Customer Success Operations Playbook: Tips & tools for CS Ops

If you're leading a customer success team, you’re probably feeling the pressure from all sides: 

Internally, you're expected to drive renewals, reduce churn, and contribute directly to revenue growth. And as customer demands increase, your team is asked to do more, faster—while still delivering that personal, one-on-one touch.

But there’s a problem. CSMs often get stuck in the weeds of manual processes, operational headaches, and firefighting internal inefficiencies. 

Instead of focusing on the customer, they're bogged down by administrative tasks that should be streamlined. This leads to slower response times, missed opportunities, and frustrated clients.

A strong customer success operations backbone can relieve that two-way tension.

Without solid CS Ops, you risk operational breakdowns that drain your team’s time and jeopardize the customer experience. The right operational structure frees up CSMs to focus on what matters: driving real customer outcomes and hitting revenue targets.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• The role Customer Success Operations plays across the customer lifecycle
• When to hire a CS Ops team
• Popular CS Ops tools
• CS Ops best practices

:::box "What is customer success operations?", "Customer success operations, or CS Ops, is the behind-the-scenes work of making Customer Success teams more efficient and effective at providing value to customers.

CS Ops includes streamlining workflows, defining best practices, optimizing tooling, and enabling cross-functional collaboration for Customer Success teams.   

Depending on the organization's size, CS Ops can be an entire team, one individual’s job, or a task. At smaller companies, CS Ops work is typically handled by a team lead or manager."

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:::

If you have more than one CSM, you probably already have playbooks, processes, tools, and standards for how your CSMs should approach their work. The bigger your organization gets, the more complex maintaining all of these assets becomes. 

That’s why, as your organization matures and your customer base grows, those responsibilities often get assigned to a separate CS Ops team—one that often falls under the RevOps umbrella.

Customer success operations responsibilities

CS Ops exists to help Customer Success do their jobs to the best of their abilities. Let’s look at some typical responsibilities of customer success operations. 

1. Process development & workflow optimization

The sales handoff, kickoff meeting, onboarding, renewals, executive business reviews, churn detection, and feature requests are all delicate moments in the customer lifecycle that must be thought through carefully.

A customer success operations manager (or team) helps your whole customer success organization run smoothly by developing repeatable and scalable processes around these critical milestones. 

As companies grow, these processes need to be refined to ensure they work for the company on a larger scale. 

Rachel Jennings-Keane, Global Head of Customer Success at Assignar, shared a good example of how she managed this with Dock.

Assignar’s onboarding process had always involved five key steps, but every onboarding was conducted differently—each rep did things their own way, which led to repeated efforts and things falling through the cracks. 

As their CS Ops team iterated on the process—going from PowerPoint slides to project management tools, and eventually landing on Dock— they eventually developed a consistent process that worked better for customers, reduced the time spent on kickoff calls, and enabled the faster ramp up of new hires. 

2. Tool & technology administration

Purchasing, implementing, and optimizing a CS tech stack is a massive undertaking that pulls CSMs away from customer-facing work.

CS Ops team can collaborate with CSMs to understand pain points and build tool stacks that make their lives easier.

Here are some common categories of tools in a CS tech stack:

• CRMs - like HubSpot or Salesforce
• Customer success platforms - like Catalyst or Gainsight
• Sales outreach platforms - like Outreach
• Helpdesk tools - like Zendesk or Help Scout
• Customer onboarding tools - like Dock 

Once these tools are implemented, the CS Ops team can train the CSMs on how to use them to ensure they have the biggest positive impact possible.

3. Data management & analysis

When your customer success ops team owns customer data management, you’ll have someone to rely on to ensure data is trustworthy, accessible, and up to date. 

Data management and analysis takes a lot of time. Siloed tools, messy segmentation, and open-ended customer feedback make it all worse.

Creating a customer success operations team gives CSMs a dedicated resource to gather and analyze customer insights, product usage patterns, customer behaviors, and customer satisfaction metrics. 

CS Ops teams can also implement performance tracking and reporting tactics so the customer success team and leaders across the organization can monitor customer churn, retention rates, and other key performance indicators for the team.

4. Training & enablement

If there isn’t a dedicated customer success enablement team or manager, CS Ops may also be responsible for training the customer success team on internal processes, systems, and the products they support and sell. 

This involves collaborating with Product Marketing to maintain internal knowledge bases, playbooks, and other resources to ensure CSMs are equipped with the information and tools they need to succeed.

Training and enablement don’t stop when new hire onboarding ends. As products change and processes evolve, CSMs must be continuously trained to deliver against their goals. 

5. Cross-functional collaboration

While it’s not as cut and dry as some of these other responsibilities, Customer Success Operations functions as the glue between your Success team and other departments—like Sales, Product, Marketing, and Support. 

CS Ops works with RevOps to establish workflows and best practices for these teams to work together, ultimately giving customers a more seamless experience.

When to hire for customer success operations

As your customer base grows, so will the demands on your customer success team. As CSMs take on that extra work, they risk spreading themselves too thin, limiting the impact they can have on customers’ success with your product. 

But what’s the sign it’s time to hire for CS Ops?

For Jigsaw’s Catherine Blackmore, it took about two years of rapid growth before she saw the need for a dedicated operations person. 

For you, it’ll come down to a combination of how quickly your business and customer success team grows, how high-touch your processes are, and how complicated your tech stack is. 

Here are some things to think about when considering the timing of your first customer success operations hire.

• Is your customer base growing rapidly? If you’re experiencing a lot of growth, you should consider hiring a customer success operations role. Your customers' demands will increase, as will the demands of your CSM team. It’s normally better to hire CS Ops before hire too many CSMs, because they can ensure your CS team can run like a well-oiled machine as your business scales—and it’s better to hire a little early than to get caught on your back foot.
  
  
• Are you getting the insights you want? Do you know why customers are churning? What aspects of your product they’re engaging with (or not engaging with)? CS Ops can help establish data collection processes and own data analysis to help you understand customer needs and behavior.
  
  
• Can CSMs keep up with the workload? Your CSMs might be burning out because they’re spending a lot of time on administrative tasks like preparing slide decks, meeting with the product team about feature requests, and combing through your CRM to determine which accounts are a priority. A CS Ops specialist can help take some of that work off their plate by building more efficient and repeatable processes and systems.
  
  
• Are you experiencing tool sprawl and sloppy processes? It’s a big red flag if your CSMs use various tools with little consistency. You might be burning money on multiple systems that accomplish the same task when you should, in fact, standardize. Customer success operations can audit your customer success technology stack and figure out which tools should stay and go. They can also implement proper training programs to ensure existing and new CSMs understand how to get the most value from the technology.

Customer success operations team structure

As an early-stage or mid-size company, you can usually get away with a single CS Ops person. 

But as your business grows, the need for more specialized roles becomes evident. Let’s examine what a CS Ops maturity model might look like across small, medium, and large companies:

• Early-stage (first customers): Early on, a single team member can handle CS Ops alongside working with customers. CS at an early-stage company is usually highly reactive and very scrappy. There often isn’t a budget for a dedicated CS Ops role, and someone on the team who is interested or skilled will voluntarily work on projects to help the whole team operate better. 
• Mid-stage (some customers): As your company grows and you hire more CSMs, it’s probably time to hire your first CS Ops role to help ensure your CSM team can run efficiently and smoothly. It’s also common for a customer success team lead or manager to handle operations work at this stage. 
• Late-stage (many customers): Mature companies often need a dedicated CS Ops team, including data analysts and CS enablement specialists, to ensure the team is well-trained on the CS technology stack and the product they’re selling.

CS Ops' role in the customer lifecycle

Customer success is a mindset and a function that impacts every stage of the customer journey, so it’s logical that your customer success operations team will too. 

If you’re new to CS Ops or hiring a CS Ops role for the first time, here are some best practices you should consider throughout the customer lifecycle.

The sales process

Customer success operations can design solutions for a smooth hand-off between sales and customer success. This process should be standardized, repeatable, and updated as needed. 

CS Ops can also empower sales teams with insights such as product usage metrics to identify upsell opportunities. 

With Dock, sales teams can capture and store artifacts throughout the sales process in a digital sales room. This creates a single shareable resource, where CSMs get complete visibility into the entire customer relationship, creating a clean and seamless handoff process.

Your customer success ops team also has an impact on other presales activities, like standardizing how you build out demos or enabling proof-of-concepts for potential customers.

Onboarding and implementation

What does your onboarding process look like? What enablement resources or assets are available to the customer success team and customers during this phase? 

Customer Success Operations is heavily involved in identifying customer segments and creating unique onboarding and implementation plans for each type of customer.

They’ll help you understand and forecast what’s coming through the sales pipeline, assign new accounts across your team, and create customer success plans. 

Customer collaboration tools like Dock enable CS Ops teams to create standardized onboarding plans for each segment, ensuring customers are onboarded in a consistent manner. 

Using Dock for onboarding helped Loom save two hours of time onboarding each new customer. This also helps expedite the onboarding process by eliminating many unnecessary meetings and emails.

Brittany Soinski, Manager of Onboarding at Loom, put it this way:

“We use Dock to onboard all of our new customers. We're able to launch a new onboarding for a new customer in about 10 seconds, and it's fully customized. It saves us a ton of time and we're able to start working right away—whereas it previously took us 15-30 minutes to create a custom Notion hub.”

For our own customers at Dock, we have one onboarding template for fully managed customers and another template for more lightweight, self-serve customers.

Dock also makes customer enablement easier — giving your customers the specific self-service resources they need to see value from your product. 

"Dock helps create a great first impression with my customers. It helps organize all of the pre-sales/post-sales tasks, documents, and conversations. One customer even commented on how our proposal format really impressed them."
- Pranav Piyush, Co-founder & CEO, Paramark

Renewals

A well-structured renewal process significantly impacts customer retention. CS Ops can influence renewals by leveraging health scores and usage data to anticipate renewal challenges and opportunities. 

Your CS Ops team can also work to design unique renewal strategies for each customer segment, including customers without an assigned CSM.

On our Grow & Tell podcast, UpKeep’s VP of Success, Joseph Schmitt, recommended sending renewal notices well in advance:

There's a whole tier of customers that do not have a dedicated customer success manager, but we need to ensure their renewal. So in those instances—and even with the ones that you get high human touch—we send them out a notice. 

We ask them the question: “Are you planning on renewing, or are you making any changes to your subscription?” That essentially prompts the conversation.

- Joseph Schmitt, VP of Success at UpKeep (from Grow & Tell)

Maximizing customer retention is the core job of every customer success organization, and the only way to do that is to identify what works and to create repeatable processes that the entire team can rely on. 

Popular tools for customer success operations teams

Administering tools and systems is a big part of customer success operations, and there’s no shortage of tools available to customer success teams today. 

The below isn’t a comprehensive list of tools, but it’s an excellent place to start if you’re rolling out a customer success technology stack for the first time:

• Onboarding tools: Onboarding tools like Dock help sales and customer success teams operationalize their onboarding process, engage customers, and deliver a faster time to value. 
• Customer success platforms: Customer success platforms such as ChurnZero help CS teams organize customer segments, prioritize engagements, and predict churn.
• Customer relationship management: Platforms like Salesforce bring together your entire organization — including your revenue teams — to act as a source of truth for customer data.
• Data analytics: Tools like Tableau help customer success teams visualize customer behaviors and product usage data.
• Customer feedback: Survey tools like SurveyMonkey enable CS Ops to quickly gather and analyze customer feedback.
• Communication: Tools like Slack and Zoom enable CS teams to connect internally with their team and externally with customers.
• Help desk platforms: Ticketing tools like Zendesk allow customer support and success teams to collaborate and help customers achieve their outcomes.

CS Ops tips

If you’re just getting started on your customer success operations career, or if you’re a customer success leader hiring for your first operations role, here are some tips for successfully integrating CS Ops with your team:

1. Get to know the customer success managers

Customer Success Ops is there to help make the CSM’s day-to-day run a little smoother, so invest in getting to know them. Meet with them regularly to build strong relationships and to understand their pain points. 

What’s working well? What needs improvement? 

Work to identify and understand inefficiencies in their processes so you can design solutions to make them better.

2. Design a CSM new-hire onboarding plan

Document a plan for how CSMs will get up to speed on your product(s) and be equipped to work with clients as their strategic advisors. Depending on your company and product, this new hire onboarding plan could take weeks or months.

Involving your customer success operations personnel in onboarding new hires sets them up as a vital resource and partner from the very beginning.

3. Map out your customer journey

Customer journey mapping is a valuable exercise that helps you understand customer needs throughout the whole customer lifecycle. By mapping out their journey, you can develop ways to improve their experience and identify ways to help the CSMs do their jobs better.

If you don’t already have a clear understanding of your customer journey, having your CS Ops person create one is a great way for them to quickly learn about your customers, your team, and your current processes. 

4. Design a customer onboarding plan

Ad-hoc onboarding might work in the early days, but if you’re hiring for a dedicated CS operations role, you’re likely already at the point where you need a more formalized customer onboarding process. 

With Dock, you’re able to give your new customers a dedicated onboarding hub that gives them a step-by-step, personalized guide to finding success with your product. 

You can build out joint customer success plans that keep you and your customers aligned, share relevant content, conduct surveys, and more. 

When you’re getting started, document the onboarding plan for each customer segment, then train your CSMs to operate that plan each time as the most effective way to bring on new customers. 

:::callout "🧩 Free onboarding plan template", "Use this Dock customer onboarding plan template to get started quickly.":::

5. Audit your technology stack

There’s an app for everything these days, and it’s easy to get carried away with adding various tools for your business. 

A good customer success ops specialist (or team) helps combat tool sprawl and ensures you’re maximizing the value of the tools you’ve invested in.

Start by listing each tool your CSM team uses and include a short description of how it’s used. If you start to see overlap, it probably means there’s an opportunity to streamline processes and even cut unnecessary costs from redundant systems.

6. Analyze available data

You need to learn everything you can about your customers. Have your customer success ops manager sit in on customer calls occasionally, in addition to reviewing existing quantitative data such as growth metrics, churn rates, support metrics, and more. 

:::callout "📖 Related reading", "To learn more about measuring CS performance, check out 22 metrics & KPIs for Customer Success teams":::

Manage CS Ops with Dock

A great customer success operations team acts as a catalyst for your business, accelerating progress and results. 

By standardizing processes, managing tools and data, training, and providing strategic insights, customer success operations enables customer success teams to operate more efficiently and effectively.

Dock can help CS Ops teams by creating a standardized onboarding process for every CSM to follow.

Dock is free to try with up to 5 customers. Give it a try here.