Striking a Nerve: To CS or Not to CS

I’ve been wondering this past week why my last post struck such a nerve. Not because it traveled far, which it certainly did, but because of how people engaged with it. The comments weren’t drive-by takes or performative disagreements. They were thoughtful, conflicted, and in many cases deeply familiar.

That signals something deeply unresolved.

What people reacted to isn’t some specific CS model or a debate about titles. It’s a shared tension around how post-sale actually operates inside many organizations today, and the quiet disconnect between what Customer Success is meant to deliver and what it’s routinely asked to absorb.

Just this past week, I spoke with a post-sale owner at a growing company who illustrated this perfectly. Her remit is customer value, ensuring customers achieve outcomes, see ROI, and remain healthy over time. Yet her days are dominated by billing issues, support transitions, messy sales handoffs, and internal escalations that exist because ownership is unclear. All of that work matters, and yet none of it directly advances customer value.

That gap is the nerve this debate touches.

Customer Success has slowly become the place where ambiguity lands. When processes are undefined, responsibilities overlap, or hard prioritization decisions are avoided, the work drifts into post-sale. How many times have we all seen CS gatekeeping any decision related to a customer? Over time, CS ends up accountable for outcomes it doesn’t fully control, while being evaluated on activity that doesn’t reliably produce those outcomes.

So, when the conversation turns to whether CS is “working,” it understandably becomes emotional. Not because people are defensive, but because many have been carrying responsibility without clarity for a long time.

This isn’t about whether companies should or shouldn’t have CSMs. It’s whether we’ve been honest about what we expect post-sale to own, and whether we’ve designed teams to support those expectations.

That question matters now, because the tolerance for fuzziness is gone. Retention isn’t some abstract metric. It’s core to growth, efficiency, and valuation. And retention doesn’t improve through brute force activity. It improves through clarity, focus, and intentional design.

I’m hoping this doesn’t fuel a louder debate, just a more honest one. Because that’s the conversation I think many of us are ready to have.