Understanding the Customer Success Team Structure

Mia Jacobs — January 23, 2020

The success of an enterprise depends more than ever on the Customer Success (CS) team. A CS team’s primary purpose is to build, maintain, and optimize lasting customer relationships by helping them fulfill and even exceed their own business goals. The stronger that connection is, the more likely your customers will be to not only remain customers, but also recommend your company to others.

Your customer’s success is your success. The more your customers can achieve using your products and services, the more they will help you achieve your own business goals. Your CS team is there to both set that cycle into motion and to keep it running smoothly, and that is why you need an effective customer success team structure.

Customer Success Team Structure: Roles and Responsibilities

The size of a customer success team is determined mainly by demand but generally speaking larger enterprises tend to require larger CS teams. Regardless of size, each member of your team should be assigned a specific role and set of responsibilities, with a clear overall structure that facilitates smooth operations. Your team may also contain separate sets of team members assigned to each customer segment for an even higher degree of specialization.

The chart below outlines some of the key roles in a typical CS team, along with the primary responsibilities.

Each member of your CS team needs to know what they are individually responsible for and what role they play in the larger team structure. Think carefully about how to create a customer success team structure that works well for your enterprise.

Establishing an Effective Customer Success Team Structure

Creating an effective customer success team structure means you need to:

• • Put the customer at the center. In our subscription economy, customers tend toward short-term, low-risk commitments. Meet their need for something better by prioritizing your customers throughout their journey, consistently monitoring their progress, and identifying and taking action on opportunities to enhance their experience.
  • Share customer data across teams. Allowing your team to easily access data from a central location is key to establishing internal efficiency. Chief Officers and Directors should be able to pull data and reports whenever necessary—not just at the end of a quarter. CS team members should likewise be able to easily review individual goal progress. Making this information available to all team members prevents conflicting reports and overlap of assignments.
  • Share data in context. Raw data alone is not incredibly useful, except to the person analyzing it. In all other cases, give your CS team context for that data to illuminate its importance. For instance, campaign progress data should be placed in the context of what is going well versus what processes need improvement.
  • Keep data up-to-date. Business needs and goals naturally evolve over time, and what your customers wanted (January 26, 2020) may no longer reflect what they want today. Real-time data helps your team act quickly to respond to—and even predict—what problems your customers will bring to the table next. More importantly, this information may help your team be better prepared to solve them.
  • Develop standardized processes for collecting, analyzing, and making use of data. A clear workflow and well-established procedures for handling common occurrences—such as what to do when a customer shows signs of waning interest—helps your CS team spend less time analyzing reports and figuring out to do and more time with customers.
  • Encourage adaptability and flexibility. Even in an ideal situation, there are always unknown and unexpected factors that could throw a solid program off the rails. The most successful CS team is not the one that never makes a mistake—such teams do not exist—but rather the one that is most capable of recognizing when things are not working and adapting their strategy accordingly. If, for example, your enterprise is falling short of an adoption goal, the first question your CS team asks should be, “Why did this happen—and what can we change to successfully meet this goal in the future?” Once the necessary changes have been implemented, you should track and analyze progress to determine if the new strategy is working—or if further changes need to be made.

In short, the most effective customer success team structure facilitates communication and proactive strategizing. For the greatest positive impact, it is vital to equip your CS team members with more than a sound team structure—they will also need innovative technology that helps them optimize the customer experience and streamline internal processes.

Give Your CS Team the Platform They Need

Regardless of the specific position they hold within the customer success team structure, every member’s responsibilities revolve around establishing and maintaining mutually beneficial relationships with your enterprise’s valuable customers.

The key to achieving the best results, therefore, is to limit unnecessary distractions for your CS team by providing them with the best possible software for the job. Look for goals and outcomes-based customer success software. Ideally, this software will offer an intuitive interface, visibility into data at every stage of the customer journey, and an early warning system. This software should bring relevant trends to your CS team’s attention—without the need for constant manual tracking—and provide guidance regarding next steps.

The more your team can focus on what they do best—helping your customers do their best—the more your customers will trust and rely on your enterprise, and the more likely they are to stay for years to come.

Totango is proud to provide enterprises with the best customer success solutions on the market. Request a demo to see how our innovative software can support your CS team’s initiatives.

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