When you’re building a customer success team, you need to pay close attention to every detail of your business: from who your customers are, to how they like to be serviced, to what your budget is, and what everyone expects of the CS function.
With so many SaaS CS leaders coming up with new and exciting ideas and methodologies, it can be difficult to find what works for your business.
In this article, we’ll be looking at some opinions from around the CS space on what to do when you’re planning the structure of your CS team. Plus, I’ll be listing some of the common CS roles, highlighting the ones that I think have the potential to impact the role and effectiveness of customer success the most.
How to Structure a Customer Success Team? CS Leaders Debate
1. Get a Clear View of All the Specifics of Your Organization
There’s no universal way to structure a Customer Success team, it depends on the company’s size and stage, the product and pricing model, the service delivery expectations, and the growth or revenue targets. All those factors shape what ‘good’ looks like. Lots of ways to slice setup, all very dependent on multiple factors.
– Kourtney Thomas, Head of Customer Success, TakeUp
2. Think of CS as a Team of Collaborative Pods Instead of Tiers
Stop drawing ‘tiers’ and start drawing ‘pods.’ In most SaaS, the healthiest CS org is three lifecycle pods that work as a relay: Onboarding, Value Acceleration, and Revenue Continuity.
Each pod has one accountable lead, a shared customer scorecard, and explicit handoffs defined by customer outcomes, not dates. The CS Ops team owns the glue that binds everything together:
- the playbooks
- the data hygiene
- the capacity model
When pods run on the same scorecard, sales handoffs feel invisible to the customer, and you scale without adding friction.
– Irina Vatafu, Head of Customer Success, Custify
3. Understand Your Scope of Service
Scope of service matters as well. How you define Customer Success and what the team actually does really changes the structure. For example – is CS given revenue targets? Is it pure CS, or does it include support? The scope of the team usually tells you how you should build it.
– Katherine Tattum, Fractional CCO/COO, KT Health Technology Consulting
4. Understand Your Customers to Understand How to Service Them
That depends on your customer profile. Have you done your segmentation? Absorbed the sales approaches and baked that into the customer lifecycle to follow? Do you have clarity on sales and engagement goals for the next quarter/year and beyond? I would answer all these questions before attempting to structure the CSM team.
– Shahab Riazi, Founder, CEO/CPO at Concordant
5. Make Sure CSMs Focus on the Most Important Tasks
Structure follows signals. Instrument your product and customer comms so your CSMs work from leading, not lagging, indicators. Then automate the ‘busywork edge’ with AI: generate playbooks from intent, turn conversations into summaries, and create follow-up tasks from the email itself. That lets a lean team spend time where judgment is needed and still cover a wide book of business.
– Philipp Wolf, CEO, Custify
6. Have a Data-backed Conversation with Your C-suite
To have a smart, data-focused conversation with your leadership team about these issues, I recommend performing both a top-down and bottom-up analysis on your customer success program. If you have your client base broken into segments, evaluate each segment separately.
Unfortunately, a number of industry benchmark numbers get thrown around, typically a specific amount of revenue per CSM. CEOs and CFOs love to refer to this, and often push for this number when budgeting for customer success.
– Kristen Hayer, Founder & CEO, The Success League, in Developing a Scalable Success Team Structure
7. Build a Self-Serve Machine before Adding Extra CSMs
In a high-velocity SMB model, CS is ‘assisted self-serve’ first. We staff enablement and content ops before extra CSM headcount. The rule we use is 80-15-5:
- 80% of value through in-app education and templates
- 15% through scalable programs like office hours and community
- 5% through human escalation for moments that matter
Build the machine, then add humans where the machine cannot create trust fast enough.
– Vicky Kalbande, CEO and Head of CS, Sleek Bill
8. Think of CS as Part of a Revenue System
Customer Success deals with the post-sales tasks of your revenue function. While you are building this sub-function, it will become instrumental in influencing your sales activities, particularly for any prospecting and focusing on the right ICP. Thinking of CS as part of a revenue system or bowtie is key to setting your mindset for growth and aligning you with other GTM departments.
– Thomas Voigt, Founder and VP of Account Management, The CS Academy, 5 Steps to build your Customer Success Team
9. Don’t Forget about CS Leadership
I generally guide CEOs to, at some point have a VP of all things Customer Success that report directly to them. CEOs need to be directly connected to the health of their customers and what the organization can do to improve it. As such, I don’t really like a level of management between the CEO and whoever runs success. I also don’t like organizations that have a head of PS and a head of CSMs with no overt direct leader.
– Brett Queener, Managing Director, Bonfire Ventures, An Extensive Guide for Building Your First Great Customer Success Team
Overview of SaaS Customer Success Teams and Roles
The customer success space is changing constantly. In the last few years, we’ve seen new functions emerge and claim their role in a true CS organization.
Emerging Mid-Level Roles within CS Org Charts:
- Customer Engagement Manager
- Customer Enablement Manager
- Customer Success Engineer
- Client Partner
- Expansion and Upsell Manager
- Customer Success Operations Analyst
These new roles have quickly become essential components of CS – they help us provide seamless onboarding experiences, and they keep customers happy, engaged, and aligned with their goals.
Add to these the existing list of senior roles within CS, and you get a somewhat clearer picture of how a customer success team should actually look:
Senior Level Roles with CS Org Charts:
- Director of Customer Success Operations
- Director of Customer Success
- VP of Customer Success
- Chief Customer Officer
Of course, to these you add classic CS roles (entry-level and mid-level), such as:
With so many potential functions, every CS team is going to be different from the next. It’s all about your company size, stage, product, and how your customers expect to be serviced. Customer centricity stands at the heart of CS, so you should always be looking at your customers for clues into your ideal team structure.
The Ideal CS Team Structure Must Make Sense for You
As many quoted in this article have already said, the ideal customer success team structure is the one that makes sense for you. While we can’t tell you the best answer, we hope we’ve offered some clarity as to how you should approach this complex question.
Need further help? Our team has years of experience advising CS leaders from across the SaaS space. So set up a call, ask your questions about the best way to structure your CS team, and see what they have to say. With Custify at your fingertips, you can reduce costs and keep your CS team lean and laser-focused on customer pain points, so be sure to check it out!
