Amp It Up

10Align Incentives for Customer Success

Do You Need a Customer Success Department?

About ten years ago, it became fashionable in Silicon Valley to organize and staff a so‐called “customer success” department. Suddenly it seemed like everybody had one, but they didn't exist much before then. The idea was to allocate resources for a dedicated team of people who would singularly focus on customer success.

Customers liked having a special team that would advocate on their behalf. These customer success folks would not report to sales or customer service, but they would coordinate and engage any and all resources of the company on behalf of the customer, to address whatever issues might come up. Typically, this team would be staffed with a blend of specialists from other departments, from technical to sales to product support.

Does that sound like a great managerial innovation? It certainly did to the folks at both ServiceNow and Snowflake, who had set up such functions before my arrival. They were happy to follow the trend set by other companies like ours. But not me. I pulled the plug on these customer success departments in both companies, reassigning the staff back to the departments where their expertise fit best.

Here's why I was so opposed: If you have a customer success department, that gives everyone else an incentive to stop worrying about how well our customers are thriving with our products and services. That sets up a disconnect that can create major problems down the ...