#77: Why You Need A CS Ops Team To Scale

Your CS team is making decisions based on gut feel instead of data. And your scaling efforts are held together by duct tape and spreadsheets.

If that rings true, it's time to invest in CS Ops.

The journey to CS operational excellence isn't just about automation - it's about building the infrastructure that helps your team make better, faster decisions that drive customer outcomes.

Who doesn't want that?

In my latest podcast with the VP of CS at vComm, we discussed the importance of CS Ops. Kristen brought her first CS Ops person to the business when she had only 6 CSMs.

This week's newsletter will help you build the case for CS Operations and structure it for maximum impact!

CS Ops Responsibilities

Most CS leaders I talk to initially see CS Ops as a function to help do two things:

1. automate manual work
2. create better reports

While that's part of it, if that's your only hope for CS Ops, you're missing the bigger picture.

A strategic CS Operations function is the bridge between your customer success vision and its execution at scale.

Think about Formula 1 racing. The drivers are crucial. But it's the telemetry data, pit crew coordination, and race strategy that win championships. 

The driver is the CSM. The car is the product. Everything else is CS Ops.

When building your CS Operations function, start with these five pillars:

Every pillar must tie back to one goal: helping your CS team drive customer outcomes.

If you want to dive into the roles in the team, here's a great article from the CS Insider.

Measuring the impact of CS Ops

 CS Operations delivers four core types of value:

1. Operational Excellence: Create a holistic Customer Success engine. Ensuring you're well integrated with the entire GTM machine by leveraging people, data, content and technology to deliver results for customers and the business.
2. Strategic Intelligence: Build a data infrastructure that can provide insights. It gives you the ability to build predictive models for churn and expansion and enables your CSMs to be deployed where they are most needed and can have the biggest impact. 
3. Strategic Planning: Create your people and headcount plans to keep you on top of how your business will grow. And develop relevant financial targets and forecasting models
4. Business Impact: Improves the visibility you have through forecasting. Has a positive impact on gross retention through earlier risk identification. Drives net retention with systematic expansion plays. Increases CS team efficiency and capacity, and thus helps decrease the cost of CS. 

If you are building a case for CS Operations, you need to go from these potential value-adding activities to the exact way CS Ops will help your business. 

If you need help building that business case, this article can help you!

Metrics that can help you understand if the investment is paying off:

1. Operational Excellence: Rep Productivity 
2. Strategic Intelligence: Improvement on key leading indicators (ie Health Score)
3. Strategic Planning: CSM Capacity Overtime and Forecasting Accuracy
4. Business Impact: GRR | NRR | Churn Rate 

A great CS Ops team will help you improve all these metrics and more!

Beware: Even the best CS Operations function will fail without strong alignment between CS leadership and ops teams on priorities and expected outcomes.

The RevOps Question: Where Should CS Ops Live?

This is where it gets interesting (and controversial).

Many companies are moving toward a RevOps model that unifies Sales, Marketing, and CS operations. The argument? Better alignment and shared infrastructure.

I personally love this structure because it unifies the GTM team. 

Especially when you think about bringing all your GTM teams into one system (here's why you should do it).

But we all know what happens when you share resources with Sales and Marketing...

You end up getting nothing.

That's why I see many high-performing CS organizations hiring their own CS Ops people who report directly to the CCO (This blog post expands on these 2 structures).

 Here's how CS Ops often matures:

TL'DR

The real value of CS Ops is building the infrastructure that helps your CS team make better, data-driven decisions at scale. 

Two key things to know:

1. CS Ops delivers value through:
   • Operational excellence (automation + standardisation)
   • Strategic intelligence (health insights + predictive analytics)
   • Strategic Planning (headcount + financial impact)
   • Business impact (better retention + CS team efficiency)
2. Build it in stages:
   • Start with a shared resource to get you off the ground
   • Move into a dedicated person to focus on automation and reporting
   • Evolve to standardised processes and health scoring
   • Graduate to predictive analytics and strategic initiatives
   • Scale to AI-driven insights and innovation

Worth the investment? My experience says yes!