Ideal CS Org
Hi All,
Been thinking about this for a while, and I know this will vary hugely on size and maturity of your CS organisation and your company. But if you could create your dream CS org, alongside the CSM what roles do you always want to have?
- CS Ops?
- CS Marketing?
- CS Engineer/Architect?
- Something else?
Comments
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I am not a big fan of up/cross selling being part of a CSM list of roles and responsibilities, hence, CS Development as an addition of my ideal CS org.
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CS Marketing/Ops would be great for orgs that require a tech touch. Naturally a great support team can help CSM's be less reactive and more proactive.
I'd throw in a Customer Experience team to handle severe escalations, renewals and churn requests (depending on industry, size and scale).
Thoughts?
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I like the CX piece - thought about putting it in my original post but believe CX encompasses CS. Another topic though!
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Totally! I guess from my experience, CX being its own independent supporting arm to CSM's helps tremendously.
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This is a great question. In a perfect world I would like to add both a CS Ops and CS Marketing resource to my team. It would also be cool to have a production support engineer live on my team to power through technical issues/support (as support lives on my team today)
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I personally would love to see something like the below:
CRO
Director of CS
CS Marketing Exec
CS Ops
CS Architect
CS Team Leads
CSMs
Ideal world and in a large organisation. Smaller I would keep it much leaner and ensure cross-collaboration with marketing and operations.
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First of all I aim for contact consistency for my customers. That means that my CSM's are the one throat to choke for the entire customer journey after Sales & Marketing took an unqualified lead to a first signature. This includes expansion, upsell and cross-sell. @Boaz Maor and @Jay Nathan published the noteworthy exceptions for large complex enterprise agreements.
Secondly I analyzed what companies with best-in-class Net Revenue Retention (140) do differently from the rest (86). Their CS org includes Support, Implementation, Onboarding, Community Mgmt, Ops roles for CS, Data Science, SME'e and Architects who support the CSM's as well as dedicated CS Marketing.
Of course many CS organizations start smaller(er). I outlined the various stages I have managed in one of by blog posts: https://cstuners.com/the-journey-to-operational-excellence-customer-success-from-early-teams-to-mature-operations/
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As you said Matt, this will vary for sure based on the maturity of the org. In addition to the ones you have listed the two more, I would consider would be; CS Enablement and a CS Analyst.
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In your recommendation, what would be the role of both?
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I guess for me, I have only seen value in a CS ops person.
I would need more information on the roles and responsibilities on CS Architect and CS Marketing.
Marketing should already be working with Customer Success so I'm not sure of the value of having a dedicated Marketing person. Who does the CS Marketing team report to?
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Depending on the complexity of your products, I would also like to see;
CS enablement
CS solutions architect (presumably this is similar to what you mentioned, as well)
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IF you are in an organization where the business can run and own the technology supporting the operations, experience and the field, I would throw that in the list with the ops, analysts, adoption marketing / services. Speaking from experience, the technology solutions in our case under IT, is pretty far away from the actual business and doesn’t always foster speed and agility in the ever shifting dynamics of customer delivery and needs.
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yes!
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Community manager to own all one-to-many content strategy and voice of customer program!
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Lots of great replies and most of the big roles and functions covered. Depending on your organisations, I'd definitely bring in support and potentially even professional services (for onboarding and more). The CS ops one is a big one and you could even expand that to include a wider commercial ops piece.
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CS Enablment for on-boarding your new CSMs and other roles that roll into the org.
CS Analyst for a dedicated resource to managing CS specific KPIs.
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We have a dedicated CS Communications person. They work closely with marketing, but it allows us to really own and manage our priorities and comm strategy. We do not call that CS Marketing though.
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We call it community manager, same deal - frees up so much CSM time because they can use the content to engage and drive our message forward. Similar to the relationship between sales and marketing
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Matt,
Value delivery product manager - to design and productise the value process.
CS psychologist - to advise on how to motivate customers to make the changes needed to achieve value, including how these techniques can be productised.
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Talk to me about the Value Delivery Manager role - I wonder if this is similar to my CS Architect role.
Designing & scaling the value & outcomes conversations.
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Makes sense! We put the onboarding responsibility split among existing members of the team so it's more hands-on practical learning. Our NEX (New Employee Experience) program pulls in SME's in different orgs and functions to train individuals as they get started.
The CS Analyst in our org had been responsible for putting together data sets to answer some complex questions from the team.
Great thoughts!
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If I growing and have the money. Some tactical teams are a must. People who can step in and fix major screwups. People who can deliver well beyond the demo and are not beholden to consulting practices.
A competitive analysis driven team who can speak to the value of your product over your competitors and speak with authority to the FUD.
Perhaps a quality team, that can drive closed loops across the many pieces of CS.
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Matt
Sounds like it. Value Delivery Product Manager is the person/team responsible for the design, maintenance and implementation of the process used to deliver value to customers. If you think about it, this is a 'service product' and the disciplines of product management (understand needs, develop solutions, launch and drive adoption) are very relevant. It also fits in the trend that you know I favour about building the value delivery process as a flow in the product, ie product-led customer success.
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