The App Collective Episode 42
Customer Success
Hello App Collective. Today is another free episode because we have a guest contributor, Malvika Rathi, as most of you know as Mals, the Customer Success Manager from Social Snowball. She explains what makes a good customer success manager for Shopify apps today.
But before we get into it, I wanted to talk about ..da da daaaaaa The Buffalo Bills again. DON’T yawn; I promise to make this relevant.
Okay, so if you follow American football, the Kansas City Chiefs have been undefeated all season long. Their head coach is none other than the legend Andy Reid. Andy led the Philadelphia Eagles for many years before moving to the Chiefs. This is where the current coach of the Buffalo Bills, Sean McDermott, enters the chat because he worked under Andy when they were both with the Eagles.
Last night, the Bills defeated the Chiefs in one of the best games of the NFL football season to date. I often say to “model your masters,’ and this is a perfect example of the student becoming the teacher.
You currently might be the person handling all of your customer service inquiries but at some point, you (the coach) will need to pass the torch onto to the next person to handle one of the most important roles in your app’s organization. Here’s hoping you can find someone like Mals. In the meantime, she’s certainly set you up for thinking successfully about what that should look like now or in the future when it’s time.
Okay, see there was a tie in there. Now, let’s get into it!
What’s inside:
A wonderful guest post on what makes a good CS team for Shopify apps today
Changing Landscape of Customer Success in Shopify: How to be a Killer CSM in 2025
Gone are the days when Customer Success used to be considered a cost centre or when CSMs would just firefight all day long. Today, customer success plays a pivotal role in growing, retaining, and driving product adoption for your Shopify app. Read on to discover what skills and best practices can help you ace as CSM -
The art of building relationships
Merchants have a million things going on to successfully run their business. Your app is just a cog in the wheel and there are probably 10 other apps in their stack that are competing for attention.
With limited time to spare, you have to make sure you’re delivering true value to the customer. Simply conducting a weekly check-in call or dropping a “how’s it going” slack out-of-the blue does not fare well. In addition to this, your messaging also is largely dependent on who you’re chatting with.
Minimalism and value creation are the key. If you’re talking to the founder of the brand, centre the conversation around ROI from your app. If you’re talking to someone who operates the app every day for the brand, talk about the mundane tasks you help automate or how you make their job easier. If it’s someone who leads their tech initiatives, discuss how your app can integrate with the rest of the stack for a seamless end-user experience. Concise and targeted messaging will demonstrate to the merchant that you are cognizant of their time and are committed towards achieving mutual success. Also, I’ve seen an astonishing number of CSMs, especially at the beginning of their career, get too serious. I want to remind you all that it never hurts to slide in a meme occasionally or chat about mutual interests with the customer. We’re humans after all and we love to bond.
Leveraging the right data
A lot of CSMs still focus on metrics like NPS and QBRs which are outdated. Feature adoption and user events are far more valuable in measuring customer health. Among these, you have to prioritise which events and features make the most sense for a merchant of a particular scale.
I’ve found Mantle to be extremely useful in gathering all the critical data points I need in a single place. Previously, I’d spend a great deal of time impersonating and keeping tabs on my customers to lead them in the right direction. Now, all of that can be automated using Mantle’s emails and flows - this has saved me countless hours to focus on things that matter more - which is business strategy and user experience. Shoutout to them for building a thoughtful and easy-to-use product!
Building solid technical skills
As a CSM, it’s a no-brainer that you have to know the product inside out. In addition to this, spare some time to play around to explore the capabilities of the ecosystem to discover what are the use cases that can be supported directly or with simple tweaks and workarounds.
You should also have a deep understanding of how your partner integrations work, and identify common bugs and patterns which need to be addressed at the product level. Not every issue has to take up engineering time. You could start off with something as basic as understanding what the different error responses mean and what’s to be done on the client side to fix it.
With AI enabling CS teams to be more efficient at their work, it’s never been easier to learn. The more you reduce your dependencies, the faster you can help customers and achieve a better success rate.
Working cross-functionally with the team
A high churn rate is definitely one of the biggest problems that a lot ofShopify apps face and it isn’t necessarily a CS issue. It could be poor UX, unrealistic expectations set by the sales team, incomplete implementation, or the goals weren’t aligned properly during the onboarding process. As a CSM, you have to dissect and understand where things are going wrong and communicate with the appropriate team to bring about changes.
At a personal level, I found brainstorming with the product team a very rewarding and fulfilling experience. First, it was fun to see your ideas take shape but the biggest gift of all is the drastic reduction in questions and support tickets from implementing small changes. There’s always room for improvement and if you notice something could be better - you should voice it!
Last but not least, go above and beyond every chance you get! Seize the opportunity to become the knight in shining armour for merchants – not only will this help your business but also give you a good reputation in the industry.
Cheers!
Mals Customer Success Manager
Social Snowball
WOWOWOWOWOWOWOW that was fantastic, right?
Hope you enjoyed this week’s episode! Please follow Mals on LinkedIn or X and I’ll see you next week!
Deb