PostHog Handbook Library / CS and Onboarding

639 words. Estimated reading time: 3 min.

# Customer success

Customer Success Managers (CSMs) help customers get more value out of PostHog so they stick around. That means helping them onboard, train their team, work through support issues, find cost savings, and advocate for them inside PostHog.

### Principles

- Show, don't tell. Help customers prioritize their needs, deliver bad news early, and stay on top of their questions. Under promise, over deliver.
- Help them save money, even when it costs us short term. Long-term value matters more.
- Be their voice inside PostHog. Advocacy only works if you're willing to go to bat for them. Push product and engineering to understand why a feature matters.

### Who we manage

CSMs cover all customers above $20k ARR, whether they're long-time customers whose spend tipped over the threshold, new business handed over after closing, or customers new to PostHog on an enterprise plan.

### What we're aiming for

Our primary goal is retention, and the team target is 120% NRR (see how we work for how that's calculated and how it ties to bonus). We hit that by being genuinely helpful.

A big part of the work is spotting customers who need help before they ask. The loudest ones will find us anyway. The ones quietly struggling won't, and those are the ones where a well-timed outreach, a usage pattern in Vitally, or just reading between the lines on a ticket makes the difference.

No two accounts need the same thing. Some need deep ticket involvement, some need strategic time, some just need a catch-up call every quarter.

### The levers we have

- Establishing and building relationships. Be the person a customer Slacks first when something breaks or when they want to try something new. Getting started with customers covers the first 30 days; the lifecycle of CSM engagement covers how the relationship evolves after that.
- Implementation and setup. Getting the right PostHog setup for a customer's use case, and improving what's already there. Implementations evolve - the person who set things up may have left, the product changes, or they want something more mature. Getting this right matters because if the implementation is off, customers stop trusting the data, and that makes everything else harder. The foundation check and health check are the two main entry points.
- Technical troubleshooting and support. Debugging customer issues (the broken event, the missing identify call, the misconfigured flag) and answering "how do I do X." CSMs at PostHog are technical, so this is yours by default, and it's also one of the best ways to build a relationship - you show technical credibility, get a better read on how they're actually using PostHog, and connect with the engineers who own the implementation. Handling customer issues covers how we work through these.
- Finding and navigating friction. Spotting where a customer is trying to do something they expect PostHog to handle and can't. Sometimes the fix is implementation or troubleshooting, sometimes it's training or pointing them to a feature they didn't know about, sometimes it's a feature request or bug report on our end. When it's genuinely our gap, we give credits generously. Churn reasons lists the patterns we see most.
- Monitoring health. Health tracking is our main signal for who needs attention. Don't just look at the score, look at what changed.
- Cost optimization. We think about cost and value together - customers should be paying for what they're actually getting. Optimizing spend (over-ingestion, session replay you can sample down, products on a plan they aren't using) is one of the easiest ways to show you're genuinely helpful.
- Running trainings. Customer training sessions for a customer's team on a specific PostHog area, usually requested by the customer or proposed when we see a clear gap.
- Credit purchases. Helping customers buy ahead of usage they can predict, like annual deals, top-ups, and plan changes. Renewals covers the mechanics.

Canonical URL: https://posthog.com/handbook/cs-and-onboarding/customer-success

GitHub source: contents/handbook/cs-and-onboarding/customer-success.md

Content hash: `f756572034a13dda`