

Strategies to Manage Margin Pressures and Scale Effectively

To reduce the margin pressures, you have to address these challenges head-on. We recommend using innovative, data-driven and scalable strategies to help reduce these pressures. Some proven ways to do this include;

1. Use Clear Metrics and Data to Your Advantage

Not using clear metrics is what makes it difficult for customer success leaders to justify their budgets to stakeholders. You know your team contributes to revenue and retention. But how you demonstrate this is what gives you an edge during budget and resource allocations.

Start by using key metrics like customer satisfaction, net promoter score, customer health score, churn rate, and lifetime value. This can be used to quantify your team's contribution to the business. Pitch a clear business case with visuals and align these numbers with broader company goals.

For example, by showcasing how upskilling the team resulted in a 20% increase in product adoption rates and a 15% rise in expansion revenue, you can effectively argue for continued investment in professional development for CSMs. Why? Because it highlights the long-term benefits of empowering the team and ties it to the business directly.

So regularly reporting on progress, telling a story with data, and anticipating questions can help build support for budget requests. Additionally, strong relationships with other departments and executive sponsors can further strengthen the team's position

2. Invest in Automation and Self-Service Tools

84% of teams mention that automation tools actually help with meeting customer expectations. This is because when you invest in a customer success technology, your team can automate routine tasks freeing up CSMs to focus on high-value activities. This will also lower operational costs and improve your overall response times.

For example, there are automation software designed to generate reports, upsells and cross sells based on customer interactions and so much more. There’s also the more advanced options like chatbots that take care of common queries reducing the need for a live agent support.

Depending on your business and team's needs, invest in a tool that’ll help take off the pressure on your team.

3. Adopt Scalable Onboarding Processes

A scalable onboarding process is important for consistency and efficiency - whether for your team or customers. But to achieve this, you need to standardise your onboarding process. This means having a template for key documents, and having a standard operating procedure.

Once there’s this consistency, use technology to have a central hub for all this information. So for example, you can have a knowledge base or help center for customer information, product features and so much more.

You can also segment your customers to offer even more personalised training and support. Use automation tools to set up product tours, tool tips, demo videos and other onboarding materials.

For your team, you can also have a central base where they can find information whenever they need this. At Stellafai for example, you can create external and internal knowledge bases within the same tool. This way, every member within your organisation can quickly learn about your offerings and customers you cater to.

Finally, you have to constantly update these documents and flow. By getting feedback, analysing data and iterating the process based on insights, you can be sure to have a scalable onboarding process.

4. Segment Customers Strategically

Not all customers require the same level of engagement, which is why segmentation is a critical strategy for scaling customer success teams under margin pressures.

So by analysing customer data, your team can identify high-value accounts that need a high-touch approach. For example, are they high-paying clients? Or perhaps they want to onboard an enterprise team.

This way you can allocate your resources to these areas. For example, giving these high-value accounts a dedicated account manager to help them reach their goals.

Low-touch accounts, which may not require intensive interaction, can then benefit from cost-effective strategies like automated check-ins, email campaigns, or self-service tools. This segmentation allows you to maintain engagement while freeing up your team or resources for more complex, high-priority accounts.

5. Leverage Proactive Customer Success

The best way to avoid firefighting is to prevent a fire. This is why using proactive customer success can help you prevent churn risks and reactive customer support in the long-run.

Anticipating issues before they arise allows your team to resolve potential problems early, improving customer satisfaction and retention. It’ll also help reduce support costs.

We recommend using predictive analytics to identify these churn risks. It analyses usage patterns and engagement data, to deduce at-risk customers.

So for example, if the average customer logs in to your software at least once a week, you can predict that users who log in once a month are at a high risk of churn.

With this data, your customer success team can come in with tailored solutions before dissatisfaction sets in. At this stage, you want to offer value-added services like training webinars, guides or even booking calls before they encounter any problems.

6. Optimise Your Team Structure and Workflows

As a customer success team lead, you can ensure that resources are directed toward high-impact activities. One effective strategy is cross-training team members to handle diverse responsibilities. This will improve team flexibility and reduce the dependency on single roles.

For example, a SaaS company cross-trained its success managers in both onboarding and renewal strategies. This reduced the need for multiple specialised roles which improved team resilience.

Now, you don’t want to overburden your team. You just want to reallocate resources in such a way that you maintain performance standards while managing costs. So outsourcing repetitive tasks like data reports, data entry and routine customer interactions can allow your team to focus on important priorities.

What to Avoid When Managing Margin Pressure in Customer Success Teams

While implementing these strategies, you also need to be strategic in your planning and execution. Here are some mistakes to avoid:

• Over-relying on automation: Ensure that your customer success automation tools complement, not replace personalised interactions where they matter most.
• Ignoring customer feedback: Skipping regular feedback loops with customers can result in misaligned priorities and missed opportunities for improvement
• Neglecting your employee well-being: Investing in training and maintaining reasonable workloads helps ensure your team remains engaged and effective
• Focusing solely on cost reduction: This may come at the expense of long-term customer value. Prioritise customer retention and lifetime value as well

Scaling Customer Success Without Sacrificing Quality

Scaling customer success teams under margin pressures requires a thoughtful mix of innovation, technology, and human expertise. Use automation, optimised workflows and segmentation to maintain high-impact performance without over-compromising.

Navigating these challenges can be difficult, but you don’t have to do it alone. With a Stellafai coach, you can get personalised insights and strategies for scaling your team on a budget.

You’d also get a platform where other stakeholders can see your team’s efforts and get metrics for the next budget allocation. Not sure if it’s for you? Find out here