Gartner Research

Use 3 Key Pillars to Establish a Customer Success Function as a Tech CEO

Published: 25 May 2023

Summary

Building a scalable customer success function can be challenging without the proper foundation. Tech CEOs must build the function on top of three key pillars covering charter, budget and capacity models.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Lack of a defined customer success charter results in misalignment in the roles and responsibilities of customer success and other business functions, causing duplication of effort and customer confusion.

  • A budget model that solely relies on sales and marketing (S&M) costs or cost of goods sold (COGS) to fund the customer success function will limit the organization’s potential scale and integration into the postsale delivery life cycle.

  • Resources and effort expended to each customer must be commensurate with the commercial opportunity that each customer offers the company. Customer success segmentation and capacity models that don’t recognize this will misallocate valuable

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