You hired a Customer Success team. You got Operations Associates.

Without anyone deciding to lose it, here is how Customer Success teams lose their commercial mandate.

Customer Success Management (CSM) is crucial and central to any organization with this engine. No one deliberately decides to waste this function. With a job description stating all the right things and jargon, the team is hired, and the work starts. Along the line, a noticeable pattern develops that almost nobody questions or pushes back.

The team is great at fixing things. They are skilled at communication, highly responsive, and capable of solving problems, so operational issues land on their desk from nowhere. They fix the issues, and soon, their to-do list grows. This blurs out the function they were hired to perform; protect and grow revenue, strengthen relationships, and drive product adoption and expansion initiatives.

By the time anyone realizes what is happening, the team’s role has morphed into a proxy operations unit. The truth is, no one connects the makeup of the department to the risk because the accounts are obviously not bleeding.

The drift is masked as efficiency mechanism. This does not look like a problem until expansion stalls or adoption never happens.

The job description versus what it became

The position was described as Customer Success (CS), and the job description did a great job. It mentioned all the right things: relationship management, retention, expansion and value realization. Post hiring and onboarding, the actual work began:

• monitoring dashboards that created more bottlenecks than it did efficiency. The intent was good, but the deployment was catastrophic keeping in mind technological advances.
•  monitoring shipments and going after due dates for active jobs
• tracking missing and delayed parcels and managing the communications in-between
• Coordinating internal teams and activities to remove operational hiccups.  

None of the above falls under the mandate of customer success. As a revenue ownership function, this is out of scope. These activities keep accounts from catching fire in the short-term, but in the long-term, it keeps the CS function away from any real impact and value-driven responsibility.

The job description and the operational gap

The deviation starts with a gap, and not a bad hire. There are operations and logistics activities that must be done: going after information, monitoring jobs, etc., to fully satisfy the customer request. These activities placed with the CS significantly reduces the chances of them doing what they were actually hired for. The drift happens because the CS team is good with customers, responsive and organized. So, the task remains with them.  

The more they handle issues and quell all the small fires, the more tasks get dropped on their desk to manage. Since handling these tasks well is what gets noticed and rewarded, over time, product expansion strategies stall, adoption initiatives are abandoned, monitoring for churn signals never happen, or measuring client’s time to value in order adjust requirements is completely dismissed.    

There is a direct disconnect between the job description prior to recruitment and the actual work after onboarding. The team, though known as CS is not remotely close to the real CS function.    

Operational work can easily expand to fill the capacity of whoever is available to do it. And in most entities, that can easily be the CS team.

Impact of CS becoming task management function

Two critical things are most likely to be impacted when a CS team is consumed by task management, and neither makes noise when it happens.

Adoption becomes accidental
Adoption is the bedrock for cross-sell and upsell. It is a deliberate act to understand what product/service combinations or in isolation provides value to the client. Drawing this insight helps to pitch products that are a natural fit the customer’s success plan and growth path. Adoption that follows from identifying a gap in full utilization of product/service spectrum creates long term revenue growth, than the one that is forced to hit account target.  

The above almost never happens when the team is focused on setting up jobs clean-up duties. This is not to suggest the team does not care about adoption. They just do not have the time and structure for it.

Expansion work stops
Adoption directly feed into expansion. Any revenue owning function requires strategic relationship in the customer organization with a high degree of influence. A CS-driven expansion is no exception to this rule. When the relationship remains at surface-level with staff who log job orders and report to a dozen others up the decision-making chain, no meaningful CS-led impact can be seen.

This stagnates the relationship at task level. The CS team stays in constant interaction with coordinators and associates at the customer organization. They barely know the decision-maker. And even when they do, the structure does not allow form a direct communication with this top-level executive.

Any attempts at expansion to unlock the hidden revenue in the account hits a brick wall because no one in the account has the clearance for this decision. And so, the potential revenue growth from this account sits untouched.  

What makes the silent drift difficult to fix

The accounts are not churning, or at the least, not at an alarming rate. This is the silence. The entire structure would come under strict audit if the accounts were going through a visible collapse. Maybe what the organization needs the most is operations and logistics coordination associates, not a CS team with roles outside their mandate.
It’s difficult to fix because the accounts are stable. They are barely growing; not bringing the expected revenue a healthy and fully functional CS engine should generate.

In it all, what is not visible is the opportunity cost. The cost of not using the team to drive exponential growth. Every week they spend on other logistics and operations related tasks is a missed opportunity to engage in conversations that protect and grow revenue. The risk and cost of keeping the team with busy work compounds over time. No strategic senior-level relationship in a key account to direct growth.   

How does the fix look like

Each organization defines roles to suit their specific growth needs. Some need operations associates and logistics coordinators more than they do, a CS team. To restructure a CS function, two key things must be considered for implementation. Doing one without the other will be counterproductive.

1.       Separate CS ownership from task ownership: The operations and logistics duties need a home, but that is not the CS team. This does not mean the task disappears or it is forced on another unit where there is no fit. The purpose is to prevent these tasks from getting in the way of CS working to protect and grow revenue.  

2.      Redefine CS accountability: Following from separating CS ownership from task ownership, realign the scope of real CS work by optimizing the metrics for revenue ownership. This is what the CS function must be measured against, not order volume or the number of issues resolved.  

These are should not be difficult changes to implement. What is needed is someone with the right authority to broach the subject and carry the teams along to effect the changes. This should not be taken lightly because, it means another team inheriting these tasks.

The team you hired with the intention of protecting revenue is most likely capable of doing that. The issue is the structure of the organization has optimized that role for operational throughput, hence measured on the same.
The question is whether the organizational structure gives room for the CS team to protect and grow revenue.