A spontaneous churn. An unforeseen ramp-up. A silent customer who goes dark. All of these occurrences surprise Customer Success Managers (CSMs) not because they weren't paying attention, but because they were overdepending on gut instinct rather than actionable intelligence.

In the fast-paced SaaS world we live in today, gut is no longer enough. CSMs must transition from reactive to proactive by embracing customer intelligence rather than speculation.

The Trouble with Intuition

Customer Success Managers tend to be empathetic and intuitive people. They learn over time about customer behavior—reading between the lines of email, noticing tone shifts on the phone, and sensing that something is off.

But intuition is anecdotal. It's founded on thin signals, personal experience, and frequently biased interpretation. That may be sufficient with five accounts. But with fifty? Or five hundred?

Here's what intuition lacks:

• Subtle signals like reduced usage of products or increased numbers of support tickets
• Cross-functional feedback by product, sales, or marketing
• Changes in stakeholder involvement that are not readily apparent
• When CSMs are acting on speculation instead of data, they are likely to respond too late—and worse, never.

Enter Customer Intelligence: The Power of Signals

Customer intelligence is all about taking raw data and transforming it into real-time insights that enable CSMs to make better decisions sooner. It's not dashboards and health scores. It's delivering the right signals at the right time so teams can take action before something becomes a problem.

Active Indicators That Matter:

• Decrease in product adoption in the past 14 days
• Decrease in stakeholder engagement post QBR
• Negative affect in support interactions
• Account growth slowing down after initial growth
• Stakeholder turnover revealed on LinkedIn

When such knowledge is centralized, contextualized, and in real time refreshed, CSMs have something intuition cannot provide: clarity, predictability, and lead time.

Real-Life: Signals vs. Surprises

Surprise: An expensive customer churns suddenly. The CSM learns on the exit call that the primary champion had departed two months prior.

Signal: A notification on the platform alerts the CSM when stakeholder activity declines and product usage drops for the same week—providing an opportunity for a check-in before the problem grows.

Surprise: An eleventh-hour expansion deal hits a snag. The purchaser is shocked at gaps in products never before mentioned.

Signal: NPS survey and support ticket product feedback revealed repeat pain points that the CSM could address during the QBR.

From Firefighting to Forecasting

Transitioning to a signal-based method changes the job of a CSM from reactive fixer to strategic partner. Anticipating needs and pre-empting issues means that you:

• Build customer trust and advocacy
• Enable expansion prospects
• Reduce churn and last-minute escalations
• Deliver measurable business outcomes

In short: you stop firefighting and start forecasting.

The Intelligence Stack for CSMs

To facilitate this shift, CSMs need more than health scores. They need an intelligence stack tailored to their process

Customer Data Platform (CDP): Combines signals from usage, CRM, support, etc.

Signal Detection Engine: Detects anomalies, trends, and risk

Proactive Alerts: Delivered via channels CSMs are already using (Slack, email, in-app)

Contextual Planning: Use the signal to base next-best-action recommendations on

AI Assistants: Help summarize signals and recommend proactive messaging

Tools such as Preemptly are making this happen—translating scattered signals into directed action.

The Future Is Signal-Driven Good CSMs don't react better—they look ahead. They operate with anticipatory awareness rather than hindsight analysis. They steer with clarity rather than confusion. The distinction between a churned customer and a champion is not always sensational. Oftentimes, it is just one missed cue. The future of Customer Success is not a guess. It's insight. And it begins today.