Focusing on your professional development is crucial to stay up-to-date with emerging Customer Success trends and industry developments. And whether you’re someone just venturing into customer success or looking to enhance your career- a customer success certification might be exactly what you need.
Customer success certifications can be immensely valuable to your career by helping you hone your skills, expand your professional network, negotiate a higher salary, and much more. If you’re wondering what the best certifications for customer success managers are, you’re in the right place. In this post, we’ll discuss some of the finest customer success certifications so you can choose the best one for you.
Best Customer Success Certifications
SuccessCOACHING
A SuccessHackers’s venture managed by industry leaders such as Todd Eby, James Scott, Andrew Marks, and Aaron Thompson, SuccessCOACHING offers multiple workshops and online training programs for customer success professionals. The course is led by trainers who have 60+ years of combined experience in the customer success space. They teach CSMs best practices that enable them to engage, manage, and retain customers. Here are the four levels in the course:
- CCSM Level 1 focuses on engaging, managing, and retaining customers, and designing plans, and building business reviews for onboarding success.
- CCSM Level 2 curriculum focuses on refining the ability to manage multiple accounts and internal relationships.
- CCSM Level 3 focuses on developing skills that you’ll need to become a strategic customer success manager.
- CCSM Level 4 curriculum provides you with the skills you’ll need to drive portfolio or account expansion
You’ll also learn how to manage time effectively, deal with customer discontent, NPS for customer success, and communication management.
TriTuns Customer Success Training Program
The Tri Tuns Customer Success Training Program is for early-career professionals, CS leaders, and customer success teams to help them improve their skills. It’s excellent for individuals who prefer learning at their own pace with self-study. It’s also 100% online and highly interactive.
CS Mastermind is another professional development program that enhances skills via online training, group coaching calls, instructor-led sessions, and more.
The online program includes 3-month access to the course. You’ll get access to fast-paced, problem-solving workshops. You’ll also get a certificate that’s shareable on your LinkedIn.
Cisco Customer Success Manager
Cisco’s Customer Success Manager Certification will help you drive business outcomes and become a trusted advisor who’s continuously delivering value to your customers. You can identify adoption barriers, validate solutions, interpret customer usage data, help customers increase renewals, implement new frameworks, and cultivate better sales opportunities across the customer lifecycle.
This course can also help you prepare for the Cisco Customer Success Manager (DTCSM) exam. To earn the recognized Cisco certification, which is valid for three years, you need to pass the 820-605 DTCSM exam which tests discovery, benchmarking, evaluation, and enablement. The program offers experiential learning based on use cases, intuitive content, best-practice procedures, and more. You’ll also learn about key phrasings and ideas that are essential to succeed as a CSM.
PracticalCSM’s Certified Customer Success Management Professional (CCSMP) Customer Success Certification
The CCSMP is a high-value practical training program. It answers important questions such as the what, why, and how of customer success. The course provides tools that will ensure high-quality task performance while improving efficiency and productivity. Here are some of its topics:
- What customer success means and why it’s important
- Understanding the value customer success provides to the CSM and customer
- Benefits of a combined framework using skills and knowledge
- Customer engagement
- Consultative techniques that will help understand customer’s initiative and their needs
- Helping customers manage change effectively
- Help customers report, measure, manage, and track value across the organization
- Report and measure customer success activities for improved customer advocacy
The CCSMP certification is based on the Practical CSM framework that works across the entire customer lifecycle.
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Customer Success Certificate Program by Portland State University
The Customer Success Certificate Program by Portland State University is a 12-week program that offers insights into the best practices, key fundamental principles, and examples of customer success. The program is a mix of weekly live instructor-led sessions with independent structured learning. It also allows guest experts to share their real-world insights and experiences.
Upon completing the program, you will get a professional certificate as a Certified Customer Success Manager (CCSM). There’s ample student interaction for professionals in any industry looking to become a customer success professional. On completion, you’ll know:
Success League’s CSM Certification Program – 15 Classes
With The Success League’s CSM certification program, you’ll have everything you need to grow as a CSM successfully. The 15-class series includes:
- Developing deep-level account plans
- Creating and managing account portfolios
- Onboarding customers effectively,
- Conducting business reviews for internal or external purposes
- Managing a customer life cycle
Tackling difficult conversations.
One thing to note is that these are live, instructor-led classes that require an active internet connection for an hour each week. But, after each session, you’ll get access to the tools you can start using immediately to apply your new skills.
Success League’s CS Leadership Certification Development Program
The SuccessLeague’s CS Leadership 12-week program is an online instructor-led training covering valuable customer success leadership topics. With a blend of practical activities and learning exercises beyond the classroom, the program provides significant value to its participants. You’ll get in-depth knowledge of team metrics, goals, hiring, customer journey, and more.
Customer Success Masterclass by WnTD
The Customer Success Masterclass by WnTD is a combination of three levels Let’s cover each level so you can see what each one offers:
- Customer Success Master class Level 1 covers the fundamentals like strategic thinking and customer engagement. Some core aspects discussed include onboarding fundamentals, customer success metrics, managing churn risks, renewals, and expansion techniques.
- Customer Success Master class Level 2 covers managing customer health and customer portfolio, internal advocacy, customer education, and QBR management.
- Customer Success Master class Level 3 is all about effective sales to CS kickoff calls, renewals and expansion hacks, managing churn risks, enhancing product adoption, creating customer success plans, and more.
CCSR Certified Customer Success Representative by AA ISP
The CCSR by AA-ISP accreditation board is established to maintain a set of competencies for customer success representatives to meet. Some of the core areas in the program include onboarding meetings, customer meetings, objection handling, communication skills, and more. The main measures include reliable testing, conflict of interest management, and impartiality. There are specific requirements you’ll need to take the course. They include completing one of the following:
- Minimum of 32 hours of customer success instructor-led training. For example, college sales programs, internships, or boot camps
- Six months or more experience in customer support, customer service, or sales development
Graduate Certificate in Customer Success Management by RMIT
Gain the skills, tools, and knowledge required to keep and manage customers with RMIT’s CSM Graduate Certificate. You can drive customer value, thereby increasing company value with top-class approaches in customer success strategy. And you can accelerate your career in customer success management.
The course teaches customer value strategies, understanding customer data, increasing customer longevity and loyalty. You can also track, predict, and optimize customer behavior with the knowledge you’ll gain from this course. Plus, you’ll learn how to communicate with stakeholders more efficiently and offer better experience designs.
Customer Success Academy’s CS Course
The Customer Success Academy’s CS Course is for customer success managers or personnel looking to find a new CS career in the SaaS industry. A SaaS company with a stellar customer success team is like a “sinking boat” and that’s what this course swears by. There are certifications for individuals and teams.
You can pick any area based on your experience, interest, and education. Some of them mentioned are account management, technical services, team management, support engineer, program management, experience design, and more. These courses come with project plans, private group forums, email lessons, and more. You can also claim your free customer success badges to add to your LinkedIn profile.
Customer Success Manager: Fundamentals to Your CSM Career by Udemy
The CSM course by Udemy helps you understand the role of a customer success manager, and it’ll prepare you for a CSM job interview. The course content includes the basics of customer success management, the purpose, people, cultural aspect to it, important customer success terminology, and keys to becoming a successful CSM. You’ll also learn how to reduce time to value, increase initial victory, and reduce churn to an extent. And you’ll learn about customer profiling and customer success gaps. The course is open to anyone who wants to be a CSM.
Certified Customer Experience Professional (CCXP) program by CXPA
The Certified Customer Experience Professional CCXP program offers professional recognition to individuals with in-depth knowledge of customer experience. CXPA is an independent professional credential. The main benefits of the course are:
- Provides a framework for advancement
- Validates expertise and credibility
- Increases how the CSM can be marketed
- Shows commitment to improve
The core competencies required include customer-centric culture, experience design, innovation, measurement, ROI, metrics, organizational adoption, and customer insight.
Customer Success- How to Exceed Your Customers Expectations by Udemy
This Customer Success course by Chuck Wall focuses on understanding customer expectations. It’ll help you deliver value to your customers and improve customer loyalty. The course comprises video lectures, downloadable resources, and tools. You will also learn how customers perceive value and what their real needs are. You can also understand how small changes impact customer expectations to loyalty.
Managing Difficult Customers by ICMI
This course by International Customer Management Institute (ICMI) is for dealing with difficult customers. The certification is great to add to your portfolio when you are looking at retaining customers, especially. There are five modules in the course. They include difficult customers, key considerations while knowing one, techniques that help, managing escalations, and stress management. You will also learn concepts such as active listening, paraphrasing, and more frameworks.
Gainsight’s Pulse Plus
Pulse+ is a premium industry-grade eLearning certification that’s offered as an annual training subscription. You get access to top-class content and information from thought leaders. The course is designed to help industry professionals map out their everyday challenges and understand customer objectives better.
Customer Success for Impact by Revenue Academy
To generate recurring revenue for the company, the Customer Success for Impact course equips CSMs (Customer Success Managers) with the skills they need to add recurring value to their customer interactions. Regarding the customer journey, CSMs will learn the crucial moments, how to apply customer-centric principles at each moment, and how to develop and grow their clientele. CSMs and Account Managers will be well-equipped to proactively manage and expand their accounts after completing this course.
This course is ideal for CSMs and account managers responsible for customer account management and account growth. The course comes in 8 hours of live instruction, one 2-hour session per week, delivered through Zoom video conference. You also get exclusive access to blueprints, videos, and exercises. It is an industry-recognized certification course with a maximum limit of 25 learners.
CS Training by Growth Molecules
Join one of the hybrid learning CS training programs by Growth Molecules, where weekly live, instructor-led sessions provide opportunities to broaden your SaaS knowledge beyond your own industry and collaborate with others in engaging, interactive activities and accredited course content.
- A Growth Molecules Certified Instructor will lead six weekly 1-hour virtual live sessions.
- Supporting live sessions and independent practice are more than 24 micro-asynchronous learning activities.
- Additional Course Curriculum Resources, Guides, and Materials
- CSA & Growth Molecules Accredited Course Certificate Interactive & Guided Collaborative Instruction Knowledge Checkpoints & Final Certification Assessment Exam
It is a 6-weekly certification course for CS professionals wherein you will get the foundational level training on CS. It will aid CSMs, and other customer-facing roles gain the professional skills necessary to develop and manage customer relationships, from mastering the art of nojitsu to feeling comfortable having challenging customer conversations.
Conversation Skills for Customer Success by Corporate Visions
A skills-development program called Conversation Skills for Customer Success is based on research in decision science. Your customer success managers will be able to communicate value in the most crucial commercial conversations with your current customers thanks to this skills training system. Customer success occupies a special place in the business world. They serve as the voice of the customer and, perhaps, the engine of sustained revenue growth.
However, your customer success team needs research-backed conversational abilities to realize that potential fully. Your customer success managers will learn a scientifically proven method for reducing churn, maintaining executive altitude, securing renewals, and raising total contract value with Corporate Visions’ Conversation Skills for Customer Success.
Customer Success Foundations by Aspireship
If you are looking for growth as a CS professional, the Customer Success Foundations Certification by Aspireship will help you to achieve this endeavor. The course duration is of 20 hours. It is a highly interactive, on-demand curriculum involving engaging interviews and hands-on exercises. The course has been designed to complete the learning process in as little as 5 hours per week for four weeks or less. You have the flexibility to learn at your schedule with compatibility across mobile and computer devices.
On top of this, Aspireship even provides job placement opportunities in the USA and Canada for program graduates. Isn’t that amazing? During the course, you will learn about:
- Customer lifecycle
- Productive engagement
- Onboarding
- Running business reviews
- How to become a top performer, etc.
Customer Success Training by Glide Consulting LLC
Glide Consulting provides innovative answers to problems affecting customer success through Customer Success Training. The company works with its clients to define and bring clarity to each component of the Glide 4 Ps framework, which stands for People, Purpose, Process, and Platform.
Nils Vinje, a seasoned professional in the field of customer success, founded and currently serves as the CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of Glide.
Some of the notable things that you stand to achieve from this certification course include:
- Deliver predictability in customer expansions and renewals through consulting.
- Take your leadership to the next level with a personalized coaching program created just for you by a subject-matter specialist and certified coach.
- Give your team the training they need to develop strategic relationships with your clients that will make you successful in the long run.
Bottom Line
These are the best customer success certification or training courses you can take to become a certified CSM. They’ll help you improve your project management skills, boost your resume, improve chances of growing within the company, and more.
The potential for a certified customer success manager vast. You can amplify your SaaS companies’ subscriptions and develop the aptitude to face customer success challenges. You will also identify ways to establish strong business ties with customers and enhance your retention aspects while reducing churn.
Kruthan Appanna is a Customer Success Analyst with 5 years of experience. Passionate about leveraging data-driven insights to drive customer satisfaction and retention. Skilled in building strong client relationships and providing strategic solutions.
Published June 11, 2021, Updated February 24, 2024
