Scaling Customer Success

I am currently in the process of a Customer Success and Customer Support reset project. Our products are complex, highly configurable, have a 12-24 month sales cycle and we have an average 2.6-year contract length. We have 10 CSMs globally and a small customer marketing team. While we sell to MM, our focus is on enterprise. I am building my 3-year plan and working my way backward to next year's plan. Does anyone have customer success org charts that show the progression as they scale to 3x? Extra kudos for any suggestions on impactful tech or specific roles that helped achieve this type of scale.

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James Conant

Leslie - I may be able to help. I cant get back to you today, but will reach out to you tomorrow. I will share a structure we used and we can walk thru how it scaled. In short, we used Sr CSM and CSM for enterprise accts, and AMI, AMII, and AMIII and Mgr of AM for small, MM, and enterprise accounts. We added a Business Consultant and Product Specialist to fill gaps. Help Desk was not part of my team. The sales team helped with very large (Fortune 500) accounts depending on facts and circumstances. AM team was a breeding ground for CSM roles.

Craig Jackson

Hi @Leslie Kelley

Tough challenge but definitely an exciting one. I scaled a CS operation at a Fintech growing at 2.5X and im more than happy to share with you what worked and didn't work for us on the journey.

The one thing pointer I would say at a very early stage is to understand the capacity load a new customer will take on your capabilities and the associated pipeline. Overnight service can plummet and makes retention extremely tough for the CSMs. In time of high growth I believe its very important for each departments growth plans to be reflective of the other, sales, on-boarding, support, CS will all need to be aligned.

Tech wise I used Viso for the for our org chart and churn zero is an excellent cs tool and good for automating customer health weighting and reporting.

Drop me a message if you'd like to speak in more depth.

Cheers

Craig

Pam Micznik

Leslie,

Your product focuses on helping specific departments with specialized processes. Do you offer Change Management as part of the Implementation Service? If not, this is something to consider in your budgetary planning.

BenB

I would consider the complexity of the renewal compared to the responsibilities of the customer success manager. Enterprise contract renewal can be long and difficult. Procurement has only gotten more involved. Considering your goals, I'd expect at some point you need an account manager, or at least a CS Renewal role to help carry some of this burden and expertise.