Do Enterprise SaaS Companies Need a Customer Success Team?

For some SaaS businesses, having a customer-facing success team makes perfect sense; however, it could be a costly mistake for other organizations. Defining processes and owners for customer success is critical, but that doesn't always indicate the need for a separate customer-facing team.

First, a company needs to define what customer success looks like for them. Beyond profitability to a SaaS company, success boils down to the following:

• Customers are Renewing

• Customers are buying more

• Customers are engaged and providing active references

From the customer's perspective, success is achieving good value.

Companies need then to take a look at their customer-facing teams. All too often, there are too many cooks in the kitchen. Typically, an account manager, a consulting lead, a support lead, and perhaps a technical account manager may all be reaching out to make a customer "Successful." But, in such cases, adding one more person to the mix with an ambiguously defined role is more than just costly it often backfires.

Operational metrics need to be put in place to measure customer health. Then you should look for gaps in the existing processes and teams that are constraining the metrics. Often existing roles can be refined to meet customer success objectives. In this case, creating a small internal Center of Excellence (COE) team can eliminate the need to introduce another customer-facing role. The charter of the Customer Success COE would include training, process improvements, best practices, and monitoring results.

 A client-facing customer success team could be the correct answer for many companies. In this case, it is essential to clearly define the roles and responsibilities and make sure the metrics for all the client-facing teams are synergistic. 

Finally, ensure the team has the right skills, resources, and mandate to drive improvements in the metrics.

If you need help reducing churn, driving expansion, and increasing value to your clients, contact us at Tilloo Advisors. We are a small team of experienced SaaS executives that take a data-driven approach to help technology companies achieve their Customer Success objectives.