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A Customer Success Skills Exercise: Problem Solving
Finding the root of your customer's problem
Nicole St. Germain
March 10, 2025
You know you need some killer Problem Solving Skills to succeed in Customer Success. But how do you develop them without first working in Customer Success?
I’m attempting to solve this chicken and egg problem. I want to equip you with different exercises and strategies to help you feel confident walking into a new job in Customer Success.
What are Customer Success Problem Solving Skills?
Working in Customer Success is essentially all creative problem solving. You have specific targets to meet, and infinite ways to meet them. There isn’t always a right answer — two people can reach the same target with completely different strategies. That’s what’s so interesting about Customer Success.
I’ve coached Customer Success professionals for years, and what I like to emphasize is finding the root cause, the real problem. Customers are rarely correct or forthright about what they really need, and it’s up to you to figure it out. I’ve created two exercises to help you do that.
How it works
For each exercise, there’s a quick explanation, some additional information, and then a prompt.
I would recommend you open a fresh Google Doc and use it to take notes, to parse your ideas, and then ultimately to write out your answer.
To meet you where you are at, you can attempt the prompt cold, or you can utilize hints. Each hint decreases the difficulty of the exercise, so try to take one hint at a time and see if that can guide you.
Once you’ve answered the exercise, compare your answer to mine. As I’ll emphasize over and over again, there is not necessarily a correct answer, only the best answer. I’ll do by best to explain what I was specifically looking for, and why it’s important.
If you’d like to share your answer, or have any questions, you can do so in the comments.
Answers, Hints and Comments will be available for Subscribers only. Please subscribe — it’s completely free!
Exercise
You are the CSM for a SaaS company with a project management tool.
Your customer is a mid-sized B2B SaaS company. They have been a customer for 6 months.
Your contact, the Head of Operations, just reached out: they have 50 user seats, but only 10 users are actively using the tool over the past two months. They want to know if they are able to reduce their contract to just the 10 seats.
Additional information:
A customer needs a contract of at least 25 seats to be assigned a CSM.
They signed a contract for one year.
Your company has a dedicated Customer Training Team and a detailed learning center.
The 50 users are spread out over multiple teams at your customer’s company. The 10 active users are mostly one team, with a few users scattered across other teams.
They initially onboarded with 45 seats. 5 seats have been added over the course of 6 months as they have hired, and some seats have changed over due to employee turnover.
How do you respond?
Exercise Hints
Not sure where to start? There are 3 hints that build on each other, and decrease the difficulty.
Start with Hint 1, and if you’re still stuck, go to Hint 2. If you really aren’t getting it, use Hint 3.