Hi Ross:In my two previous roles I owned both customer success and support. My background is mostly on the support side so I had to learn a lot (quickly!) about customer success. In one of my roles I came into a CS team that did both support and success related functions. Not only was the team stretched too thin, support and success require different mindsets and different operating motions. So it's good you're separating these out to make both teams more efficient.The biggest piece of advice I'd provide you is to draw clear "swim lanes" between the teams - what each team does and doesn't do. Of course you want the teams to collaborate and to work together for benefit of your customers - but they also have to stick with their own roles and responsibilities. Once complaint I heard from the success team quite often is "we are doing so much support-related stuff we can't keep up with business reviews." None of these interactions ever made it into Salesforce, so I had no way to quantify it or to gauge the impact on their time. After some coaching and a few hard conversations, I let CS know that support wasn't their role. I also had to make sure the support team stepped up their game, as it were...the success team had been doing support historically because the support team was mediocre before I started. We staffed the support team properly, provided documented processes and tools, and reported to customers and internally what the support team was doing...and voilà, CS stopped doing support.That's just one thing you'll have to think about in the midst of many others - but you have to start building in that specialization early. Happy to speak to you more about my processes around this, or give you more advice from my experience if it can help.
Hey Ross,
I used to work at Freshworks, and have run the support team for my product till it grew large and had to be transitioned to the central team. I used to do the support myself initially as a founder (got acquired by Freshworks after that) and later as business head of an early stage product. So I feel I can relate to your situation and help out . Let's DM?
Thanks,
Sri
Ross