Where Does All the Time Go? A Candid Look at How CSMs Really Spend Their Day

Every week, I hear Customer Success leaders making the same case:

“We need more headcount.”

And sometimes, they’re absolutely right. The demands on Customer Success teams are higher than ever, more customers, more complexity, more responsibilities that bleed into Sales, Product, and Support.

But before we make the case for more people, we have to ask an uncomfortable question:

👉 Do you actually know where your team’s time is going today?

Most leaders don’t.

They can tell you their ratio of CSMs to customers, or the number of accounts in a given segment, but few can show you a true top-down and bottom-up analysis of how their team actually spends their time.

And that’s the problem.

Not All Customers Are Created Equal

Let’s start with the obvious, every customer is different, and not every account requires the same level of attention.

New customers (especially in onboarding or their first year) need more frequent and guided touchpoints. They’re forming habits, building trust, and setting the tone for the entire partnership.

At-risk customers require deep engagement and strategic focus, often from your most senior team members.

Mature, healthy customers, on the other hand, may be able to thrive with lighter, scaled engagement models.

Seasonality also matters. Some industries peak in certain months (think retail during Q4 or education in late summer), which naturally shifts workload.

And if your CSMs are responsible for commercial motions, renewals, expansions, or upsells, their workload ebbs and flows depending on where customers are in their buying cycle.

So before we assume the team is “at capacity,” it’s worth understanding how much of their time is spent on the right things and with the right customers.

The Invisible Time Suck

Even with the best segmentation strategy, time gets lost in the cracks of our operations.

Think about how much time your team spends:

• Hunting for answers because documentation is outdated, incomplete, or nonexistent.

  
  

• Rebuilding data that lives across 20 different systems just to prepare a QBR or forecast.

  
  

• Creating insights from scratch instead of using shared, automated dashboards.

These are not “value-add” activities, they’re symptoms of operational debt. And that debt compounds over time.

The result? Teams feel overworked not necessarily because they have too many customers, but because they’re spending too much time navigating inefficiency.

Before You Ask for More, Optimize What You Have

Headcount is expensive and once you add it, it’s hard to take it back.

That’s why responsible staffing starts with visibility and optimization. You can’t scale what you don’t understand.

Before you submit that request to Finance or HR, do these five things first:

1️⃣ Conduct a Time Audit

Track how your CSMs actually spend their time for 2–4 weeks. Don’t assume you know.

Categorize activities by type (onboarding, renewal prep, reporting, meetings, internal coordination, admin, etc.). The data will surprise you and it will become your strongest argument for change.

2️⃣ Segment by Customer Profile

Map time spent across customer segments by ARR, lifecycle stage, and health. Are your most tenured customers getting the same level of engagement as brand-new ones? Are high-risk accounts receiving enough proactive attention? This helps identify imbalance and misaligned effort.

3️⃣ Identify Operational Gaps

Where are your teams losing time due to process, tools, or data issues? If they’re spending hours pulling insights from five platforms, you don’t have a headcount issue, you have an efficiency issue.

4️⃣ Redefine “High Touch”

High touch doesn’t mean high frequency. It means high impact.

Recalibrate your engagement model by value, not volume. Some accounts may need fewer but more strategic conversations; others may benefit from scalable, tech-enabled outreach.

5️⃣ Run a Capacity Model

Once you have the data, quantify it. Build a capacity model that maps workload to account load, customer stage, and time allocation. This allows you to show Finance exactly why you need additional people or prove where optimization could unlock more capacity.

The Goal: Responsible Growth

After this exercise, you might still find that you need more people but now, you’ll know exactly why, and you’ll have the data to prove it.

You’ll also uncover operational bottlenecks, process inefficiencies, and automation opportunities that make your current team more effective.

That’s how you scale intelligently.

That’s how you staff responsibly.

So before you ask for more… Ask where the time is going.