Customer Operations

I have recently been given the opportunity to take on creating a Customer Operations function. I am transitioning from a career of managing Customers and CS Teams, to now having internal stakeholders (CS and Partner Teams), and acting as the product owner for our post contract tools and processes. CS Ops seems to be becoming more and more of a thing so I am curious to hear from the group on a couple of things:

Where is your organization at with investing in Customer Success Operations?
How are you justifying the benefits of CS Ops?
How are you differentiating from Sales Ops?
What are the KPI's you are using to define success for CS Ops?
What are the roles and responsibilities for your CS Ops team?

Looking forward to hearing everyone's thoughts here and I'm certainly open to finding time to chat 1 on 1 or even hosting a group chat if folks are interested.

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Comments

John Bosch

Thanks @Travis Wheeler very helpful insights!

Marco Innocenti

To date we are about 120 CSM, and a smattering of other roles that fall into CS for about another 30

CS primary tool is Totango for managing customers and campaign strategies.

Zendesk for tickets, Jira for bugs and feature enhancement requests.

John Bosch

Thanks @Marco Innocenti ? How big is the CS org and what tools do you have in place that the CS group touches.

Marco Innocenti

Hi John - our justifications are very similar to points 2,3, and 4 that Travis calls out above.

Our CS Operations team consists of::

Manager, CS Operations

1x CS Operations Manager, Systems and Process

1x CS Data and Strategy Manager

2x CS Enablement Manager

2x CS Communications Manager

Always happy to dig into more details on the above.

Thanks for the call out @Brian Hartley

Brian Hartley

I just had a great conversation with @Marco Innocenti about this same topic. I hope he doesn't mind that I tagged him in this string but he shared some great experiences.

tjwwheel

Hey John - awesome topic. I've watched this from a distance as we've grown ours, here is some of my input:

We created a "Value Services" operations group which is responsible for assisting with CS ops, Customer Visibility (internal reporting/KPI tracking), Customer communications (user groups, webinars, etc). This allowed the team to not only help CS directly, but also help management with data requests. Both sides win.
Justification was created by CS efficiencies, better KPI/ROI tracking, shifting CS focus to value realization and not mundane tasks, as well as quicker reporting on customer journey to management.
Given the growth we've had, the justification from Sales ops was simply based on "needs". Sales Ops couldn't support the Solutions Consulting, Sales and Value engineering group and also the CS group. Two different thought processes/needs.
KPIs could be: reduction of internal CS reporting, increased frequency of customer info offerings (standardized offerings such as monthly newsletters, etc that stay consistent with our Corp vision), and increase in CS productivity.
Question 5 probably got answered in some of the above.

Hope some of this helps! Again, I've only witnessed as someone who helped build out the need and has seen the company grow in both sales and CS by 5x in the past 2 years. I am not directly involved with CS Ops at this point.

Cheers!