CSM vs. Support team- Roles & Responsibilities

Brett Eslinger

Hello everyone,

Wanting to get some insight from others to help delineate responsibility between CSM vs. Support team.   We are a medium sized Saas organization and most of our CSM's have a 1:1 relationship with clients (at least for larger clients; we also do have a shared support model for smaller clients that is relatively new that we are continuing to tweak and improve).  In our model, almost all of the questions to us are funneled through our main points of contact at the client organization (vs. end users).  We do have a "Product Support" team that fields the questions that do end up coming from end users (which are relatively few and only in certain instances), as well as from internal employees, sometimes client sponsors, etc. as well as help support the Technical team to identify bugs, issues post-releases, etc.

My question: how do you delineate the responsibility between when a CSM should support a troubleshooting question vs. having the support team handle the request?  IE I have always been of the belief that it is important for CSM's to become relative experts in the platform to be able to support any issue that comes in from their client sponsors.  But I also recognize that their time could be better spent in supporting larger initiatives to drive usage with the client vs. basic technical issues.  In addition, I also see the value in the visibility of the support team having visibility and tracking these requests to understand true volume (our support team uses Zendesk to track requests).

Would love to hear if anybody has it a clear separation of the two, and how you set that up.  Thank you in advance!