Does Customer Success have a future?

300 people registered for a webinar with a scary question. And 100 stayed for the full hour.

That number told me more than any trend report.

Layoffs keep coming. AI is eating the reactive work. Boards want CS to justify itself in NRR, not NPS. And a lot of CSMs, Heads of CS and Directors are asking the same question quietly, at 11pm, scrolling LinkedIn.

So I asked three people who won't give you the polite answer.

• LeeRon Yahalomi, VP of Customer Success at Docket AI, with 20 years building post-sales orgs and zero patience for CS theatre.
• Noah Little, ex-Senior Enterprise CSM, who helped 150+ CSMs land better jobs, and continues coaching CSMs to find their next company.
• Bob Mathers, leadership coach and host of The Growth Mixtape, who lost a senior role and rebuilt his career. Bob is also the one who proposed this panel in the first place.

Above is the full panel. Below is what I walked away with, and what you can do with it this month.

TL;DR

• Nobody is really asking if CS has a future. They're asking if they have a place in it. The comfortable version of the job is already gone.
• Hiring managers stopped paying for activities. They pay for outcomes, judgment, and knowing your numbers.
• CS has always owned revenue. The economy just stopped letting us pretend otherwise.
• The CSM of the near future manages AI agents, reads data, makes judgment calls, and multi-threads accounts.
• Your name is on a spreadsheet somewhere. Know your contributions, segment your book, and keep your network warm before you need it.
• If you're married to the "CS" title, get a divorce. The name will change. The work of keeping and growing revenue won't.

1. The real question is whether you have a place in it

Bob opened with the reframe that set the tone for the whole hour.

People don't care if CS has a future in the abstract. They care if the version of CS they're good at, the one that pulled them in five or ten years ago, still exists. His answer: no, it doesn't. So the real question is whether you can see yourself in the new version.

LeeRon took it further, and she didn't soften it. The question on every executive's mind right now is simple. Do I need this person, or can software do this job cheaper?

If your week is check-ins, QBRs, being nice, and repeating a playbook, she was blunt. ChatGPT and Claude are trained to be nice. They cost $20 a month. You won't take the job for $20 a month. So the company can't justify keeping you.

Harsh? Yes. But I'd rather you hear it from her on a webinar than from HR on a Friday.

2. Hiring managers stopped paying for activities

I asked the panel what hiring managers look for now that they didn't two years ago.

LeeRon doesn't care if your résumé says "built playbooks." She asks what outcome it had. And if you write "110% NRR," expect questions. How did you get there? How was the rest of the team doing? What did you actually do? If you can't answer, you're reciting numbers, and you just did activities.

She's also seeing domain expertise come back. If you've spent years in one industry, that's something to double down on.

Noah added the part I think every CSM should rehearse. Tell me about a customer who was about to leave for a competitor, and how you got them to stay. Did you message the CEO on LinkedIn? WhatsApp them? Judgment, knowing when to push and when to pull live on a call, is what people get hired for now. It's also what people get let go for when they don't have it.

Bob added adaptability and curiosity. He admitted it's hard to hire for. He also said there's a good chance we'll watch this recording in a year and laugh at how wrong our predictions were. Which is exactly why curiosity matters more than any specific skill.

I'll add one from my side. A client came to a coaching session with me, and I asked for their numbers. They said they'd need to go check. We were sitting in a paid session and they didn't know their own book. That's the gap. Fix it before anyone asks you.

3. CS has always owned revenue. The economy just stopped covering for us

I pushed a little here. It felt like CS only started talking about revenue because the economy forced us.

LeeRon shut that down fast. CS has always owned revenue. Renewals are revenue. Expansion is revenue. The title literally says customer success, meaning the customer succeeds so they pay more. If revenue gives you the ick, she said, maybe CS isn't for you.

Then she gave the number that explains why it hurts now. Before COVID, NRR numbers looked great everywhere. When COVID hit, average NRR dropped to 78%. Money stopped flowing, and suddenly everyone noticed that the department responsible for renewals couldn't explain why customers renewed. She'd ask CSMs that exact question and get the signed paperwork sent back to her.

Noah's angle was cost. Acquisition is expensive now. Enterprise customers aren't switching vendors fast. Seat counts are shrinking. CS is the team keeping the money in the bank. He told a story about a CFO at a conference who said the most important person in the company is the CSM. Investors don't care if a customer renewed once. They care about year three, five and seven.

Bob named the honest catch. CS carries the responsibility for retention but rarely has the authority over who sales sells to or what product builds. And for years CS defined itself by what it wasn't. Not sales, not support, not account management. So it became the company's junk drawer. AI is now emptying that drawer, and the light is on the question nobody wanted asked. What value do you provide?

LeeRon's answer to the authority problem was short. You can sit and whine, or you can get on the horse. It's not all sales's fault, and there is something you can do.

4. What a CSM's day looks like when AI does the prep

I asked the panel to imagine AI already took the admin work. Notes, CRM prep, everything connected. You open your laptop at 9am. Then what?

LeeRon didn't have to imagine. Her team at an AI-native company already works this way.

Every CSM manages a set of AI agents running workflows in the background. You check they're doing the right jobs.

The rest of the day is judgment. You look at data, form a hypothesis about what it means, and go do real discovery. Usage and adoption? There's a dashboard for that. As she put it, she doesn't call her bank to read her balance out loud to her.

And you multi-thread. "I only have one contact on the account" isn't an answer. Go find the other people your product can help, map them, and build the path from where the customer is to where they want to be. You become a consultant on their domain, not a tour guide for your features.

Noah had the image I keep thinking about. Your customer has 25 other vendors and 25 other CSMs talking to them about data, features and adoption drops. They don't care. Every customer is different, like an expensive race horse that trains in its own way. Your job is to build the bridge between your product and how their business runs. The second you're obsessed with QBRs, NPS and health scores, you're tracking inputs and ignoring outcomes.

His best director once told him she didn't care if he took a four hour lunch, as long as his customers renewed.

5. Your name is on a spreadsheet somewhere

This was the question I asked for the CSMs with 100, 200, even 400 accounts who are scared of the next layoff round. What do you do in the next 30 to 60 days?

LeeRon: know what you contributed and write it down. How many accounts did you renew, grow, expand? What did you do to get there? If you have 500 accounts and treat them all the same, you don't have a system, and you can't be doing the job. Segment your book yourself, and redo it every month or quarter. Don't wait for someone to do it for you. Then make sure you're not invisible. Your boss should know your contributions and agree they hit the bottom line.

Then she added the part people don't like to hear. You can do all of that, be a top CSM, and still get cut. That's a business decision. It says nothing about your capabilities.

Noah was more blunt. Look around the room. Is the company making money? Were there layoffs this year? Is sales hitting its numbers? Is your VP not sleeping? If the writing is on the wall, update your résumé and LinkedIn, and start talking to your network now. Don't be the person who says "I knew it was coming" after the meeting invite lands. He even kept interviewing while he was happy in his last role, just to keep the skill sharp.

Bob tied it together. Rock stars get let go every day. Everyone's name sits on a spreadsheet next to a line that moves up and down. Often there are no warning signs. So build your capabilities list and your network while you're still employed and comfortable. Then a layoff is a dip you keep moving through, not a cliff.

6. If you're married to the title, get a divorce

My last question: will customer success even keep its name?

LeeRon has already watched companies rename CS teams to outcome engineers, forward deployed engineers, and a lot of other things. Her line was the one I'll keep repeating. If you're married to your title, get a divorce. The title is rented. Your capabilities are what you own. If you only search for jobs with "CSM" in the title, you'll miss half the market.

Bob hopes the term goes away entirely. It lost its meaning before AI showed up. Ask ten CSMs what their job is and you'll get ten answers, half of them support. And outside B2B SaaS, customer success barely exists. Every business on the planet still needs someone to keep and grow customers. It's just called account management or sales.

That connects to something I see every few months on Reddit. Someone asks if there are any SaaS companies left where CS doesn't own commercial metrics. If that's you, here's my honest take. You might be a great customer care professional, and there are plenty of businesses that need exactly that. Changing direction isn't a failure. Something was wrong with the SaaS companies that never explained to you what CS was supposed to be.

Noah said it simplest. What got you to this dance won't get you to the next one. And that's okay.

So, does CS have a future? Yes. The version that lives on fast replies and happy check-ins doesn't.

If you tie your work to revenue, hand the busywork to AI, and stop waiting for permission, you'll be fine.

Your homework for this week: open a doc and write down three things. Your numbers for the last 12 months. The capabilities behind them. And the problems those capabilities solve. That's your next promotion, or your next job.

Thank you to LeeRon, Noah and Bob, and to CS Insider for giving us the room.