Customer Success Under Support Org

Currently with the company I am at, the Customer Success Team sits under Customer Experience which sits along the side of Technical Support which sits under Product.   Since I oversee the overall CX and we are a B2B company that is heavily driven by Product it has had its advantages when providing feedback around product defects or around the handling of Tech Support issues.  I do leverage the CS team as an additional listening post and they also own our closed loop process for our inner feedback loop.  This tends to make our closed loop process contact completion better.  Where it does seem to get a little dicey, is around some of the goals that I am introducing to the CS team around lead gen, retention, and on time renewals.  The CS team was originally created out of a need for escalations within support but has started to mature based on the deepening of the relationships being created with their assigned customers.  As we move from being reactionary to proactive to eventually preventative, I feel we will look to shift where in the org chart we sit.  At previous companies I have seen this fall under Sales but also be split into its own operations or customer part of the org chart reporting into a CCO or a COO.

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Justin Chappell
Global Director Customer Experience
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Original Message:
Sent: 08-05-2020 14:30
From: Lauren Warthan
Subject: Customer Success Under Support Org

Has anyone had experience managing a CS team that sits under a larger Support organization with Support leaders? What were the pro/cons of this set up for you? Did you find this to be a good long term scenario or did your team ultimately move into its own org or under sales?


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Lauren Warthan
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I have worked for a company where CS was a hybrid of CS and TS. Then, we created a support org that works under the customer success hierarchy but not under the Customer Success department.

There are a lot to learn from each other. Particularly that our customers will be more honest with their TS experiences with the CSM than they would be directly and we could provide that constructive feedback. It's easier than in my current company where CS does not influence TS.

Not managing one but I worked as one of a group of TAMs for a while under a Support org that essentially were in that capacity. It wasn't good--Support is by definition a reactionary org (and they should be!) but it made for very reactive account management. I essentially ended up doing some weird mix of emergency project management BDR while slotting "how's everything going" calls where they would fit.