Customer Success Operations < 20 questions

Dave Epperly

• How many teams out there have a CS Ops Manager or similar?
• When did you know it was time to dedicate someone to this role?
• What are the specific roles/duties/responsibilities of this person(s)?
• Who does CS Ops report to within your organization?
• If you have personal experience, what's the value-add of this role to the organization?

Some context from Allison Pickens: https://www.gainsight.com/customer-success-best-practices/the-value-of-customer-success-operations/

Gretchen Hustad

I have no answers for you, but am very interested to hear what others say, as I think this is actually the type of leadership role I would make the most sense filling on a CS Team. I would love to learn more about how this manifests and if people are hiring higher-level managers to be strategic partners, or if they are hiring more entry to mid-level employees to act simply as "doers".

Kevin Mitchell Leonor

1. We have a CS ops manager and are slowly building that team.
2. When we kept pushing CS initiatives down the priority list because customer priorities kept mounting. Usually when scaling a customer success department, that need becomes more and more pronounced.
3. Defining processes, leveraging tech stacks, maintaining tech fluidity to hit KPIs
4. VP of Customer Success
5. allows for a more standardized form of Customer Success that makes it easier to manage CSMs and benchmark them and their customers.

Jackye Clayton

I am the Director of Success but that is slowly turning into more Ops and Product than anything else currently though I imagine that will change.

It sort of migrated that way as we saw a need to collect more data and strive toward data based decisions.

Tejas Satyan

We have a CS Ops team. VP of CS Ops reports in to the Chief Customer Officer. The CS organization was rapidly expanding so we needed to standardize the processes across regions (North America, EMEA, APJ). CS Ops has taken over the running of the VOC program, building out a customer 360 platform, developing playbooks etc. 

Although this has recently started, it is already showing impact as we now have dedicated people working on key initiatives which previously were not really completely owned by anybody in the CS org. 

Dave Epperly

Thank you Tejas. That's exactly what I was looking for.

Dave Epperly

Thank you Kevin. I appreciate the insight here.