Gartner Insights Abstract

Scale Your Customer Success Organization Using a Capacity Model

Published: 17 April 2024

Summary

A customer success capacity model is key to achieving customer retention and expansion goals at scale. Revenue and retention leaders tasked with determining the appropriate customer success manager to customer ratio for CSM staffing and allocation should use this research to inform their strategy.

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Overview

Key Findings
  • Many leaders responsible for customer success use a basic revenue per customer model to determine the appropriate customer success manager (CSM) to customer ratio, resulting in a suboptimal allocation of CSMs to customers.

  • Revenue and retention leaders responsible for customer success (hereafter referred to as “customer success leaders”) lack a reliable tool for capacity planning that they can use in the budget cycle to request resources for the next fiscal year. This often results in an understaffed customer success function.

  • Segmentation models are used in multiple parts of the business, including marketing and sales, that customer success leaders can leverage

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