EXPRESS: The Customer Success Community: an Exploration of Non-firm 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 non-firm epistemic communities (i.e., knowledge 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, we investigate how the CS Community is implemented across countries that vary in their levels of uncertainty avoidance. We 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 our findings and indicate different levels of reliance on the external CS Community to guide internal CS Management operational factors. Our 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. We also offer salient insights into how managers can optimize CS Management operational factors, as well as provide a discussion of future research topics.