How to Structure Customer Success?

I once told my parents I inherited the Hosting organization (i.e. data center team). Two years later I overheard my mom telling a friend “my son’s the official greeter for the company!” She was thinking in restaurant terms apparently! Lesson learned: explaining what we do, correctly and succinctly, is very important. Structuring Customer Success is no different.

Customer Success is still a relatively new function, and in discussion with peers, there is still no clear answer for how a CS organization should be structured. My personal opinion is that it’s owning everything post-sales (and a bit pre-sales) to maximize the customer’s value. This includes owning the renewal rate and the retention rate numbers. As such, I structure CS organizations as follows:

Breaking this down:

• • Customer Support: For smaller companies I prefer the “Touch and Hold” model, which is the equivalent of hiring just Tier 2 Support individuals who are cross-trained to answer everything. As companies scale, and depending on the quality/structure of the product, you may need to add an Account Support team to handle provisioning (not onboarding) type activities, and tier your teams to optimize for cost and response times.

• • Professional Services: The PS function is a great department to handle teams that are necessary to help customers be successful that are structured in a “project” delivery manner. These include Customer Onboarding, Customer Training, Strategy for Customers, and Technical Integrations for Customers.
    • • Two call outs for Professional Services:
        • • Having a team (frequently the largest) of Solution Vertical Knowledge Experts. While at Marketing Automation software company, this was a group of experts in email deliverability. While at a brand protection company, this was a group of experts in understanding and recommending how to remove online content. This group is key to helping customers obtain value and is a key differentiator for CSMs to leverage.
        • • Solution Engineers: I have become a proponent of having SE’s report into Customer Success. Sales training is not deep enough (unlike what happens within CS organization), and having Solution Engineers helps to ensure sales that are structured to ensure Customer Success vs. just getting the deal done. This role can be filled part time by management in PS, Strategists in PS, onboarding consultants in PS, or by the Solution Vertical Knowledge Experts vs. staffing 100% independently.

• • Customer Success Management: The CSMs themselves, who are directly accountable for the retention rate. Depending on your sales model, this team may include Partner Success Managers to ensure your partner/channel is successful. If you have a tech touch model solution, I also recommend a renewals team (but be careful as taking this off CSMs plate can start to remove accountability and increase customer friction), and finally a Strategic Account Management function.
    • • Regarding Strategic Account Management: This role must be carefully defined! The CSM is responsible for renewal and potentially cross-sell and up-sell. Essentially growing the existing relationship within the account. The Strategic Account Manager is responsible for selling into new relationships within an existing account. This role can be in either CS or in Sales, as it requires a sales persona.

• • Customer Success Operations: This is a team of individual contributors who exist to make the other customer facing CS departments successful. The CS Ops person is responsible for timesheet updates, utilization reports, CS health metrics, and managing all CS Software tools. The CS Trainer is responsible for all new and existing CS employee education. The CS Program manager is responsible for all processes and procedures within the organization, and managing all CS Improvement projects. Additional optional roles within these team can be the Community Manager, KB Manager, or CS Tools Engineer. Having worked for smaller companies, I typically ask the managers to take on these responsibilities until we’ve scaled to the point of needing these roles full time.

All of this being said, every company is different. The size of the company, whether you have an enterprise customer model or a tech touch customer model, whether you are true SaaS or a SaaS/MS hybrid, and more all impact the above structure. That being said, if you aren’t doing one of the above functions, the question should be asked “who is?” and if it’s not clear, then it’s not happening, to the detriment of your customers, and your retention rate.