48.5% of CS orgs have dedicated ops support. The other half is running blind.
According to Gainsight and TSIA's annual State of Customer Success survey, 48.5% of customer success organizations now have dedicated operations support. That means more than half of CS teams are still running their entire function without the operational infrastructure that makes retention predictable, expansion systematic, and customer health measurable.
If you lead a CS team without ops support, you know the symptoms. Renewal forecasting lives in spreadsheets. Health scores are manually updated (if they exist at all). Onboarding handoffs vary by CSM. Data about customer engagement is scattered across your CS platform, CRM, support tool, and product analytics, and nobody has time to stitch it together. Your CSMs spend 30% or more of their week on administrative work instead of talking to customers.
The first CS Ops hire is one of the highest-leverage decisions a CS leader can make. But timing it right, defining the role correctly, and structuring the function as it grows are all decisions that most CS leaders are making for the first time. This is the playbook.
When to make your first CS Ops hire
Not every CS team needs a dedicated ops person immediately. At small scale, a strong CS leader can handle process design and platform configuration alongside their management responsibilities. But there are clear signals that indicate the inflection point.
Signal 1: CS team exceeds 8-10 CSMs
Below eight CSMs, a VP of CS can typically maintain direct oversight of processes, data, and tooling. Above that threshold, the operational complexity outpaces what any leader can manage alongside their core responsibilities of strategy, team management, and executive stakeholder engagement. The VP starts making tradeoffs: skip the platform configuration to prepare for the board meeting, or skip the board prep to fix the broken renewal workflow. Neither choice is good.
Signal 2: ARR exceeds $10M
At $10M ARR, the revenue at stake in your existing customer base is large enough to justify dedicated operational investment. If your gross retention is 90%, you're losing $1M per year to churn. A CS Ops hire who improves GRR by even 2-3 percentage points pays for themselves multiple times over.
Signal 3: Renewal process is manual and unpredictable
If renewals are managed through calendar reminders, ad hoc CSM outreach, and last-minute scrambles, you have a process problem that won't improve with more CSMs. It improves with operational infrastructure: automated renewal workflows, standardized timelines, health-based risk flagging, and forecasting rigor. That's CS Ops work.
Signal 4: CSMs spending 30%+ of time on admin tasks
Survey your CSMs or have them track their time for two weeks. If they're spending more than 30% of their time on data entry, report building, manual account updates, and internal coordination, they're doing ops work instead of customer work. Every hour a CSM spends on admin is an hour not spent on engagement, adoption, and expansion.
Signal 5: Customer data is scattered across 5+ systems
Product usage lives in your analytics platform. Support data lives in Zendesk or Intercom. Contract details live in Salesforce. Engagement history lives in Gainsight or spreadsheets. Communication history lives in email and Slack. When no single view of customer health exists, every decision requires manual data aggregation. That's unsustainable and it's exactly the problem CS Ops solves.
The cost of waiting too long
The most common mistake is waiting until the pain is acute before making the hire. By that point, you've accumulated months or years of process debt, data inconsistency, and CSM burnout. The new CS Ops hire spends their first six months cleaning up messes instead of building forward-looking infrastructure. Hiring proactively, at the inflection point rather than past it, gives your first ops person the runway to build things right instead of patching things that are broken.
The first hire: what to look for
CS Ops Manager profile
Your first CS Ops hire should be a CS Ops Manager, not an analyst and not an admin. This distinction matters enormously.
An analyst can build reports and surface insights but typically lacks the systems-thinking and process design skills to build operational infrastructure. An admin can configure your CS platform but typically lacks the strategic perspective to design the right processes. A CS Ops Manager combines both capabilities with the judgment to prioritize what to build first and the stakeholder management skills to drive adoption.
The profile you're looking for: someone who thinks in systems, is fluent with data, can design and document processes, has hands-on experience with CS platforms and CRMs, and can communicate effectively with both frontline CSMs and executive leadership.
Technical skills
The first CS Ops hire needs to be hands-on. They won't have a team to delegate to, so they need to be personally capable of executing across the operational stack.
- CRM administration. Proficiency in Salesforce or HubSpot at an admin level. They should be able to build reports, create custom fields, configure automations, and manage data quality without depending on a Salesforce admin in another department.
- CS platform experience. Working knowledge of Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero, Vitally, or equivalent. They should understand health scoring configuration, playbook design, and lifecycle automation.
- Data analysis. Comfortable building analyses in Excel, Google Sheets, or BI tools. Able to calculate retention metrics, build cohort analyses, and identify trends in customer data.
- Basic SQL. Not required for every CS Ops role, but increasingly valuable. The ability to query product usage databases directly (rather than waiting for an analytics team to pull data) dramatically accelerates the time to insight.
Soft skills
Technical skills get the work done. Soft skills determine whether the work gets adopted.
- Stakeholder management. CS Ops serves multiple constituents: the VP of CS, frontline CSMs, sales teams (for handoffs), product teams (for usage data), and finance (for renewal forecasting). The ability to manage competing priorities and build trust across functions is essential.
- Process design thinking. The ability to look at a messy, ad hoc workflow and design a standardized, scalable process. This requires both analytical rigor (understanding why the current process fails) and empathy (understanding why people resist change).
- Communication. CS Ops work is invisible if it isn't communicated well. The ability to present data clearly, document processes concisely, and explain the "why" behind operational changes determines whether the CS team embraces or resists the new infrastructure.
Why a "former CSM" hire can be risky for the first ops role
It's tempting to promote a strong CSM into the first CS Ops role. They understand the customer motion, they know the pain points, and they have credibility with the team. These are real advantages.
The risk is skill set mismatch. The skills that make someone an excellent CSM (relationship building, empathy, account management, customer advocacy) are different from the skills that make someone an excellent ops professional (systems design, data analysis, process optimization, platform administration). Some CSMs have both skill sets; many don't.
If you promote a CSM into CS Ops, validate that they genuinely enjoy and excel at the operational work, not just the customer-facing work. The worst outcome is losing a great CSM and gaining a mediocre ops person.
Salary range
For a CS Ops Manager with 3-5 years of relevant experience, expect to pay $90,000-$140,000 base salary in the US market, depending on geography, company stage, and the candidate's specific skill set. Major metro areas (San Francisco, New York, Boston) command the higher end of that range. Fully remote roles in lower cost-of-living markets can land at the lower end.
Senior CS Ops Manager or Director-level hires with 7+ years of experience and a track record of building the function from scratch will command $130,000-$175,000+, particularly at growth-stage or PE-backed companies where the operational mandate is broader.
Team structure by stage
Solo CS Ops (1 person, $10M-$25M ARR)
At this stage, your CS Ops person is a generalist handling everything: platform configuration, data management, process design, reporting, and basic analytics. Their scope is broad, and their impact depends on ruthless prioritization.
Typical responsibilities:
- Own and administer the CS platform (Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero)
- Build and maintain customer health scores
- Design and implement renewal workflows and playbooks
- Create CS dashboards and reporting (executive and operational)
- Manage the CS-to-CRM data sync and overall data quality
- Support the VP of CS with board-level retention metrics and analysis
The solo CS Ops person should focus on building the three things that produce the highest leverage: a functional health score, a standardized renewal process, and a clean executive dashboard. Everything else is secondary until those three are working.
Small team (2-4 people, $25M-$75M ARR)
As complexity grows, the generalist model breaks. You need specialization. A typical team of three at this stage:
- CS Ops Manager (team lead). Owns strategy, process design, and stakeholder management. Manages the team and partners with CS leadership on priorities.
- CS Platform Specialist. Owns the CS platform configuration, automation, and integration with CRM and product analytics. This is a technical role focused on making the tooling work reliably and scale.
- CS Analyst. Owns reporting, dashboards, and data analysis. Builds the analytics that help leadership understand retention trends, identify at-risk segments, and measure CS team performance.
At the higher end of this range (4 people), you might add a process and enablement lead who owns playbook design, CSM training on new processes, and documentation.
Established function (5+ people, $75M+ ARR)
At scale, CS Ops becomes a true sub-function with dedicated teams:
- Analytics team (2-3 people). Owns retention analytics, cohort analysis, predictive modeling, and executive reporting. May include a data engineer who builds and maintains data pipelines from product, CRM, and support systems.
- Systems team (1-2 people). Owns the CS tech stack: platform administration, integrations, automation, and tool evaluation. As the stack grows, this role becomes increasingly specialized and technical.
- Strategy and enablement team (1-2 people). Owns process design, playbook development, CSM enablement, and change management. This team ensures that the processes and tools the analytics and systems teams build actually get adopted by the CS organization.
- CS Ops Director/VP. Leads the function, sets strategy, manages the budget, and represents CS Ops in cross-functional leadership forums.
At this stage, CS Ops should have its own OKRs tied to measurable retention and expansion outcomes, not activity metrics.
Where CS Ops should report
Reporting structure shapes priorities, access, and influence. There are three common models, each with tradeoffs.
Under VP of Customer Success
This is the most common and often the most effective structure. CS Ops reports directly to the VP or SVP of Customer Success.
Advantages: Closest to the customer team. Fastest execution because priorities are set by the same leader who owns the CS team. Deep understanding of CS-specific workflows, challenges, and needs.
Risks: Can become siloed from sales and marketing operations. May optimize CS processes without considering upstream (sales handoff) or cross-functional (renewal involving sales) dependencies.
Under RevOps leader
In companies with a centralized revenue operations function, CS Ops may report to the VP of Revenue Operations alongside sales ops and marketing ops.
Advantages: Best for cross-functional alignment. Shared data standards, integrated tech stack decisions, and consistent reporting across the revenue lifecycle. Eliminates the handoff gaps that occur when each ops function operates independently.
Risks: CS-specific needs may get deprioritized in favor of sales-focused initiatives, especially if the RevOps leader comes from a sales ops background. CS workflows have unique requirements (health scoring, adoption tracking, renewal management) that a generalist RevOps leader may undervalue.
For a deeper look at how CS Ops fits within the broader RevOps structure, see the revenue operations guide and RevOps team structure guide.
Hybrid or dotted-line
Common at growth-stage companies that are transitioning from siloed ops to a more integrated model. CS Ops reports directly to the VP of CS for day-to-day priorities but has a dotted line to the RevOps leader for data standards, tech stack decisions, and cross-functional process design.
Advantages: Balances CS-specific focus with cross-functional alignment. Gives CS Ops a seat at both the CS leadership table and the RevOps coordination table.
Risks: Dual reporting can create confusion about priorities. Requires clear decision rights: who decides when CS Ops spends a week on a CS-specific initiative versus a cross-functional data project?
The first 90 days for a new CS Ops hire
The first 90 days set the trajectory for the entire function. Move too fast and you'll build the wrong things. Move too slow and you'll lose credibility. Here's the framework.
Days 1-30: Listen, audit, document
The first month is about understanding the current state. Resist the urge to fix anything yet.
- Shadow CSMs. Sit in on customer calls, QBRs, and internal team meetings. Understand how CSMs actually work, not how the process documentation says they work.
- Audit the tech stack. What CS tools exist? How are they configured? What's integrated and what's not? What data flows are working and what's broken?
- Audit the data. What's the state of customer data in the CRM and CS platform? How is health scored? How are renewals tracked? Where are the gaps?
- Interview stakeholders. Talk to every CS leader, frontline CSM, and cross-functional partner (sales ops, product, support). Ask: what's working, what's broken, and what would make your job easier?
- Document the current state. Write it down. Every process, every gap, every workaround. This becomes the foundation for your roadmap.
Days 31-60: Quick wins
In the second month, deliver 2-3 quick wins that demonstrate value and build credibility with the CS team.
- Standardize a handoff. Pick the most painful handoff (usually sales-to-CS or onboarding-to-ongoing) and design a standardized process with defined triggers, required information, and SLAs. Implement it in the CRM or CS platform.
- Build a dashboard. Create the executive CS dashboard that the VP of CS has been wanting: NRR, GRR, renewal pipeline, health score distribution. Make it clean, accurate, and automated. When the VP presents this at the next leadership meeting, your credibility compounds.
- Configure the CS platform. If the platform is poorly configured or underutilized (common), focus on the highest-impact configuration: health score setup, renewal task automation, or account segmentation.
The goal of quick wins isn't perfection. It's demonstrating that CS Ops adds tangible value quickly, which earns the trust and political capital needed for larger initiatives in month three and beyond.
Days 61-90: Launch first playbook, deliver first executive report
In the third month, move from quick wins to foundational infrastructure.
- Launch your first playbook. Typically an at-risk account intervention playbook triggered by health score changes. Define the trigger, the actions, the owners, and the timeline. Implement it in the CS platform. Train the CS team on it.
- Deliver the first executive report. A comprehensive retention and expansion analysis that goes beyond the dashboard. Include cohort analysis, churn driver identification, and recommendations. This positions CS Ops as a strategic function, not just a platform admin.
- Present a 6-month roadmap. Based on your first 30 days of discovery and your 60 days of quick wins, present a prioritized roadmap for the next two quarters. Include health scoring improvements, playbook buildout, data integration projects, and process standardization initiatives.
For the full CS operations framework including the complete playbook library and technology stack, see the customer success operations guide.
Scaling CS Ops: when to add headcount
The ratio benchmark
A common ratio is 1 CS Ops person per 10-15 CSMs. This is a rough benchmark, not a rule. The actual ratio depends on several factors:
- Complexity of the CS motion. High-touch enterprise CS with complex implementations and multi-stakeholder relationships requires more ops support than tech-touch SMB CS.
- Maturity of the tech stack. A well-configured, integrated stack requires less manual ops work than a fragmented, poorly configured one.
- Scope of CS Ops responsibilities. If CS Ops also owns enablement, the ratio will be lower (more ops people needed). If enablement is separate, the ratio can be higher.
When to add an analyst
Add a dedicated CS analytics hire when:
- The volume of ad hoc data requests exceeds what the CS Ops Manager can handle alongside their platform and process responsibilities
- Leadership needs regular cohort analysis, predictive churn modeling, or segment-level retention reporting that requires sustained analytical work
- The data complexity (multiple products, multiple segments, usage data from product analytics) exceeds one person's bandwidth to maintain and analyze
When to add a systems specialist
Add a dedicated CS platform/systems specialist when:
- The CS tech stack includes three or more integrated systems (CS platform, CRM, product analytics, support tool, enrichment)
- Integration maintenance and troubleshooting consume more than 20% of the CS Ops Manager's time
- The organization is evaluating a platform migration or major implementation (Gainsight, Totango, etc.)
- Tool sprawl becomes unmanageable and you need someone focused on rationalizing, integrating, and optimizing the stack
Common hiring and org design mistakes
Hiring too junior
The first CS Ops hire should not be an entry-level coordinator or junior analyst. They need to be a self-directed professional who can assess the current state, design solutions, implement them, and drive adoption, all without a manager telling them what to do next. Hiring too junior means you've added headcount without adding capability, because someone else (usually the VP of CS) still has to do the strategic and design work.
Treating CS Ops as CRM admin
If your CS Ops person spends 80% of their time creating custom reports, fixing broken Salesforce fields, and responding to "can you pull this data?" requests, they're being used as a CRM admin. CRM administration is part of the job, but it's not the job. CS Ops should be designing processes, building infrastructure, and surfacing strategic insights. If admin work is consuming the role, either the CS platform needs better configuration (so the admin work decreases) or you need a separate admin resource to handle tactical requests.
Not giving CS Ops authority over process decisions
CS Ops can design the best renewal process in the world, but if they don't have the authority to enforce it, adoption will be inconsistent. The VP of CS must explicitly empower CS Ops to set process standards and hold the team accountable. This means CS Ops can require specific data inputs from CSMs, can define when and how playbooks are executed, and can flag non-compliance. Without that authority, CS Ops becomes an advisory function that produces recommendations nobody follows.
Embedding CS Ops too far from the CS team
If CS Ops sits in a centralized ops function with no regular interaction with frontline CSMs, they'll lose touch with operational reality. The processes they build will be theoretically sound and practically useless. CS Ops should attend CS team meetings, participate in account reviews, and have regular touchpoints with frontline CSMs, regardless of where they formally report.
Failing to define success metrics for the CS Ops function itself
CS Ops should be measured on outcomes, not activities. Not "number of playbooks created" or "reports built," but "renewal forecast accuracy improved from 15% variance to 5% variance" or "health score now predicts churn with 75% accuracy" or "CSM admin time reduced from 35% to 15%." Without clear success metrics, it's impossible to evaluate whether the CS Ops investment is producing returns.
Build the function that makes retention predictable
CS Ops is the operational backbone that transforms customer success from a relationship-driven, inconsistent function into a data-driven, scalable revenue engine. The first hire is the catalyst: the person who builds the health scores, the playbooks, the data infrastructure, and the reporting that turns retention from something you hope for into something you engineer.
Time it right: when your CS team exceeds 8-10 CSMs, your ARR passes $10M, or your renewal process is held together by spreadsheets and good intentions. Hire the right profile: a systems thinker who can both design the strategy and configure the platform. Structure it wisely: start with a generalist, add specialists as complexity grows, and ensure CS Ops has the authority to enforce the processes it designs.
The companies with the best retention numbers aren't the ones with the best CSMs (though that helps). They're the ones with the best operational infrastructure supporting those CSMs. That's what CS Ops builds.
At RevenueTools, we're building the operational infrastructure that connects customer data, health signals, and revenue workflows into a system that CS Ops teams can build on. If you're making your first CS Ops hire or scaling an existing function, we'd like to help.