customer success services
December 8, 2024
Do you think of customer success as a role? Or as a portfolio of services?
I love the way Sasi Yajamanyam describes customer success in his book Reimagining Customer Success:
“Companies must offer a broad set of skills and services to help customers succeed, and this combination of services varies based on the company and customer context. As the company and its products evolve, so does the need for these skills. Customer Success should be viewed as a portfolio of services and skills that are needed to help your customers.”
Let’s unpack that…
Sasi outlines four categories of services that companies should offer their customers. These aren’t necessarily paid services — more like customer entitlements.
Here’s how these services break down:
Service Type
Description
Examples
Relationship
(a.k.a. Customer Success Account Management)
Ongoing support to educate customers, ensure success, and demonstrate value.
Value / Success Management, Renewal, Expansion Sales, Premium Technical Support Services, Managed (i.e., extension of your team) Services
Time-bound
(a.k.a. Customer Success Services)
Predefined, scoped services with a clear start and end date.
Implementation / Onboarding, Health Audit, Strategic Consulting Workshops, New Workflow or Integration deployments
Always-on
(a.k.a. Scaled / Digital CS Programs)
Scalable, self-service tools customers can access on-demand.
Customer community, Knowledge Base, Education, Digital CX (e.g. In-app, onboarding email sequences, etc.)
Event-based
(a.k.a. Customer Support)
Targeted support for specific needs or occurrences.
Standard Technical Support, New User Onboarding, Product Release
(Note: the “Aka’s” are the terms I usually use to describe Sasi’s service types.)
The nature of each service informs the skills and capacity required to design, build, and deliver the service on an ongoing basis.
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A common question is whether these services should be included in your subscription or offered as paid add-ons. Here are two questions to help you think through it:
What level of 1:1 engagement is required? High-touch services like strategic workshops, proof of concept/accelerators, or managed services often make sense as paid options. Anything where a person is assigned from the company to execute a project for a single customer.
High-value services are expensive to provide. Consider funding delivery headcount by charging.
Who benefits? If the service benefits your company, it’s probably “funded” by the ongoing subscription fee. If it mainly benefits the customer, charging might make sense. For example, renewal and expansion sales are foundational. We don’t charge the customer for them — they’re “baked into” the subscription cost.
Early-stage companies offer many services across each category on an ad-hoc basis. That’s normal—it’s called being scrappy.
But as the company grows and matures, specialties will emerge, and many will naturally evolve into distinct offerings. And what once felt reactive transforms into a scalable customer engagement system.
Service categories you might recognize
If you’re not already thinking about your CS function as a portfolio of services, now’s the time to start. This mindset unlocks new ways to build capabilities, deliver value at scale, and staff customer success teams.
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