You Can't Route Accountability: The Value of Customer Success

I read a post on LinkedIn about eliminating dedicated Customer Success Managers in favor of access to a team of experts. The conclusion was that the traditional CSM role is simply too broad to work anymore.

✔️ I agree with the problem 100 percent.
❌ I respectfully disagree with the solution.

The uncomfortable truth? Most companies don’t fail at Customer Success because the role is flawed. They fail because they never designed CS to work in the first place.

When CS becomes:
🩹 The catch-all for support
🩹 The human escalation layer
🩹 The product expert, trainer, strategist, firefighter, and therapist

Of course it breaks. But that’s not a reason to remove ownership. It’s instead a reason to restore focus.

In my work, the highest-performing CS motions share three traits:

1️⃣ Clear Outcome Ownership
Someone must own customer health, value realization, and renewal risk end-to-end. This can’t be about routing questions to experts.

You cannot route accountability.

2️⃣ Ruthless Prioritization
CSMs should not respond to everything. They should instead work on the few things that actually move retention:
➡️ Adoption of core use cases
➡️ Executive alignment
➡️ Measurable and realized ROI

Everything else? Move it where it belongs (to support, education, services, account management, etc.) and keep it there.

3️⃣ Objective Customer Health
When health is visible and trusted and correlates with renewal, CS ceases to be reactive.

❌ No “check-in calls.”
❌ No random outreach.
❌ No guessing who needs attention.

Health tells you:
➡️ Who needs help
➡️ Why
➡️ And what will happen if you don’t act

Specialists are powerful when guided by health and priorities. Without that, you’ve just replaced one overloaded role with a smarter-looking form of chaos.

This isn’t about being “more personal” or “more precise.” It’s about designing a system where:

✅ Ownership is tight and clear
✅ Focus is not just encouraged by protected by leadership
✅ And expertise is available and applied intentionally

You don’t need fewer CSMs. You need fewer distractions, clearer roles, and a CS model built around outcomes, not random activity.

Cutting the role is the expensive shortcut.
Fixing the system is the durable answer.