(Last Updated on February 25, 2019)

What’s one thing that SaaS companies have in common other than subscription-based business models? Yes, you guessed it right. Customer Success.

Customer Success is a relatively new field for growing SaaS business. We keep coming across people who are unsure of how should they build customer success at their companies. 

The good news is that there is no lack of customer success resources available on the internet and we decided to collate all of them for your benefit.

Here are the top customer success resources

(P.S. This list will keep getting updated every quarter. So bookmark it for future reference.)

Books

1. Customer Success : How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn And Growing Recurring Revenue by Lincoln Murphy, Dan Steinman and Nick Mehta: This is Customer Success 101 and is a must read for anyone in the CS space.
2. The 10 Principles Behind Great Customer Experiences  by Matt Watkinson: The book’s achievements speak for itself as it is the winner of the CMI Management Book of the Year 2014 and the Innovative & Entrepreneurship Category at CMI Awards 2014.
3. What Customers Crave: How To Create Relevant And Memorable Experiences At Every Touchpoint by Nicholas J. Webb: The book simplifies the issue of customer success by conveying the best companies’ experience in form of deep and humanly experiences.
4. Chief Customer Officer 2.0: How to Build Your Customer-Driven Growth Engine by Jeanne Bliss: Chief Customer Officer 2.0 will give you a proven framework that has launched and advanced the customer experience transformation in businesses in every vertical around the world.
5. Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion, and Purpose by Tony Hseih, CEO, Zappos.com: One Amazon reviewer wrote, “This book is not a how-to but rather a fable for entrepreneurs – a story to help teach and inspire them on their own path.” Need we say more.
6. The Effortless Experience: Conquering the New Battleground for Customer Loyalty by Matthew Dixon, Nick Toman and Rick DeLisi: Everyone knows that the best way to create customer loyalty is with service so good, so over the top, that it surprises and delights. But what if everyone is wrong? This book turns conventional wisdom on its head.
7. Farm Don’t Hunt: The Definitive Guide to Customer Success by Guy Nirpaz: This book breaks down the intellectual underpinnings of Customer Success as a theory and quickly moves to providing pragmatic, actionable advice for orienting your business around this new model.

Also read: The Essential Guide to Buying a Customer Success Platform

Blogs

1. Sixteen Ventures – Lincoln Murphy’s blog on marketing, sales and customer success thought leadership.
2. SaaStr – The largest web community of SaaS founders and entrepreneurs, with over 2.5 million views per month across the web, and over 16 million views on Quora.
3. For Entrepreneurs – David Skok’s content with his 25 years of experience as an entrepreneur has got this blog a must read rating as Customer Success is his key topic.
4. The Customer Success Directory –  To assist Customer Success professionals at all levels to locate needed content, services, technologies, etc., The Customer Success Association has created The Customer Success Directory™.
5. Shep Hyken’s Customer Service Blog: Shep Hyken writes newsletters on customer service and experience. He also publishes his favorite blogs of the week.
6. CX Journey: This is a blog by CX Journey Inc., a customer experience strategy consulting firm. It’s about customer experience, employee experience, customer service, voice of the customer, and leadership.
7. Tomasz Tunguz: “Daily, data-driven blog posts about key questions facing startups”. Tomasz, venture capitalist at Redpoint, covers many topics about SaaS business, including customer success.

Also read: The Customer Success Blog – Being a customer success platform for B2B SaaS, we try to help SaaS companies build a strong customer success practice.

Communities

1. The SuccessHACKER community: This popular platform is free and professionals use it to connect to success managers from around the globe. CSMs post questions, advertise webinars or meetups, and read relevant articles.
2. The Customer Happiness Experts Association: The association hosts a content aggregator, where CSMs can stay up to date on news within their field.
3. The Customer Success Association: Membership for this association is free, but costs $95 per year for an executive membership. It has many helpful resources, such as a customer success directory.
4. The Customer Success Forum: The largest group of customer success professionals on LinkedIn with over 28000 members. This group is managed by The Customer Success Association.
5. The Customer Experience Professionals Association: Founded in 2011, the Customer Experience Professionals Association is the premier global non-profit organization dedicated to the advancement and cultivation of the Customer Experience profession.
6. Customer Success on Reddit: Reddit is the simplest way to share links or resources and get questions answered. If you’re looking for a fast way to connect with other professionals, you’ve found it here.
7. Customer Success on Quora: The topic “Customer Success” on Quora has 6.6k followers. Quora is a great platform to post questions, give and receive answers.
8. Slack Communities: Apply to CS Heroes and Customer Retention/Happiness to connect with fellow Customer Success leaders and have engaging conversations daily.

Courses and Certifications

1. CCXP Certification: The CCXP program provides a means for individuals to obtain professional recognition of their high levels of knowledge of the customer experience discipline.
2. Customer Success University: Gainsight offers a 3 course program that teaches key Customer Success elements. At the end, participants receive the Certified Customer Success Manager designation.
3. SuccessCOACHING: SuccessCOACHING is the direct outgrowth of what James Scott, Andrew Marks, Todd Ebby and Nils Vinje have learned from years in the trenches and from working with a wide variety of companies from around the world who are reimagining how they train and educate their Customer Success teams.
4. Customer Success Manager 101: If you’re looking for a fast-paced course, Udemy’s customer success course may be the choice for you. The lectures demand only a little over an hour of your time.
5. CSM Practice’s CS Navigator: This program provides helpful insights, templates to improve your company’s current processes. It provides one on one coaching program for CS executives.
6. The Success League: This consulting company offers leadership programs, training programs, playbooks and workshops.
7. Cisco Customer Success Manager (DTCSM) by CISCO: The Cisco Customer Success Manager Specialist certification provides a solid framework, and a core set of proven fundamental skills and knowledge to deliver immediate value to the vendor/customer relationship.

Twitter handles to follow

1. Lincoln Murphy
2. Jason Lemkin
3. David Skok
4. Guy Nirpaz
5. Charna Parkey
6. Matt Zilli
7. Irit Eizips
8. Julie Devaney Hogan
9. CustomerSuccessBox (you have most likely come here via social media, so why not?)

Who do you follow to keep yourself updated on Customer Success? If you feel something or someone is missing from this list, feel free to tweet to us at @CustSuccessBox.