Inside the Hamburg Customer Success Snack
When you step into a customer success business meeting in Hamburg, you quickly realise it’s not just about contracts or numbers, it’s about people. Behind the polished presentations and punctual handshakes are individuals who value trust, respect, and genuine connection.
This spirit defined the recent Customer Success Snack in Hamburg, where we gathered with professionals to share strategies, and build lasting customer relationships rooted in genuine value and trust.
The event was expertly moderated by Joshua Reimann, Sally Stoewe, Nadia Nicolai, Lisa Rentrop, Bernadette Hamann, Antonino Avarello and Julian Lindhorst, who helped guide conversations around:
- AI & Prompt Engineering
- CS Enablement and Scaled CS in 2025
- Upselling together with Sales & Marketing
- Conflict Management and Feedback
- Client Change management, Success Plans & tooling
- Communities, Playbooks, Automation, and Customer Engagement
- Value-based communication, Time to value & Stakeholder management
AI & Prompt Engineering
In our first session spearheaded by Joshua Reimann, and Sally Stoewe, we explored how AI,when prompted effectively,can not only unlock but expound the real efficiency in Customer Success.
The goal here is simple. Automate the repetitive, time-consuming tasks so teams can focus on high-value, human-first work like proactive outreach, success planning, and community building.
With smart implementation, AI boosts decision-making, speeds up execution, and helps process large volumes of data. Key areas of impact include workflow automation, customer insights, sales support, and faster development.
We highlighted practical tools already making a difference:
- ChatGPT, Perplexity for quick answers and content
- Zapier to automate workflow
- Gong, Jamie, Fathom for conversation analysis
- Planhat, Gainsight for customer health visibility
- Apollo for sales intelligence
- Data protection remains non-negotiable—use internal hubs and always ensure AI outputs are verifiable.
To get the most from AI, here’s a couple of tips we gathered from the session:
- Provide clear context (“You are a CS lead at X…”)
- Use meta-prompts to refine questions
- Focus on empathy and clarity in tone
- Reference real examples for accuracy
When used well, AI becomes more than just a tool, rather a teammate that helps CS teams move faster, smarter, and with more heart.
Start, Stop, Continue
| Start | Stop | Continue |
| Prompting better: Use clear, directive phrases (e.g., “take your time,” “don’t lie,” “explain your thoughts”). | Relying on AI to guess or fabricate information without verification. | Looking for golden nuggets—valuable insights and takeaways from interactions. |
| Teaching and refining prompt-writing internally as a communication skill. | Using vague or underdeveloped prompts and expecting accurate results. | Clarifying do’s and don’ts when using AI (e.g., no fabrications, no unsolicited suggestions). |
| Creating task-specific AI agents/CoPilots (e.g., for KPI discovery, meeting prep). | Assuming AI understands context without clear input or guidance. | Exploring useful AI resources like frameworks, books, podcasts, and newsletters. |
| Encouraging the use of AI over Google for context-aware meeting prep. | Depending on AI without human review or final judgment. | Reinforcing prompt experimentation to improve output quality. |
| Providing clients with prompts and scenario-based examples to maximize product use. | Treating AI as a one-size-fits-all solution. | Collecting and sharing best practices for internal AI usage. |
| Using AI as a communication coach to reformulate difficult messages. | Overloading prompts without clear structure or direction. | Encouraging cross-functional teams to apply AI in their workflows. |
| Encouraging small, digestible AI tasks for more accurate outcomes. | Ignoring data privacy and ethical considerations in AI use. | Keeping the focus on human-first, empathy-driven customer success. |
Resources
- Frameworks for prompt design and AI use.
- Books and courses on AI prompting and communication.
- Podcasts/newsletters sharing best practices and updates in AI usage.
Customer Success Enablement and Scaled CS in 2025
As customer bases grow, delivering high-touch success to every account is no longer feasible. At this session, headed by Nadia Nicolai, we explored how Enablement and Scaled Customer Success (CS) can work hand-in-hand to maintain impact and elevate the customer experience, without overextending teams.
We began by answering an important question: Why do these strategies matter now? The answer is clear—customer expectations remain high, even as teams stretch to support more accounts. The challenge is delivering meaningful value without relying solely on 1:1 interaction. That’s where well-designed enablement programs and scalable CS strategies come into play.
Here’s a few actionable tips:
- Enablement: Empowering Teams for Impact
A strong CS enablement function sets the foundation for success. World-class onboarding programs focus on speed, role-specificity, and real impact. CSMs should be equipped to contribute quickly through:
- Structured onboarding and training to reduce ramp-up time
- Playbooks that drive consistency across key motions like renewals, adoption, and QBRs
- Internal certifications to establish a shared standard of excellence
- Knowledge hubs for quick access to reusable content, case studies, and FAQs
Enablement is not a one-off event—it’s an ongoing process that evolves with customer needs and team maturity.
- Scaling CS Without Sacrificing Quality
Scaling doesn’t mean sacrificing personalization. Through a mix of digital programs and efficient engagement models, teams can maintain a high level of support:
- Automated onboarding flows and lifecycle messaging
- Customer communities that promote peer learning and reduce 1:1 dependency
- Webinars and on-demand events for broader knowledge-sharing
- CSM-lite models, combining technology with strategic human touchpoints
These approaches ensure long-tail and tech-touch segments still receive value—often in ways that feel more responsive and convenient.
- Measuring Success at Scale
To track progress, enablement teams should measure metrics like CSM productivity, content usage, and CSAT. Scaled CS teams can focus on health scores, engagement rates, self-service adoption, and expansion in lower-touch segments.
- Practice Cross-Functional Alignment
Successful execution relies on strong alignment across Product, Marketing, and Sales. Teams should share insights, co-create content, and maintain seamless customer handoffs to ensure a consistent and valuable customer journey.
Start, Stop, Continue
| Start | Stop | Continue |
| Building structured, role-specific onboarding programs | Relying solely on 1:1 CSM interactions | Standardizing CS processes through playbooks |
| Developing internal CS certifications to boost consistency and credibility | Treating enablement as a one-time event | Measuring the impact of enablement and scaled CS efforts |
| Investing in digital-first customer journeys | Underestimating the value of long-tail customers | Collaborating cross-functionally across Product, Sales, and Marketing |
| Fostering peer-to-peer customer communities | Working in silos | Hosting value-driven webinars and events |
Upselling together with Sales & Marketing
Customers don’t think in departments. Their experience is shaped by the consistency and relevance of your engagement, straight from onboarding to renewal. A coordinated approach to upselling ensures you’re not just offering more, but offering the right thing at the right time to the right person. During the session led by Lisa Rentrop, we summarized the strategies through a simple model.
Start,Stop,Continue
| Start | Stop | Continue |
| Train CS in lead qualification and discovery | Relying solely on manual tracking for CS-qualified opportunities | Joint QBRs with AMs and CS for key accounts |
| Introduce CS-qualified leads as a trackable concept | Frequent changes in AMs that disrupt upsell momentum | Campaign collaboration between Marketing and CS for current customers |
| Automate upsell detection using product usage data | Allowing ownership conflicts between Sales & Marketing | Monitoring product usage and using KPIs to prompt upsell conversations |
| Include CS in opportunity opening (once trained) | Expecting upsell from CS without proper enablement or incentives | Treating CS as trusted advisors to surface expansion needs |
| Shift lower-tier QBRs to tech-touch | Prioritizing new business over upsell/retention without ROI evaluation | Using CRM to track CS-qualified leads and surface insights |
| Run co-owned campaigns between CS & Marketing for expansion | Treating CS solely as a support function instead of a strategic growth driver | Performance reviews to identify upsell opportunities |
| Use testimonials and benchmarks to support upsell conversations | Ignoring customer feedback loops that could inform product and success strategies | Running ROI-tracked marketing campaigns for current customers |
As Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success align more closely to drive growth through upselling, maintaining that momentum often depends on how well we support clients through change. Whether it’s adopting a new product feature, expanding use cases, or navigating internal transitions, client change management becomes critical. This is where success plans and the right tooling come in, helping guide customers through change with clarity, structure, and confidence. Let’s look at how to make change management a seamless part of the customer journey.
Client Change management, Success Plans & tooling
One of the most discussed themes across teams is the reduction of manual tasks through automation. AI-powered tools like Gong.io help eliminate the need for tedious note-taking, allowing customer-facing teams to focus on strategic conversations. Tools like Zapier create seamless connections between systems, turning what used to be engineering-heavy tasks into self-serve automations.
Moderated by Julian Lindhorst, we delved into success plans that actually converts. There’s growing excitement around automated success plan generation. Whether supporting long-tail accounts or enterprise customers, the goal is the same: build momentum quickly with a clear, outcome-driven roadmap. Even high-paying customers don’t want to spend a week in workshops. If they can enable themselves through communities, academies, or on-demand content, they’ll do it, if those tools are easy to access and mapped to real outcomes.
But beware of the “Chinese whispers” effect, as when Sales to CS handoffs are unclear, customer goals get lost in translation. Without confirming those goals explicitly with the customer, even a beautiful success plan can become irrelevant. Every step should be linked to quantifiable value.
Start,Stop,Continue
| Start | Stop | Continue |
| Automating note-taking and task syncs using tools like Gong & Zapier | Relying on engineering/ops for simple process automations | Using AI tools to streamline onboarding and internal workflows |
| Confirming customer goals early and tying Success Plans to outcomes | Allowing unclear handoffs between Sales and CS | Offering on-demand, scalable enablement resources (webinars, academies) |
| Using data to auto-generate success plans tailored to segments/customers | Using success plans without aligning them to measurable value drivers | Investing in tooling that improves efficiency without sacrificing accuracy |
| Auditing data inputs across tools to ensure CRM and CS platform quality | Working with unreliable or outdated data | Collaborating cross-functionally to refine tech stack and reduce friction |
Building on the foundation of streamlined onboarding and outcome-driven success plans, the conversation naturally evolves to how we sustain and scale customer engagement beyond the first 90 days. That’s where Communities, Playbooks, Automation, and Customer Engagement come into play.
Communities, Playbooks, Automation, and Customer Engagement
A successful scaled CS program isn’t just about flashy tools or slick automation, it hinges on clear roles, tight alignment, and bulletproof fundamentals like trusted health scores as explained during the session with Sally Stoewe. Without confidence in these signals, every digital motion becomes guesswork, reactive instead of strategic.
Our conversation spotlighted a variety of impactful one-to-many formats: webinars, communities, email campaigns, pooled CSMs, and LMS-led learning. But execution matters more than ideas. Digital CS is too often handed off to junior staff, when it actually demands seasoned pros, people with product mastery, technical chops, and the communication skills to drive engagement at scale.
Start, Stop, Continue
| Start | Stop | Continue |
| Hosting webinars & self-service content as 1:many customer enablement formats, incl. inviting power users to contribute and celebrate their expertise. | Overengineering customer health scores—strike the balance between insightful but manageable. | Looking at the user(s) behind an account and speak to their individual recognition when celebrating milestones. |
| Using customer engagement tools like Intercom to enable scalable in-app engagement (e.g. chat function). | Treating every digital channel as their own silo, e.g. marketing with campaigns, product with newsletters, etc. | Building out help desk resources and keeping them updated (on a reasonable cadence—not every facelift needs a revamp of all resources). |
| Experimenting with semi-digital SBRs through templated dashboards, automated sharing via mail, and assigning health scores based on them. | Relying on tribe knowledge instead of documenting it in an accessible source (e.g., Confluence / Notion). | Establishing one source of truth about customers to ensure smooth handovers and prevent knowledge loss in case of a CSM’s departure. |
| Measuring improvements in customer health after interventions (e.g., through A/B testing in response to risks or not). | Taking GDPR as an excuse for not tracking usage metrics and satisfaction—do so while respecting individual user privacy. | — |
Now that we’ve explored the foundational elements of Customer Success and how to drive adoption and satisfaction, it’s crucial to shift our focus to the core of effective impact: Value.
Value-based communication, Time to value & Stakeholder management
Before you can communicate value or accelerate time to value, you need to understand one fundamental truth: not all stakeholders are who they seem to be. Throughout the session, with Julian Lindhorst, we elaborated that sometimes, the people you’re talking to aren’t the real decision-makers, they just want you to think they are.
This is where the challenge begins. Gatekeepers, office politics, and unclear decision-making lines can make it tough to get to the people who truly influence renewals and expansions. So what’s the solution? Multi-threading.
Multi-threading means building multiple relationships across different departments and levels, not just relying on a single Customer Success Manager to be the only voice. Get Sales involved, connect with different buyers, and protect yourself from risk if someone leaves the company.
Also, don’t underestimate the power of executive engagement. Setting up regular touchpoints like executive chairsides or steering committee meetings creates visibility at the highest levels, ensures alignment, and solidifies your position as a strategic partner.
Here’s a few tips:
- Don’t Just Chase Leaders, Engage End Users Too
While climbing the customer’s organizational ladder is important, the real magic happens when you engage the people using your product day-to-day. End users and practitioners might not have the final say, but their experience directly impacts renewal decisions.
Additionally, you should incorporate Executive Business Reviews (EBRs), but also take time to check in with these frontline users. They provide honest feedback and insights that leaders may never hear.
Inviting internal colleagues to join these conversations can also be a smart move—sometimes having a teammate play the “bad cop” during tough discussions (like managing expectations on feature requests) helps keep things honest and balanced.
- Defining and Proving Value Is an Ongoing Journey
Everyone talks about “value,” but quantifying it? That’s a different story. Depending on your product and customer, measuring impact can be tricky. Start by capturing a baseline value early in the customer lifecycle so you have a reference point for progress. Use surveys and other feedback tools to gauge business impact regularly. And also, don’t be afraid to steer stakeholders towards realistic, measurable goals and KPIs. Sometimes the perfect data isn’t available, but you can still show meaningful improvements.
- Benchmarking is The Secret Sauce to Communicating Value
Here’s something many overlook a lot, “benchmarking”. As a vendor, you have access to data across many customers. This allows you to compare your client’s performance against industry peers or similar customers, which can be a powerful validation of success.
If a customer hesitates to share their data for benchmarking (maybe because they don’t want competitors to see it), you can make participation a two-way street—no data shared, no benchmark access. This encourages transparency and helps everyone see the bigger picture.
Start, Stop, Continue
| Start | Stop | Continue |
| Multi-threading relationships across departments to reduce single points of failure | Relying solely on supposed decision-makers without verifying their actual influence | Holding formal Executive Business Reviews (EBRs) to align on goals and priorities |
| Involving executives early and regularly through chairsides and steering committee meetings | Conducting reviews only with leadership and ignoring end users’ perspectives | Capturing and communicating both qualitative and quantitative value regularly |
Join the next CS snack event, and get to know more customer success professional!
Related posts
Find your hyper-local community
Find your local community in Dublin, Amsterdam, Stockholm, Malmo, Copenhagen, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Ghent, Paris, Madrid, Zurich, Bucharest and more.
Copyright © 2024 - Customer Success Snack. All rights reserved.