Customer Success took off in the 2010s alongside the SaaS boom, and its boundaries with other departments haven't always been watertight. Its mission, though, is simple: help customers get value from the product. Yet between support, account management, sales and onboarding, roles still overlap more often than not. Time to put things in order!
In just a few years, Customer Success has become a core function in B2B SaaS, and most software companies now employ CSMs. But ask three people at the same company what CSMs actually do and you'll get three answers: "they manage customers", "they're product experts", "they handle renewals"... The confusion isn't just about vocabulary. When the lines between Customer Success, support and account management are blurred, customers fall through the cracks. Nobody sees disengagement coming, everyone assumes someone else is on it, and churn arrives out of the blue.
So let's go back to basics: what Customer Success really is, what it does day to day, and above all where it stops.
Customer Success: a simple definition
The most widely quoted definition comes from Lincoln Murphy, a US consultant often described as one of the founders of the discipline and a former Customer Success Evangelist at Gainsight. In his words, Customer Success is when your customers achieve their desired outcome through their interactions with your company. Not just through your product, but through every interaction they have with you, from sales and onboarding through to support. The distinction matters.
Murphy breaks this Desired Outcome down into two components:
- the Required Outcome: what the customer concretely needs to achieve;
- the Appropriate Experience: how they need to achieve it.
Take a fictional example. Your customer does get their monthly reports, but only after chasing support three times and building a makeshift spreadsheet alongside your tool. The required outcome has been achieved, but the experience hasn't. And that customer will move on the moment a competitor promises the same thing without the pain.
Murphy draws another useful distinction: on one side there's Customer Success, the outcome the customer achieves, which involves the whole company; on the other there's Customer Success Management, the team and processes responsible for orchestrating that outcome proactively. So the CSM isn't "the" Customer Success of your company: they're its conductor.
And no, Customer Success isn't customer satisfaction either. A customer can like their CSM and attend every one of your webinars... without getting any measurable value from your solution. Murphy explicitly warns against confusing customer success with customer satisfaction. A happy customer who achieves nothing concrete will eventually leave.
The role of Customer Success: deliver value, then make it visible
In practical terms, what does a Customer Success team do day to day? Everything that takes the customer from the promise made during the sale to real, measurable value that they recognise as such. Its main responsibilities:
- Onboarding and getting started: reducing time to value, the time between signature and the first concrete benefit.
- Adoption: making sure the right users are using the right features for the right use cases.
- Account health monitoring: tracking usage, interactions and sentiment to pick up weak signals.
- Value management: setting goals with the customer, then showing them how far they've come, notably in Business Reviews.
- Renewal preparation: turning renewal into a formality rather than a tense negotiation.
- Opportunity spotting: identifying accounts ready to go further (new use cases, new teams, an additional module).
- Voice of the customer: feeding back to Product and Marketing what customers actually experience.
What do all these responsibilities have in common? Customer Success is a proactive function: it doesn't wait for the customer to get in touch before acting. That's its whole reason for being. A CSM who spends their days answering inbound requests isn't doing Customer Success, they're doing something else (more on that shortly).
That said, be careful not to reduce Customer Success to a defensive function, a mere bulwark against churn. In practice, it's also one of the main growth engines of a SaaS business: a customer who gets value stays, but they also buy more and recommend your solution. That's why retention and expansion have become boardroom topics rather than just CS team topics.
Customer Success vs support: anticipating rather than reacting
This is the most common confusion, and it's understandable: support and Customer Success both talk to existing customers after the sale. But their roles are completely different.
Support is reactive by nature: it steps in when a customer runs into a problem and reports it. A bug, a question about a feature, a locked account. Its goal is to resolve things quickly and well, and it's measured with indicators such as first response time, resolution time or post-ticket satisfaction. Good support is a valuable asset that contributes directly to the customer experience.
Customer Success, on the other hand, works over the long term. It isn't trying to resolve an incident but to make sure the customer achieves their goals throughout the contract. It's measured on retention, adoption and expansion.
One example shows the gap clearly. Picture a customer who hasn't opened a single ticket in six months: for support, that's rather good news. For the CSM, it may be a warning sign. Has this customer simply stopped having problems... or stopped using the product altogether? A customer's silence can signal complete autonomy just as easily as quiet disengagement. Only by reading usage and interactions together can you tell the difference.
That doesn't mean the two functions should ignore each other. Tickets are a goldmine of information for the CSM: an account that suddenly opens far more of them, or whose tone deteriorates, is sending a signal you need to catch. Conversely, the CSM can lighten the support load by tackling an account's recurring difficulties at the root (training, configuration, misunderstood use cases).
The classic mistake? Turning the CSM into second-line support that customers can contact directly about anything and everything. Their diary fills up with emergencies, they no longer have time to plan ahead, and the churn they were supposed to prevent happens anyway. A CSM turned firefighter is a CSM who's no longer doing Customer Success.
Customer Success vs account management: value on one side, the contract on the other
Here the line is subtler, and it varies a great deal from one company to the next.
In a traditional set-up, the account manager owns the commercial relationship with the customer: renewals, negotiation, upsell and cross-sell. They mainly deal with decision-makers and buyers, usually carry a revenue target, and often sit within the sales team. The CSM, meanwhile, supports the operational teams who use the solution day to day, and focuses on adoption and value.
Why separate the two? Because the mindsets are different. When a CSM carries an overly aggressive sales target, the customer ends up seeing them as a salesperson in disguise, and the relationship of trust (the one that lets you hear about the real difficulties) takes a hit.
But distinct roles don't mean the CSM should stay away from revenue. Quite the opposite: the best expansion opportunities come from the value delivered, and the CSM is the first to see it. They're the one who knows another team is interested in the tool, a new use case is emerging or the customer is approaching the limits of their plan. Their role isn't necessarily to close the deal, but to make the customer want to buy and to hand over at the right moment.
In practice, there's no single model. In many mid-market SaaS companies, the CSM also handles renewals and sometimes part of the upsell; in larger organisations, an account manager takes over the commercial side. Both models work. What doesn't work is an implicit model where nobody really knows who owns the renewal. And where everyone assumes someone else is handling it.
Support, Customer Success, account management: who does what?
To make things clearer, here are the main differences between the three functions. They describe a typical set-up, to be adapted to your organisation.
Support
- Trigger: a request or incident reported by the customer
- Mindset: reactive
- Contacts: users
- Horizon: the current ticket
- KPIs: first response time, resolution time, post-ticket satisfaction
Customer Success
- Trigger: the customer lifecycle and its signals (usage, health, key dates)
- Mindset: proactive
- Contacts: operational teams and the sponsor
- Horizon: the length of the contract, and beyond
- KPIs: retention, adoption, health score, Net Revenue Retention
Account management
- Trigger: the commercial calendar (renewal, expansion opportunities)
- Mindset: commercial
- Contacts: decision-makers and buyers
- Horizon: the contract and its growth
- KPIs: renewal rate, expansion revenue, attainment of sales target
If you remember just one thing: support fixes problems, Customer Success makes the customer successful, account management grows the contract. All three are needed, and none can replace the others.
Mistakes that blur the roles
Hiring a CSM without defining their scope
This is often how it all starts: customer numbers keep growing, the founders can no longer keep up, so they hire a CSM "to look after customers". With no further detail. The result: the CSM picks up everything nobody else wants to do, from chasing unpaid invoices to configuration questions. A CSM without a clear scope becomes the whole company's catch-all.
Making the Customer Success team solely responsible for churn
Customer Success plays a central role in retention, no question. But a customer poorly qualified at signature, an unstable product or an undeliverable sales promise can't be rescued by good CSMs. Churn is often baked in at the point of sale, and it concerns the whole company, starting with its leadership. If you expect the CS team to make up for everyone else's shortcomings on its own, you're asking the impossible.
Leaving each team with its own view of the customer
Support has its ticketing tool, Sales has the CRM, CSMs have... a bit of both, plus a spreadsheet. Each team sees part of the customer, and nobody sees the whole picture. That's exactly how misalignment happens. Clearly separated roles only make sense if everyone shares the same information about the customer. That's the whole point of a 360° customer view, whether it's built in an in-house data warehouse, a CRM or a Customer Success Platform such as Skalin.
How to split roles according to your stage of growth
In the very early days, one person often does everything: onboarding, support, account follow-up, renewals. That's fine, as long as you know which hat you're wearing at any given moment. It's when the team grows that things get complicated.
Our recommendation is to specialise teams gradually, in a fairly logical order:
- Onboarding first, especially if your product is technically complex: the onboarding team takes care of the "build", CSMs handle the "run".
- Support next, to absorb inbound requests and free up CSMs. If you can't create a dedicated role yet, a rota among CSMs works perfectly well in the meantime.
- Account management last, with no rush. Wait until you have four or five CSMs before hiring your first account manager: before that, you mainly risk creating a grey area between the two roles.
At each stage, write down who does what. A RACI matrix (Responsible, Accountable, Consulted, Informed) may feel a little textbook. Yet it's remarkably effective at clearing up the confusion on borderline issues: who handles a customer threatening to leave? Who runs the renewal? Who spots the upsell, and who closes it? If the answer to any of these questions is "it depends", that's where your customers will fall through the cracks.
Finally, if your CS and sales teams report to different leaders, consider a single point of oversight, for example a CRO (Chief Revenue Officer) who heads up all revenue-related functions.
Conclusion
Support, Customer Success and account management talk to the same customers, but for different reasons: the first responds, the second anticipates, the third negotiates. So the real question isn't which organisational model is right, but whether yours is explicit. If your teams can't say in one sentence who owns the value, who owns the contract and who owns the incident, your customers will notice before you do. So take an hour, get all three teams round the table and set out the boundaries in black and white. Your customers will thank you!
Further reading
