Beyond Silos: Developing an Integrated Understanding of Customer Success Management and Service Recovery

Phenomenon: Customer Success Management (CSM) has rapidly evolved into a crucial practice for B2B firms, driven by the rise of subscription models, digital transformation, and increasingly demanding customers. CSM focuses on proactively ensuring customers realize the full value of their service engagements. However, service failures inevitably occur, necessitating effective service recovery (SR) to restore customer satisfaction and value.

Research Gaps: Despite the shared goal of maximizing customer value, CSM and SR are often treated as separate domains in both research and practice. This separation creates silos that can hinder a firm’s ability to effectively manage customers and continue relationships throughout the entire service lifecycle.

Research Purpose and Questions: Against this backdrop, this study seeks to advance the theoretical and managerial understanding of CSM and SR by investigating their conceptual and practical intersections. More specifically, we seek to answer the following research questions:

1. What are the theoretical overlaps between Customer Success Management and Service Recovery, and how do these intersections contribute to value creation and retention in service relationships?

2. To what extent do current managerial practices reflect an operational integration between CSM and SR?

Ultimately, we aim to develop a conceptualization for an integrated CSM-SR approach.

Methodology: We conduct this study by combining a systematic literature review with semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions. This multi-method design allows for a comprehensive exploration of the conceptual and practical intersections between CSM and SR. Our analysis is guided by the People, Process, and Performance (PPP) framework, focusing on employee roles, operational processes, and performance metrics related to both CSM and SR.

Expected Findings: We expect to identify key areas of overlap between CSM and SR, highlighting how these functions can be integrated to create more holistic and effective customer management systems. We anticipate that our findings will reveal specific opportunities for firms to:

• Redefine employee roles to enhance collaboration and shared responsibility between CSM and SR teams.

• Redesign operational processes to seamlessly blend proactive value creation with reactive service recovery efforts.

• Align performance metrics to encourage a unified focus on long-term customer success and value realization.

Expected Contributions: This study offers both theoretical and managerial contributions. It bridges the conceptual gap between CSM and SR, offering a novel integrated framework that views value creation and restoration as interconnected processes. By highlighting the interplay of proactive (CSM) and reactive (SR) mechanisms, this study extends our understanding of continuous value co-creation. Furthermore, it redefines CSM and SR roles as complementary functions within a unified service system. Managerially, this study provides actionable insights for integrating CSM and SR to build more resilient, value-driven systems. The findings highlight opportunities to reduce organizational silos and promote cross-functional collaboration, ultimately enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.