Building DigitalCSM: The Case for Customer Success Analytics at Scale

As a CSM managing a large book of business, scale fundamentally changes how customer success needs to operate. When each CSM owns 150 to 200 accounts, the challenge is no longer intent or effort but rather visibility, speed, and consistency.

Today, at most organizations, critical customer information is often spread across various platforms such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Gainsight, Tableau,  PowerBI dashboards, and personal notes. Simple questions such as license utilization, feature adoption, or recent behavior changes require jumping between tools to find meaningful answers. At scale, that friction adds up and directly impacts how quickly and effectively a CSM can act.

This post captures my rationale for building an internal Digital CSM analytics platform called DigitalCSM. This is not a deep technical write-up. I will cover architecture and demos in future posts. This post focuses on one question: Why should DigitalCSM exist?

The first goal of DigitalCSM is to provide a true one-page account overview. For any selected account, a CSM should be able to immediately see key information such as license type, license counts, add-ons, adoption breadth and depth, utilization trends, and all qualitative notes captured over time. This includes context such as which competitors are being used when certain features are not adopted. All this information already exists, but it is siloed. Bringing it into one place removes unnecessary friction and accelerates decision-making.

The second goal is to surface meaningful signals that drive action. DigitalCSM focuses on alerts such as drops in call volume by a user-defined percentage, license underutilization, use of a previously unused feature, unuse of a previously used feature, and spikes in digital channel usage such as messaging or email. These signals help CSMs proactively engage customers, understand what changed, provide enablement, and mitigate risk early rather than reacting during renewal cycles.

The third goal is enabling targeted one-to-many motions. DigitalCSM allows filtering accounts based on feature usage or non-usage, unused features included in a customer’s license tier, license type, and KPIs such as AHT or callback counts. This makes it easier to run focused enablement efforts, share relevant webinars, and communicate feature updates to the right customers instead of broadcasting to everyone.

This platform was self-initiated, but it was shaped through direct feedback. I spoke with three CSMs on my team to understand their biggest pain points and what a unified internal platform should actually solve. Their input was translated into use cases and then into features. Early versions were tested with fellow CSMs, and the platform was iterated based on feedback. For example, the initial account overview lacked utilization trends. This was quickly identified as a gap since it still forced CSMs to navigate elsewhere. Trends were added to align with the core purpose of reducing context switching.

Backlog prioritization was driven by immediate impact and demand, using the RICE methodology to stay objective and focused.

From a broader perspective, this effort should align closely with any fast-growing B2B SaaS company’s vision and strategy. As the company continues to focus more on enterprise customers, CSM efficiency becomes increasingly important. High-touch effort needs to be reserved where it delivers the most value, while smaller accounts still need to be supported effectively. Internal automation and analytics make this possible by allowing each CSM to manage more accounts without sacrificing customer experience and, equally important, not stressing a CSM’s capacity and well-being. Additionally, in the long term, reducing cost-to-serve while improving consistency is critical at scale.

This blog documents why I believe DigitalCSM should exist. In future posts, I will walk through the platform in more detail and share demos of how it is used day to day. If you are a CSM, especially in a SaaS environment, I would love to hear how your organization is handling the challenge of managing scale and what internal tools are working or falling short.