Are you using Customer Success as a cover-up?

The Customer Success discipline has gone through some tough times. What started as a pure ideal of encouraging adoption and retention has often morphed into an uncomfortable mix of escalation management and upselling, while pretending to be dispensing best-practice information. As I work with customer success managers (CSMs) I’ve come to systematically question them about their activities and compensation model to figure out if they are truly engaged in success activities, or they are just there for cover-up purposes.

See if your team falls into the following four scenarios.

Support is broken, so CSMs are escalation managers 

Many CSMs tell me they spend more than half of their waking hours chasing support cases that are unassigned, stalled, or summarily closed once any kind of an answer has been provided. This is a terrible use of their time, and can only contribute to friction between Support and Customer Success. If there is a problem with support overall, fix support; do not add a layer of CSMs to smooth things over with customers.

(There is nothing wrong with CSMs serving as a conduit for support escalations, as long as the general support process is working fine.)

Bugs are not being fixed, so CSMs are escalation managers 

Support cases can be stuck not because of specific support failings, but because bugs just don’t get fixed. The consequences on customers and CSMs are similar, but the fix is a little different: do a better job of product quality, ideally upstream, before products are released, and otherwise fix bugs reasonably promptly. CSMs can dance around quality issues only so long.

(There is nothing wrong with CSMs serving as a conduit for product quality issues, as long as product quality is acceptable overall.)

Implementations are not quite complete, so CSMs are project managers

This situation may be worse than support issues since incomplete implementations (or onboarding) hit new customers at a vulnerable time. Especially in complex implementations, various subprojects can be jettisoned to meet a desired rollout date. This is completely understandable, but not if the implementation team then moves to another project and expects the CSM to pick up the pieces.

(There is nothing wrong with CSMs helping customers in a project management role to add icing on the implementation cake. They should not be the bakers, however.)

Sales is too busy chasing new logos, so CSMs are sales reps

In this incarnation of customer success, the CSMs are “farmers”: they are sales reps with a different name, expected to generate revenue from existing customers, with quotas and commissions. With a reward system based on sales, other duties naturally take second place–and the trust that can develop between CSMs and customers takes on a different and weaker flavor. Be transparent: call the farmers sales reps, not CSMs.

(There is nothing wrong, and indeed a lot of good, with CSMs actively detecting and qualifying new opportunities with existing customers, or even closing smaller ones. But their main compensation should be based on retention.)

What have you done (successfully or not) to avoid being a mere cover-up? Share your experience in the comments.