Where does Customer Success "live" within your organization and why?
Acknowledging that Customer Success culture should ultimately span the entire organization, when we look at the Customer Success function (the folks ultimately responsible for supporting the customer journey) there are options in terms of alignment. Where does it sit within your organization? Within Sales / Account Management? Within Services? Within Support? An independent branch? It would be interesting to understand what alignments have been most successful.
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It is an independent organization reporting to the COO.
We wanted the person we hired to build the function to have a sense of leadership and to shape the customer success culture, within customer success and in the broader organization.
We initially had a dotted line reporting relationship to revenue generation, but discovered that was a mistake, at that stage, despite the large impact customer success plays in revenue.
Not sure that we have this right. This will change over time, I think.
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I'm sure @Phil Nanus has a better answer than me, but from my perspective, this is very complicated. I see companies define Customer Success in many ways, so there isn't a "one size fits all" solution to where they fit into the organization. Most of the companies I've seen create a Chief Customer Officer role who owns success are entirely focused on renewals and expand selling. We've all seen companies just rename their support group as their success group, which isn't helping anyone. I'm also seeing professional services and the education services teams own onboarding and adoption monitoring, which are success functions.
While I agree that conceptually everyone owns customer success, TSIA certainly has an opinion that this should be a dedicated group linked to a COO or CCO. But I think until the dust settles on what customer success actually means, it will be hard to have a definitive answer.
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Agree with John that CS org alignment varies by company depending on what the intent and focus of the team (onboarding vs. retention vs. up-sell/cross-sell vs. csat, etc.). That said, many of our SW / SaaS clients are aligning customer success with other services functions (PS, Support, Training, etc.), usually under a single leader. They are doing this for two reasons: 1. interaction between the different services teams in delivering a unified customer experience, and 2. companies are increasingly positioning services offerings / subscription tiers that combine premium levels of support, PS hours, training, dedicated CSMs, etc.
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With our company's focus on customer intimacy, all our customer facing services (customer success, customer care, customer enablement, subscription services, education, and existing customer revenue/renewals) all report into our Chief Customer Officer (COO). I have previously managed customer success teams is sales, marketing and support departments. However, I would say this structure has created the most dynamic customer-aligned organization I have worked in.
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Thank you both for the insight! I was thinking that alignment to revenue was key for the purposes of quantifying impact and justifying functional investment. It sounds as though that's still prudent from a metric perspective, but that the organizational strategy needs to support C-level accountability for the customer. Much appreciated.
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we have a CCO that reports to our CEO, the CCO owns CMS , training and our professional services org.
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we have a CCO that reports to our CEO, the CCO owns CMS , training and our professional services org.
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At AWS, the customer success function lives with our Customer Solutions Managers (CSM). Our CSMs are part of the sales organization, and work side-by-side with our Global Account Managers (GAM), and our Global Solutions Architects (GSA). This trio are considered the proverbial "three legs of the stool," and make up he core of our global account teams. These global account teams are focused on our largest and most complex customers, their desired outcomes, and their journey to (and within) the cloud.
At present, we do not have a single-threaded global functional leader for the CSM team. When we do, this leader will report to our VP of WW Sales. In my opinion, this is precisely where customer success should live at AWS, along with our global leader for Solutions Architecture, as our SAs and CSMs work very closely together, and both functions have a technical as well as business focus, with the CSM being less technical and more business focused than the SA.
In the interim, we have formed a virtual global team of CSM leaders to provide direction, clarity, and alignment across our various CSM teams, and to provide senior leadership with focal-point for communication with the CSM community.
Given our size, customer success lives in other places too. For instance, we have Partner Success Managers (PSM) who, as you might have already guessed, focus on the success of our partners. For those account teams who lack a CSM, our Account Managers and Solutions Architects often draw on the various mechanisms, metrics, training programs, and best-practices that reside within the CSM community, to infuse their account plans and customer cadence with the elements of customer success they feel are most impactful for their customers.
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