At Acquisition Ace, 600 to 800 active clients run on three full-time people plus fractional coaches. That only holds if every question has an owner.
Result from a named client with written permission. Typical clients of this cohort saw a range of outcomes; nothing here is a guarantee. How we handle claims.
Escalation rules decide who owns what. Without them, every hard message lands on the coach or the founder, and the client waits. With them, the client success manager clears most of the inbox alone and passes the rest on with a note.
What does a client success manager handle alone?
Most of it. Chats, the support inbox, check-ins, overdue clients, onboarding questions, access problems, where to find a video and what the next step is. The point of the role is to move clients forward without an expensive coach doing work that does not need a coach.
The test is simple. If the answer is in the video training, the SOPs or the offer document, the client success manager answers it. If it needs judgment about the client's own business or the method, it goes to a coach.
Which questions go to the coach?
Questions about the method and the client's specific case. How to price their service, why their ads stopped, what to do with a deal that went sideways. Those go to the next group call or to a one-to-one call the client books themselves.
They do not go to the coach by DM. A coach who answers DMs all day stops coaching, and the client learns to skip the system. The client success manager books the slot and adds a note to the board. After the call, they check the client has a next step.
What goes back to sales?
Any message that starts with "the closer told me". If sales promised something the program does not do, the client is right to be upset, and the problem sits upstream. It goes to whoever leads sales the same day, with the client's words and the date of the sales call.
Record every sales call so this can be checked in minutes. A lot of chargebacks is usually a sales problem: the team promised something the business does not do. One case is a conversation; three cases from the same closer are a pattern.
Who takes refund requests and review threats?
One person, never the whole team. Every refund request gets a call first to find out why. Most early requests are fear, and the call turns most of them around. Every decision then goes by email, so it is official.
A client who threatens a bad review gets the same call, the same day. When a refund is promised, pay it fast. Every day of delay raises the chance of a Trustpilot review that hurts the offer for months.
| What the client says or does | Who takes it | How fast | How |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where is this, how do I log in, what is next | Client success manager | Same day, in the chat waves | Chat reply with a link |
| Overdue on a milestone | Client success manager | The day they go overdue | DM or voice message, then a call if needed |
| A question about the method or their own case | Coach | Next group call or a booked call | Call, with a note on the board first |
| "Sales told me this was included" | Sales lead | Same day | Internal note plus the call recording |
| Refund request | The one refund owner | A call booked as fast as possible | Call first, decision by email |
| Bad review threat or a public complaint | Head of client success | Same day | Call, then a written follow-up |
| A complaint about a coach | Head of client success | Same day | Listen to the call recording, then decide |
| Anything that changes the offer | Founder | Next Loom update | Loom with the case and a proposal |
A good COO takes care of the CEO and does not create meetings. The CEO should not have to deal with anything. The founders I work with get Loom updates and can check the live data any time.
When does the founder get involved?
When the decision changes the offer or the team. Adding or removing something clients get, a refund outside the contract, letting a coach go. Any change to an offer causes confusion, so the founder signs it off before clients hear about it.
Daily questions never reach the founder. A founder who answers client DMs teaches every client to go around the team. The founder sees the live numbers and gets a Loom with the cases worth knowing.
How do you write the escalation rules down?
As one table in the client success playbook. Each row has five fields: trigger, owner, deadline, channel and what gets logged on the board. New client success managers learn it in their first week. When the same kind of case escalates twice in a month, add a row or fix the training.
Watch out. An escalation without a note is a new problem. A coach who gets "can you talk to this client" starts from zero. Every handoff carries three lines: what the client said, what was tried, what is needed.
Further reading: Client success playbook template · Which channel clients should use · The call we do before any refund
Diego Miescher
