This is a research-evidence companion to our guides on customer success in HubSpot and the HubSpot customer success workspace. Start there for the operating playbook; this piece checks how much peer-reviewed evidence actually backs the function.
Customer success management ROI (return on investment) claims like “107% ROI within 3 years” circulate widely and cite a real methodology. The academic research meant to independently prove CSM improves retention started years behind the industry’s own growth, and its founding call to action admitted the evidence didn’t exist yet. What’s been published since is real, but it’s thinner, more case-based, and more vendor-adjacent than the size of the CSM industry’s ROI claims would suggest.
A Function That Grew Faster Than the Evidence For It
Hilton, Hajihashemi, Henderson, and Palmatier’s 2020 paper in Industrial Marketing Management, open access, tracks the CSM job title’s growth from fewer than 5,000 roles in 2015 to more than 30,000 by 2018. In the same paper, the authors count only 7 academic articles that had specifically addressed “Customer Success” up to that point, far below the ratio they’d expect for a management concept of this size and adoption speed.
That gap between industry adoption and academic scrutiny is not a minor footnote. It is stated directly in the field’s own founding research agenda: Hochstein, Rangarajan, Mehta, and Kocher’s 2020 editorial in the Journal of Service Research, co-authored with Gainsight’s Nick Mehta and GE Digital’s David Kocher, states: “To date, no scholarly article has investigated performance outcomes of CS activities at either the organization or individual level.” That sentence was published the same year CSM job postings were accelerating past 30,000.
What the Case Evidence Actually Shows
The strongest evidence available before 2023 was case-based, not experimental. The most detailed example, from the same 2020 editorial, is GE Digital: after a 2015 internal study found customers were at risk of not renewing because they didn’t understand the value of GE Digital’s expanding IoT product line, the company built a CSM function that today monitors 2,600 customer relationships across 25 objective health metrics (product usage, optimization, technical issues, customer satisfaction). The reported result: churn in small accounts declined, and “fewer explosions” occurred within large enterprise accounts.
That’s a real, specific, well-documented case, on a business doing $1.2 billion in annual IoT revenue at the time. It is also exactly what it’s labeled in the source paper: a “mini case study” offered as “initial evidence,” not a controlled comparison against a non-CSM baseline. Hilton et al.’s companion paper adds a useful caution here too, citing a Twilio-Uber case where a customer achieving genuine value-in-use with the product still didn’t guarantee retention absent proactive CSM engagement, evidence that value alone isn’t the whole mechanism, which cuts against reading any single success case as the whole story.
What the ROI Numbers Actually Rest On
Most teams that try to calculate the ROI of customer success reach for one of two figures that come back again and again. Forrester’s widely-cited claim, delivered as 107% ROI within three years, comes from a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study built on a composite, hypothetical $1 billion firm with 5,000 accounts, modeled to a net present benefit of $26.1 million against roughly $12.6 million in setup and program cost, with retention (5% improvement), cross-sell and upsell revenue (6% increase per account), and reduced support costs cited as the main drivers. TEI is a real, named analyst methodology, not an invented number. It’s also, by design, a composite model rather than a measurement across a sample of real companies, and the Forrester page presenting it doesn’t disclose whether a customer success vendor commissioned it, unlike most Forrester TEI studies, which say “Commissioned by [vendor]” directly in the title.
The second figure, an estimated $11 million revenue impact and $1 to $5 million in annual operational savings, comes from a whitepaper by Mainstay, produced for Gainsight, a company that sells customer success software. That doesn’t make the number false. It makes it a vendor-adjacent business case rather than independent evidence, exactly the distinction our research on the “208% more revenue” sales-marketing alignment stat applied to a different, equally repeated figure.
The First Real Empirical Study
The most substantial academic response arrived three years later. Hochstein, Voorhees, Pratt, Rangarajan, Nagel, and Mehrotra’s 2023 paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing is the field’s most developed attempt to move past case examples. Its central contribution is treating customer health, the metric CSM teams live and die by, as a formative construct built from three distinct dimensions: relationship quality, product usage, and customer value realization, rather than one number pulled from a single data source. That reframing matters operationally: a health score that only tracks product usage, or only tracks NPS, is measuring one-third of what the research says actually constitutes customer health.
This is the paper most future meta-analyses would need as an anchor, but it’s worth being precise about what’s settled and what isn’t: it establishes a rigorous way to measure customer health, which is a real advance over ad hoc scoring, but the full-text isn’t available through open channels we could independently verify for this article, so treat its specific effect sizes as something to confirm before citing rather than something we’re asserting here.
Why the Evidence Gap Persists
A few structural reasons the research lags the practice, and why the field still lacks agreed best practices for isolating the roi of customer success from general account activity, drawn from both papers above:
- Construct confounding. CSM activity is hard to cleanly separate from general account management, relationship management, and CRM practices in most datasets, so isolating the CSM-specific effect is a genuine methodological problem, not just a lack of interest.
- Reporting structure varies wildly. The 2020 editorial notes CSM reports to the CEO at some firms (Xactly), sales at others (Hootsuite), operations (Workday), or customer experience (Cisco), with no agreed answer on which structure performs best, which makes cross-company comparison noisy.
- Self-reported metrics dominate. Much of what feeds a health score (NPS, satisfaction surveys) is self-reported, and the 2020 editorial explicitly calls for research testing objective measures against these lag indicators.
- No standard taxonomy of CSM activity. There is still no agreed-upon breakdown of what customer success managers (CSMs) actually do (frequency, channel, engagement type), or a standard set of customer success metrics tied to that activity, that researchers could code consistently across studies.
What This Means for Your CSM Investment
None of this means investing in customer success is a bad bet, only that the evidence for it is thinner than the industry’s own growth suggests. Whether you’re standing up a new customer success program or trying to prove an existing one is working, here’s what the research actually supports doing:
- Build your health score on all three dimensions, not just usage data. Most customer health scores in practice still only track product usage, one of the three inputs the research says are required. If your HubSpot health score only tracks product telemetry, you’re measuring roughly a third of what the 2023 research frames as customer health, add relationship-quality and value-realization signals your cs team already has visibility into.
- Treat vendor case studies, including this one, as directional, not proof. GE Digital’s result is real, but it’s one company. Use it to justify a pilot, not to skip the step of measuring your own before-and-after.
- Don’t assume value-in-use alone protects renewal. The Twilio-Uber caution applies directly to renewal risk scoring: a technically successful deployment can still churn if nobody is proactively engaging at-risk accounts based on more than usage alone.
- Measure customer success ROI yourself, deliberately. Given the field-wide evidence gap, the single highest-leverage thing a RevOps team can do is track renewal outcomes for CSM-touched versus untouched accounts internally, since the broader research isn’t going to hand you a measurable, field-wide number yet.
- Treat any vendor-published customer success ROI figure the way you’d treat the “107%” or “$11 million” numbers above. Useful for a rough business case, not a substitute for measuring your own customer success team’s actual ability to reduce customer churn for your specific SaaS or B2B customer base.
- Anchor your business case in your own numbers, not industry averages. The metrics that actually improve customer confidence in a CSM investment, internally, are customer retention, churn rate, retention rates, net revenue retention, and customer lifetime value (lifetime value), tracked before and after for your existing customer base, not assumed from a new customer acquisition benchmark or a vendor’s composite model.
- Get onboarding and adoption right before scaling CSM headcount. Several of the sources above tie early confusion, not just late-stage disengagement, to nonrenewal, so revenue growth from CSM investment tends to compound only once onboarding is already solid.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there research proving Customer Success Management improves renewal? Less than the size of the CSM industry implies. Hochstein, Rangarajan, Mehta, and Kocher’s 2020 founding editorial in the Journal of Service Research states plainly: to date, no scholarly article has investigated performance outcomes of CS activities at either the organization or individual level. Research has grown since, but started from zero.
What does the GE Digital customer success case study actually show? GE Digital monitors 2,600 customer relationships across 25 objective health metrics and reports reduced churn in small accounts since adopting CSM. It’s real and specific, but it’s a single-company case example published as initial evidence in an editorial, not a controlled study, so it shows CSM can work, not how reliably it works across contexts.
How fast did the Customer Success Manager job title grow? From fewer than 5,000 roles in 2015 to over 30,000 by 2018, roughly 6x in three years, according to Hilton, Hajihashemi, Henderson, and Palmatier’s 2020 Industrial Marketing Management paper. Academic coverage did not keep pace: the same paper counted only 7 academic articles specifically addressing Customer Success at that point.
What is a customer health score, according to the research? The most developed academic treatment (Hochstein et al., 2023, International Journal of Research in Marketing) frames customer health as a formative metric built from three dimensions: relationship quality, product usage, and customer value realization, not a single number pulled from one data source.
Where does the “107% ROI in 3 years” customer success statistic come from? A Forrester Total Economic Impact (TEI) study using a composite, hypothetical $1 billion firm with 5,000 accounts, modeled to a $26.1 million net present benefit against roughly $12.6 million in program cost. It’s a real, named methodology, not a made-up number, but it’s a composite model, and the page doesn’t disclose whether a CS vendor commissioned it, unlike most Forrester TEI studies which state that plainly.
This piece pairs with our guides to customer success in HubSpot, the customer success workspace, and renewal risk scoring, and with our research on switching costs and B2B renewal for another widely-assumed retention lever checked against the evidence.
CSM is one of the fastest-growing functions in B2B, and one of the least independently measured. SWOTBee builds the health-score workflows and renewal systems to actually track whether yours is working, not just assume it is.
