Building a Scalable Customer Success Organization—What Do You Wish You Had from Day One?

MJ

Stepping into a startup as the first Customer Success hire is both an exciting and daunting challenge. At Realtime Robotics, I have the unique opportunity to build the foundation for a CS-led organization from the ground up. My goal? To set us up not just for short-term wins, but for long-term scalability.

I’m already laying the groundwork for Digital Customer Success, ensuring we have the right systems, data, and automation in place to drive proactive engagement. But I know that what we build today will define how effectively we scale tomorrow.

So, to all the seasoned CS professionals out there:

📌 Knowing what you know now, what are the foundational elements you wish you had in place early on that would have made your life easier as your company and customer base scaled?

Was it a robust customer health scoring model? A well-defined customer journey with playbooks? The right tech stack? Or maybe a mindset shift towards CS as a revenue driver rather than a support function?

I’d love to hear your thoughts—what are the must-haves for building a CS function that can scale effectively? Let’s start a conversation! 🚀

#CustomerSuccess #ScalingCS #Startups #DigitalCS #CSStrategy

Mikael Blaisdell

In my view and that of other consultants, the first step is to define what services you are going to offer under the heading of Customer Success. What services/resources are your customers asking for or are in need of? How much will they cost you to provide? Along with this analysis, you need to segment your customer base into portfolios based on their long term value to your company. Different portfolios will have different services/resources — you will not be able afford to offer the same to everyone. This is also the basis for your self-success offerings, or digital customer success.

If Sales were to come running into your office, bubbling over about how they were going to add X new customers in the next quarter, can you reply with a projected staffing capacity study to justify adding Y new CSMs?

"Customer Success is a scientifically designed and professionally directed long term business strategy for maximizing customer and company sustainable proven profitability." You can't do science without reliable data, most especially the financial.