Everyone I’ve spoken to who has a CS Ops team is grateful to have them, but that’s different than explicitly defining and even measuring the value of CS Ops. 80 CS Ops leaders got together to discuss the topic, which kicked off with a presentation (view recording) from Jeff Heckler, describing a commission program he stood up for CS Ops team members at Pipedrive. (Talk about aligning CS Ops value to $$$!)

In breakout groups following Jeff’s session, folks talked through the topics in more detail, and then shared these key takeaways, in their own words:

Defining the Purpose/Value of CS Ops

• Orchestrating journey of customer through data, consistency through methodology of process
• CS Ops is the CSM for CSMs
• CS Ops is both process / efficiency as well as data to drive value and action
• To give the team some space to take a look at the bigger picture and plan/mitigate expected risks
• CS Ops provides resources, training, processes to maximize CSM time to engage with customer and bring more revenue
• Coordinating the resources, training, and processes to make CSMs as efficient as possible and maximizing time with customers
• CS Ops is how Customer Success scales

Measurement of the Value of CS Ops

• We really need to tie more of the impacts of CS to $$$. Those correlations are looser now and need to be tighter to get to a world with variable compensation.
• Time-saved by CS Ops scaling key CSM activities (like sending automated customer comms vs manual customer comms)
• CS Operations drive efficiency through the CS team, you must find and measure the indirect effects of CS Ops activities on the CS book of business

Insights for Running Your CS Ops Team

• Always making sure to focus on and communicate the “what’s in it for me” when asking CSM teams to do something! ie data governance in Gainsight
• CS Ops first hires (among our group) tended to be company long haulers capable of reaching across multiple teams to pull off org wide changes