What does your customer success team org structure look like?

We have our Customer Success organization broken into 2 groups - Strategic Customer Success and Scaled Customer Success.

In the Strategic Customer Success group I have managers who are responsible for a team of CSMs and also serve as the DRI on customer success for one or more products. CSMs need to have a strong understanding of multiple products because we only have one CSM per customer, and customers ideally use more than one product. Each manager coaches and supports their CSM team, and they provide leadership and guidance where they are the DRI across the entire team.

In Scaled Customer Success, we have managers who oversee a group of Scaled CSMs. Rather than own a customer, our scaled CSMs own a product or customer lifecycle stage. For example, we may have a Scaled CSM who only owns churn mitigation for one product line.

We have a leader over post-sale who rolls into our Chief Revenue Officer. We call this org Customer Value and Adoption. Within this umbrella, we have Support, Services, and Customer Success.

Within Customer Success, I oversee:

• Customer Education (Community, Knowledge Base, Training) 
• Digital Adoption (In-app Engagement) 
• Product Success (Technical Specialists, Liaisons to Product)
• CSM

Having all of these teams aligned under Customer Success allows us to drive product adoption and value realization at scale and maximize the value of one-to-one CSM time with customers.

Our CSM team is split by Region and Segment (EMEA vs. NA and Enterprise vs. Commercial).

We don't have dedicated enablement or operations under our team, since we have centralized teams that support us (and do it well!).

This can vary wildly.

Areas

It depends…

1. CSM/Pooled CSM

2. Digital

3. Renewals

4. Support

5. Professional Services

6. Implementation

7. Education

8. Operations/strategy

9. Enablement

So when you look at all those, a CS org structure could be complex even with a small team! My recommendation is to start small, ensure your definition of success and annual strategy is clear for where you need to go based on your product/service, is aligned with other teams, avoids the errors of 1) being overly complex, 2) being non-ambitious (thinking small), and 3) shooting for the moon and demoralizing yourself and the team.

The biggest piece of advice I can give is to:

1. Establish your long term strategy

2. Seek wise counsel around you for what you should pursue and how to organize it given your long term strategy

If you're looking for general org structures, there are many images on the internet that you can use to get started.

1. Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are grouped into segments based on either Product Type or Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR).

2. Each CSM reports to a CS Director responsible for leading their respective segment.

3. CS Directors report to the VP of Customer Success, who manages all CSMs.

4. The VP of CS reports to the Chief Customer Officer (CCO), who oversees all post-sales teams, including Renewal Managers.

5. The CCO, in turn, reports to the CEO of the company