Declining Culture, Increasing Workloads, and Compensation That Doesn't Match Expectations - Customer Success Manager (CSM) KnowBe4 Employee Review

Over the past few years, I witnessed a significant decline in employee morale and company culture. Since the change in leadership and private equity ownership, many employees felt that the company became increasingly focused on operational efficiency and growth metrics at the expense of employee well-being, development, and retention. As a Customer Success Manager, workloads continued to increase year after year. We were assigned more accounts, expected to manage increasingly complex customer environments, and required to learn more technical aspects of the platform. However, the training provided often did not keep pace with these growing expectations. Employees were frequently expected to figure things out on their own while maintaining performance metrics. Compensation was another major concern. For the amount of responsibility placed on CSMs, pay was not competitive. Newer CSMs were often earning significantly less than more tenured team members, with pay differences of $10,000 or more despite performing similar work. At the same time, some long-term employees shared that salary reductions made during COVID were never restored. Personally, I earned a base salary of $40,000 managing a demanding customer portfolio and decades of experience. Variable compensation added roughly $15,000 annually, but even at approximately $55,000 total compensation, it felt increasingly difficult to keep up with the rising cost of living. Considering the expectations of the role, the compensation did not reflect the level of responsibility, customer management, and technical knowledge required. Many employees stayed because they haven’t received any new job offers in the saturated SaaS market, but there was a growing sense that employees were expected to continuously do more with less. The result was burnout, declining morale, and increased turnover.