Why Customer Success Is Structurally Set Up to Fail

© Jonathan Greaves July 2025

Controversial view. Customer Success as a function is quietly failing.

I don’t think Customer Success fails because the people are bad at the job. I think many Customer Success teams are structurally set up to fail.

That’s a very different problem.

Over the years I kept noticing something strange:

Customer Success often carries the responsibility for the outcome…
while controlling only a fraction of the actual relationship.

Think about it.

A CSM may be responsible for:

• retention,
• adoption,
• customer health,
• renewals,
• advocacy,
• escalations,
• stakeholder alignment,
• onboarding success,
• and strategic growth.

But they usually don’t control:

• pricing,
• product roadmap,
• support quality,
• implementation,
• engineering priorities,
• sales promises,
• executive sponsorship,
• or budget constraints.

In other words:

The role carrying the relationship often has the least structural authority over it.

That creates invisible operational strain.

Especially in SaaS.

We then layer on:

• more KPIs,
• more tooling,
• more reporting,
• more meetings,
• more “customer ownership”…

…without fixing the underlying imbalance.

And eventually we wonder why burnout happens.

Or why the average tenure in Customer Success remains relatively short.

I believe this is because most organisations still think transactionally while expecting relational outcomes.

The modern customer relationship is no longer owned by one role.

It’s an ecosystem.

And ecosystems require contribution visibility, not heroism.

That’s one of the core ideas behind the Relationship Intelligence™ and S.U.R.F.™ work I’ve been developing.

Not:
“Who owns the customer?”

But:
“How balanced is the relationship system itself?”

Because sustainable relationships cannot depend on one overextended function carrying the emotional and operational weight of the entire business. If we are able to manage that, then if you consider customers having one unified experience of multiple contributors (including themselves) then we might just see a necessary evolution in customer success.

Do you Agrea?