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The Path to Success in Customer Success Management
Part II: Uncovering your customers' problems
Markus Rentsch
September 25, 2025
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Hi, Markus here. Welcome to a new episode of the Customer-Value-Led-Growth Newsletter.
I share strategies and guides to help you become a proactive CSM, deliver more value for your customers, and turn it into revenue for your company every week.
Want to show your leadership your true potential? Check out these resources 👇️
Understanding your customers’ goals is the first and non-negotiable step on the journey to success. Without clarity, there are no directions, and without accountability, there’s no targeted execution.
In the second part of the discovery, you need to understand what stands in your customers’ way. The days when you could get away with mere product education are long gone. Telling them where to click does not add value.
They have purchased your product to solve a non-trivial business problem. You need to enable them through education, training, and advising. And that requires running a full analysis to deconstruct the problem into actionable measures.
If it stays on the surface, like “missing sales quota” or “high employee turnover” you can’t build an actual solution. All you can do is move customers through a one-size-fits-all-eat-or-die enablement program that customers won’t tolerate anymore.
In today’s post, I’ll show you how to get to the bottom of your customers’ problems to provide a dedicated solution.
2. The Problem Analysis
What is the problem?
Similar to your customers’ goals, you need to have clarity about the problems that need to be solved. Ideally, your customers have done the preparation work and made accurate descriptions.
“After doing extensive research, we have discovered that there are 3 main reasons why we have a 35% employee turnover that has cost us $3.5 million in the past 12 months.
overboarding workload that results from redundant tasks and projects with extensive scope creep
extensive micromanagement that results from incomplete onboarding and a lack of management training
lack of incentives because building a reward system has not been prioritized yet
But that’s often a rare thing, and you need to be able to extract that information. How? Ask your customers to walk you through a process, or in this case, through the lifecycle.
Beginning with a question framed like this: “So you’ve hired new people for your company. What happens during the first 30-60-90 days?”
When they tell you that people go through an onboarding program, your next question is to ask how it performs - whether people complete it and what feedback they receive.
If there’s no onboarding in place, you’ve identified a potential culprit. The same applies if they have an employee onboarding program but lack insights into its effectiveness.
However, you need to know what’s really going on. If the discovery is non-conclusive, you need to take a step back and start the collaboration with an analysis.
More precisely, you help your customers to conduct insightful exit interviews with employees who are leaving and, if possible, to get more data faster, with those who have recently left.
Where is the problem?
The lack of incentives is likely a company-wide issue. But tedious micromanagement or excessive workloads? They could be restricted to certain parts of the company.
In the next step you need to locate and segment these problems. Go deeper and break them down by
role (e.g. sales vs engineers)
tenure (new hires vs long-term)
team (leadership approaches)
or other relevant criteria to uncover specific patterns that might require different solutions for different people (stakeholder).
A special case might occur when there are (attributable) spikes after certain events like a change in goals, policies or key players.
Why does it exist?
And finally, after defining what is the problem and where it occurs the final step of the problem discovery is to understand why the problem exists. I distinguish between 3 different types of problem causes that require different types of measures:
Blank Spot - important tasks are not covered and you need to build a solution from scratch (e.g. incentive system)
Ineffective Execution - important tasks are covered but do not work out as planned (e.g. project management) and you need to analyze and improve them
Overcomplexity - important tasks are covered but not applied because they are to difficult and time-consuming to use (e.g. employee onboarding) and need simplification
Use simple, yet effective techniques like the 5-Why analysis to dig deeper until you get at the bottom of the problem. At the end of the discovery, you should have uncovered actionable items.
Fast forwarding a bit, here’s an example of how the process to install an employee onboarding program from scratch could (roughly) look like 👇️
Defining an onboarding goal and success metrics
Collecting requirements for different roles
Sourcing internal knowledge from selected experts
Building an onboarding program for each role
Testing internally to get feedback
Rollout for new hires
Measuring and reviewing results
Deriving and implementing measures for improvement
Tired of putting out fires all day while being overlooked by your leadership?
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