Why the Best Customer Success Teams Aim to Become Obsolete

The Ultimate Goal of Customer Success

What makes a great Customer Success team, you ask? It's when customers don’t need them all the time. Many companies view a Customer Success as the team that hand-holds customers, solves issue, and makes renewals happen. But the best CS teams work toward something counterintuitive: making themselves obsolete.

When your CS team is overwhelmed with tickets, it might be a clue that something else isn’t quite right; a product that's not as user-friendly, a poor onboarding process, or self-serve resources that nobody wants to look at. Instead of just throwing more CSMs at the problem, ask yourself: how can we set customers up for success without needing us at every step of the way?

The most successful CS teams ensure they align their OKRs with those of the customer. For this to work, great relationships, a proactive attitude and strategic guidance are essential. It’s not just about ticking of QBR sessions and customer check-ins. It's about building meaningful relationships and a thorough understanding of the customers' use cases.

When customers experience success on their own, it signals that the things just work—the UI, the onboarding journey, the features, things just click. In the next sections, we’ll dig into how Customer Success goes beyond support by addressing churn as a symptom rather than the problem, leveraging a sales-oriented mindset, and ensuring that onboarding begins even before signup. We'll also uncover how CS challenges are often rooted in the product itself, why tracking forward-looking metrics matters, and how bringing the voice of the customer to your product team makes all the difference.

1. Customer Success ≠ Support

Yes, there’s a thin line. Customer Success means supporting customers, but the real goal of CS is to help customers realize their desired outcome, not to handle bugs, product issues, or tell users where to click. If your product's UI is needs an IKEA manual for customers to understand it, maybe your problem isn't the onboarding calls you organize with your customers.

Great CS teams guide customers toward success, not simple product usage. Success means ensuring customers get real business value from your product in the shortest time possible. And the role of CS is to come up with strategies, inspirational use cases, and success stories from other clients to guide the customers to that point.

Just remember, if a CSM spends the majority of their time answering basic usability questions, it’s a signal that the product, onboarding, or self-service resources aren’t doing their job.

2. Churn Is a Symptom, Not the Problem

Churn isn’t a problem—it’s the symptom of deeper problems. Customer Success teams typically see churn as their ultimate failure. Of course, reducing churn as much as possible is important, but churn is often a result of problems customers faced along the way trying to get value from your product.

To really reduce churn sustainably, you have to focus on leading indicators, like:

• Time-to-first-value: How quickly do users experience their first real, tangible with our product?
• Feature adoption velocity: Are users actively engaging with our product’s most valuable features? And how long does it take for them to adopt them?
• Executive engagement levels: Is business impact related to our product constantly shared with key decision-makers?

Rather than firefighting and scrambling to save customers at the last moment, the most effective CS teams work across all teams, from sales to development, to address problems at their core.

3. Why the Best CSMs Think Like Salespeople

A common mistake in hiring for your CS team is prioritizing account management skills over commercial intellect. Many CSMs are friendly and well-liked by customers but struggle to drive growth. Yes, of course it's important to become a trusted partner of the customer, but CS is more than just that. The best CSMs are great sales-people, which they can skillfully combine with their relationship management skills—together with the customer, they sell achieved successes forward to craft opportunities for expansion.

Great CSMs:

• Create upsell opportunities based on sharing the value customers achieved with the entire customer organization, without making it feel like a sales pitch.
• Make renewals happen before they become a concern.
• Position expansions and upsells as natural progressions tied to the customer’s goals–more adoption = more value for the customer.

In short, a successful CS function doesn’t just retain customers; it helps them grow, ensuring they see an increasing return on investment through well-crafted up- and cross-sell opportunities.

4. Onboarding Defines Retention

If a customer doesn’t achieve value with your product quickly–and I mean quickly– they almost never turn into long-term users. Nevertheless, I have seen way too often that onboarding is added to a product as an afterthought, rather than used as the guiding principle for how the product was designed.

A poor onboarding journey is a recipe for churn, while a strong one accelerates product adoption and makes expansion a natural move. Ask yourself:

• How quickly do customers understand and achieve tangible value?
• Are we nudging customers to their "aha!" moments effectively?
• Where do users drop off, and how can we bump them back onto the journey?

Retention isn’t something that begins when a customer is at risk—it starts much earlier. Contrary to popular belief, I argue it even before they sign up. All the education and evangelizing that you did with your marketing efforts made someone sign up, and all that framing framed their mind about what success looks like. This pre-signup interaction lays the foundation for success and a long, healthy customer relationship.

5. Customer Success or a Product Issue?

Many challenges faced by CS teams, like low adoption, confused users, constant fear of churn, are often product issues in disguise. If users struggle to succeed, it’s often because:

• The product doesn't match the user journey
• Getting started takes too long and delays value too much
• The (business) value is unclear and not well-positioned in the product

Rather than “rescuing” customers through constant interventions, CS teams should serve as a bridge to the product team, feeding customer insights that help build better user experiences. If the same issues keep coming up again-and-again across your customer base, the solution isn’t more CSMs—it’s a better product.

6. Listening to the Right Customers

It’s easy to focus on the customers that scream the loudest—the ones who constantly give feedback, demand new features, or escalate their concerns. We can all agree that engaged customers are a great sign, even constant support tickets are better than customers that are disengaged. However, customers who aren’t speaking up might just be the ones secretly getting tons of value from your product, and you need to find this out.

• Loud customers typically need support or want the product tailored to their needs, perhaps because their use case isn't a fit.
• Quiet customers often already experience (some) success and require little intervention.

If you fall into the trap of optimizing only based on complaints, you risk misjudging what’s actually driving long-term customer retention. Instead of relying solely on support tickets, make sure you combine quantitative feedback with rich qualitative feedback, to truly understand the context and make informed decisions.

7. Measuring What Actually Matters

Oftentimes, Customer Success teams rely on backward-looking metrics like:

• NPS (Net Promoter Score): “Would you recommend us?”
• Churn rate: “Who already left?”
• Expansion revenue: “Who already upgraded?”

While these are valuable for certain things, they are no absolute prediction of future success and retention. Instead, the best CS teams focus on leading indicators that signal customer health before problems arise—metrics like time-to-first-value, feature adoption speed, and executive engagement are key in predicting customers' success.

The Ultimate Goal: Making CS Less Necessary

A great Customer Success strategy doesn’t just focus on keeping customers happy or renewals. And it certainly should not be about increasing the headcount of the CS team to be able to solve more customer issues. Instead, great CS teams reduce the need of a larger CS team.

• A well-designed onboarding flow, baked into the product, reduces the need for excessive training and hand-holding for simple tasks. It should bring users to their first "aha!" moments smoothly.
• Built-in education and proactive guidance, like tooltips, nudges or even short in-product videos, remove constantly recurring support tickets.
• A clear product and go-to-market strategy ensures customers succeed without constant hand-holding. Keep in mind, onboarding, education and framing of your users starts well before users even sign up for your product!

In some cases, high-touch, consultative CS works great. However, the goal of CS should never be to act as an overpaid babysitter, a human IKEA manual, or an internal employee of the customer. The best CS teams don’t aim to grow their headcount through the roof—they aim to create an environment where customers don’t need them for every small decision. CS is about empowering customers to achieve their desired outcomes independently, stepping in only at pivotal moments to drive success. When customers can succeed without constant intervention, that’s the ultimate sign of a well-functioning product and business.

What’s Next?

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