Top Mistakes Leaders Make When Building a Customer Success Organization

Kristi Faltorusso

Have you tried to build your Customer Success program without collaborating with your colleagues? Did you fail to set proper expectations with the members of your team? Or do you tend to focus more on problems, at risk customers, or churn that you forget to celebrate the wins along the way? – If this sounds familiar to you, you’re not alone. 

There are thousands of CS Leaders who find themselves faced with making decisions that impact them, their team, their company, and their customers. With each decision there’s a lot of potential risk, so making mistakes is not really an option. Think about telling your CEO that half your team quit because of poor communication and ambiguity as you moved quickly to develop a new Customer Journey without telling them.

The reality is that even the most seasoned leader will make mistakes. In fact, sometimes it is the leader we expect to know it all, that gets it all wrong. Everyday you risk stepping into a “leadership landmine”, so being aware of potential landmines will help you be a better leader for your team, your company, and your customers.

Over the past decade we’ve built, scaled, and transformed many CS organizations and have made a ton of mistakes along the way. We’ve also worked with hundreds of customer success teams and thousands of customer success professionals with the benefit of learning how they’ve navigated many of their own challenges. Armed with these learnings, insights, and battle scars, we’ve compiled our top 16 mistakes to avoid when building a customer success team. 

If you recently attended The Customer Conference in June 2021, you may have heard our CEO, Dave Blake, and our VP of Customer Success,  Kristi Faltorusso, discuss their top 6 mistakes leaders make when building a customer success organization. Well, we couldn’t stop there! Even 16 didn’t seem to capture them all, but we believe these are a great start for all customer success leaders.

Download our guide to check out the top mistakes as well as get tips and advice on how to navigate and avoid these pitfalls.

Download the Top 16 Mistakes When Building a Customer Success Team