Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.
I help CSMs to show their C-suite what they are really capable of. To grow from invisible to irreplaceable with the CSM Operating System.
The first and only training program that integrates with your tight schedule. 2-minute micro lessons and 1 task per day. Giving you small wins that add up to big results.
The Perfect Customer
Every CSM has a customer like this. The kind that never raises alarms. Never have emergencies. Never shows up as a risk in any dashboard.
Green health score.
High engagement.
Regular meetings.
Active users.
On paper, everything looks exactly how it should look. And that’s exactly what makes this type of customer dangerous. Nothing about them signals a risk. And nothing about them signals progress either.
The Illusion of Progress
You have seen the pattern.
They answer every email.
They attend every meeting.
They are polite, responsive, and engaged.
They tell you everything is going well.
They thank you for your support.
They rarely, if ever, escalate anything.
All the signals you are trained to consider healthy are there
communication frequency
product usage
positive sentiment
meeting attendance
responsiveness
So naturally, you assume progress is happening. This is where things get interesting. Because what you are actually seeing is not progress.
It’s participation, and that is extremely easy to confuse with progress.
The Danger
Customers can participate without changing. They can engage without evolving. They can stay involved without ever moving closer to their original goal.
The longer this goes on, the more convincing the illusion becomes. Every meeting, email reply, and positive feedback reinforce it. And working with these customers feels good.
Nothing suggests you should take a closer look at the account. You only start noticing that something is off slowly.
When you have the same conversations repeated over time. Talking about the same topics. Making the same decisions and agreements again and again.
It can take months until you notice that nothing has changed. Because it was buried under all the activity. And when you eventually find out, you may already be out of time.
The Real Problem.
The worst part is not the customer’s behavior. It’s how easy it is to misinterpret it. Because CSM systems tend to reward what is visible:
meetings attended
emails answered
usage logged
tasks discussed
engagement maintained
But none of those metrics answer the most important question:
“Is the customer actually achieving the outcome they bought the product for?”
If that question is not actively asked, everything else becomes a distraction that looks like progress. This is why these customers are so dangerous. They don’t fail loudly. They fail quietly.
The Way Forward
At some point, every CSM needs to internalize the difference. A customer can be:
engaged without being enabled
satisfied without moving closer to their goals
cooperative without being committed
active without being successful
Each of these pairs looks similar on the surface. But the outcomes underneath are completely different. Engagement tells you the customer is present.
It does not tell you whether they are making progress. This is where the shift needs to happen. Customer Success is not measured by
how many meetings you have
how many emails get answered
how satisfied customers say the are
Those are inputs. Real customer success is measured by outcomes.