The Customer Success Community: An Exploration of Nonfirm Epistemic Communities and Their Influence on a New Sales Practice

Abstract

Customer success (CS) management is being implemented across global business markets. CS management is unique, as it exists within a broader CS community of professionals who actively support the new customer management practice. However, academic research has yet to investigate nonfirm epistemic communities (i.e., knowledge communities related to a specific domain) that support CS management and how they differ across geographic settings in ways that may affect the overall practice of CS management. To address this gap, the authors investigate how the CS community is implemented across countries that vary in their levels of uncertainty avoidance. The authors focus on the CS community and its impact on CS management operational factors that represent people, process, and performance factors of CS management. Following a phenomenological approach, interviews from the United States, Brazil, and Portugal drive the findings and indicate different levels of reliance on the external CS community to guide internal CS management operational factors. This research contributes by establishing the importance of the CS community and by uncovering insights based on CS managers’ perceptions of the CS community and its effect on CS management operational factors. The authors offer salient insights into how managers can optimize CS management operational factors, and they provide a discussion of future research topics.