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A Customer Success Skills Exercise: Problem Solving 2
How to respond when your product can't meet your customer's needs
Nicole St. Germain
March 17, 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 and comments will be available for Subscribers only. Please subscribe — it’s completely free!
Exercise
You are the CSM for an email marketing platform.
Your customer is a fast-growing ecommerce business that has been using your platform for 2 years.
They are on your second largest plan, and they’ve been generally happy with the platform, even doing a case study in the past.
Last week, one of your competitors released a really valuable feature for ecommerce: AI-powered personalized product recommendations.
After the announcement, your CEO said in an All Hands that this is not a feature that’s a priority for your company right now, because ecommerce is only a small segment of your customers and the company’s priority is content creators and newsrooms.
Today, your customer emailed you to ask you about this feature.
Additional information:
You do have a simple product recommendation engine feature, but it is not powered by AI. It is however heavily used by this customer, and specifically generated them over $100,000 in Q1.
This customer is one of your favorites in your book of business. You’ve been their CSM since the beginning, they are always easy to work with, kind and respectful.
There are 10 other CSMs at your company, and you estimate that all of them have at least one ecommerce customer in their book.
The next big feature your company is launching is AI-powered email campaigns. It’s been teased but not officially marketed to customers yet.