Acquisition and retention · Qualitative empirical theory-building study using a theories-in-use approach and interviews with B2B sales/customer-success executives across settings.
Customer Success Management, Customer Health, and Retention in B2B Industries
Bryan Hochstein, Clay M. Voorhees, Alexander B. Pratt, Deva Rangarajan, Duane M. Nagel, Vijay Mehrotra (2023). Customer Success Management, Customer Health, and Retention in B2B Industries. International Journal of Research in Marketing. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijresmar.2023.09.002
Plain-English take
Customer-success management complements sales and service by proactively increasing realized customer value. Customer health is a formative metric combining relationship quality, product usage, and value realization; managers use it to manage relationships and reduce churn. Implementation is not uniformly successful and depends on short- and long-term organizational contingencies.
How much weight to give this
2/5 Evidence needs cautious interpretation
The 1–5 evidence-check score is a practical reading aid, not a formal peer review or a probability that a conclusion is true. It combines design strength (2 points), sample reporting (1), comparison/control clarity (1), and how much of the paper could be checked (1). Access affects how confidently this directory can assess a study, not the study's underlying quality. Blinding is reported separately because it is not relevant to every design.
Qualitative empirical theory-building study using a theories-in-use approach and interviews with B2B sales/customer-success executives across settings.
Interviews with 26 B2B sales executives, spanning multiple B2B industries and customer-success implementations.
Check comparison conditions and analysis in the paper.
Publisher record checked; full-text methods were not verified.
Double-blind? Blinding details were not established from the checked publisher page.
Research question
What the authors investigated
What does customer success management, customer health, and retention in b2b industries show about customer behavior or marketing outcomes?
Design
Qualitative empirical theory-building study using a theories-in-use approach and interviews with B2B sales/customer-success executives across settings.
Sample and setting
Interviews with 26 B2B sales executives, spanning multiple B2B industries and customer-success implementations.
Reported result
What the study found
Customer-success management complements sales and service by proactively increasing realized customer value. Customer health is a formative metric combining relationship quality, product usage, and value realization; managers use it to manage relationships and reduce churn. Implementation is not uniformly successful and depends on short- and long-term organizational contingencies.
This is a paraphrase of the source. Check the original paper for definitions, estimates, statistical uncertainty and analysis details.
Scope and transfer
Limitations to keep in view
The interview-based, theory-building design establishes mechanisms and contingencies but does not estimate a causal retention lift; the 26-executive, cross-industry sample and nascent customer-success setting constrain statistical generalization and leave quantitative validation for future work. Full-text methods and correction history were not independently checked.
Possible founder application
Use this paper as evidence about customer success management, customer health, and retention in b2b industries in the stated context; compare its population, treatment and outcome with your own decision.
Evidence access
Publisher page; full-text availability varies and was not established.
Candidate study metadata and reported evidence were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; the full article was not independently reviewed.
If only an abstract or metadata was available, the profile is limited to claims supported there. A paper's paywall does not change its evidentiary status, but it limits what we can substantiate from accessible text.