Why are customer success managers blamed for churn?

Churn, SaaS lingo for losing a customer, is an unavoidable and unwelcome part of the job of any customer success manager.

According to Recurly’s 2025 churn rate report, churn hits every industry.

• DTC subscription businesses, the report found, see higher customer churn rates than B2B businesses.
• Other consumer-facing industries like digital media, CPG, and retail see an average churn rate of 6.5%.
• On the lower end, Recurly noted that B2B companies, especially software and professional services, had average churn rates of 3.8%.

Churn can be caused by a lengthy list of factors (including the customers themselves), but ultimately CSMs are generally blamed for attrition by their company’s go-to-market teams.

The customer success leaders Revenue Brew spoke with, however (and, well, obviously), offered some pushback.

“They’re the ones who are with the client 90% of the time,” Colene Castillo, director of account management at SEO consulting firm, Cadence SEO, said. “The way I think of it with our own clients is that they’re our babies, so it’s my responsibility to keep them happy and make sure that they have everything they need. If I’m taking that responsibility on myself, everyone else is also going to put it on me if they cancel. Is it 100% our responsibility? No, I don't think so, but that is why.”

Stomach churning

CS leads say churn is complex and can be exacerbated by internal factors like strategy misalignment, poor communication, and undefined expectations. Churn can also be caused by external factors such as the economy or a client’s financial state or changing priorities.

Christina Kosmowski, CEO of IT infrastructure monitoring platform LogicMonitor, knows a thing or two about churn from her days as Slack’s COO and before that, CS lead at Salesforce. She addressed churn by integrating her customer success teams within the broader organization.

“One of the things that Salesforce did really well was thinking about customer success less as a department and more embedded into the DNA of the culture,” she said. “That came very much from the top down. It was in the core DNA, whereas I see a lot of companies view the customer success team as they’re the ones that are accountable to this. If that’s the case, that doesn’t work. The customer success managers are the facilitators of it and bringing the processes and the frameworks to bear, but they are not the ones solely accountable.”

Internal misalignment

Leaders say it’s crucial to have a well-defined customer success strategy throughout the whole sales organization so that clients don’t experience any confusion in the sales-to-CS handoff.

Shannon Nishi, director of customer success at customer engagement platform Customer.io said, “Having that clear strategy of who is our customer, what do we want to be providing to them, how do we think that we're providing customer value, and how are we going to continue to build on that—it’s so important for CSMs to have a strong grasp on because ultimately, they’re making decisions based on their understanding of that that have lasting impacts on the revenue and the way that the customer views us as a partner.”

Zoom out

Customer success managers can stress internal alignment, our experts said, and hold other teams accountable to help eliminate it as much as possible.

“The biggest thing is constantly tying back the day-to-day work to the big picture,” Nishi said. “For many CSMs, it’s really easy to get tied down in the day-to-day work and completing tasks, feeling like completing tasks or fulfilling individual requests is execution but losing sight of: What are the broader objectives? What are we working towards? How do we know and feel confident that the customer is getting value out of our platform and that we are always one step ahead?”