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
International Journal of Research in Marketing · 2023
Summary
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.
For your marketing
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.
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.
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.
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.
Research sources
Candidate study metadata and reported evidence were cross-checked against a direct publisher-page retrieval; the full article was not independently reviewed.