Understanding the Role of CS Ops & CS Enablement

When you first start your business, your priority is to sell your product, i.e. acquire new customers. But when your company starts growing, you’ll realize that getting new customers without the means to keep them in the long run will make your pipeline look like a leaky bucket. 

With 21% of a company’s revenue coming from upsells, according to a fresh HubSpot study, companies are slowly beginning to realize the importance of customer success as a revenue-generating function rather than just a cost center. This is also one of the main trends in CS this year, according to our own research. 

As a result, more leaders are ready to invest in enabling not just their sales reps but also the CS team, providing them with playbooks, training, and technical means to work more effectively. In this post, we will look closer at the CS ops and enablement roles, learn about their responsibilities, and identify when companies need to start with the positions to improve the customer success strategy.

The role of CS ops and enablement

CS operations and CS enablement are two functions that offer the foundation for a customer success model. CS ops focus on improving and orchestrating the underlying processes, solutions, and metrics that customer success teams depend on to bring value. 

CS enablement, in contrast, aims to equip the customer success teams with all the tools and training they require. Combined, these functions help customer success teams to be effective in their job.

The good news is that 55% of customer success teams currently have a CS ops function, while CS enablement is slightly more overlooked with only 37%. Given that more firms realize the value of such roles, we will see more CS teams get the support they need in terms of enablement and operations.

Differentiating from sales ops and enablement

While Sales and Customer Success may share similar structural support functions, their goals and focus areas diverge significantly:

• Sales Enablement and Operations prioritize acquiring customers, streamlining the sales process, and closing deals efficiently. These roles are designed to optimize lead conversion and pipeline velocity.
• CS Ops & Enablement, in contrast, center on retaining customers, expanding existing accounts, and fostering long-term partnerships. Their ultimate objective is to maximize the lifetime value of each customer.

By focusing on the post-sale journey, CS Ops and Enablement ensure that customers receive consistent, value-driven experiences from onboarding to renewal—and beyond.

Key functions of CS ops and enablement

Although they are often treated as one, operations and enablement job functions have quite different responsibilities and focus areas in the CS team structure. 

Key responsibilities of CS Ops

CS Operations is the “behind-the-scenes” function that ensures the foundation of a CS team is solid. Its responsibilities include:

• Optimize and streamline CS workflows, processes, and tools based on the perception of current operations. This way, there is no interruption between the customer success team, and their productivity is enhanced.
• Gather and sort CS data to generate an overall picture of customer state, satisfaction level, and activity. Using data analytics, CS ops can determine patterns, anticipate future problems, and help CS teams make informed decisions to improve customer satisfaction.
• Identify areas for improvement through the ongoing assessment of current processes and structures. This proactive approach provides an opportunity to implement better practices and introduce new strategies to increase the team’s and customer’s performance.
• Work closely with other teams (e.g., product, engineering) to advocate for customer needs and ensure customer feedback is incorporated. This cross-functional integration assists in making the products and services offered to customers even more customer-oriented.

Key responsibilities of CS Enablement

CS Enablement complements CS Ops by focusing on the people side of the equation. Its responsibilities include:

• Educate and upskill CS teams by offering new and continuous training. It entails developing specific training packages, organizational workshops, and other means to enable the team to solve diverse customer relationship issues effectively.
• Create CS playbooks, materials, and learning centers within the company to act as reference documents that allow the team members to work through various customer issues while delivering consistent action and referencing important information when required.
• Ensure that CS teams have the right skills, content, and strategies to succeed by focusing on continuous skill-building and preparing teams for diverse customer interactions. This involves developing new training material and strategies based on market trends and offering help to ensure employees stay aligned with the customers.
• Work closely with CS ops to identify the skill gap, map training requirements, and, where required, develop programs against the functionality of the CS function. This approach guarantees the link between enablement initiatives, optimization of process delivery, and the unique needs of the customer success team.

Who should be in charge of CS ops and enablement?

The approach to managing CS ops and enablement roles often depends on the size and structure of your company:

• Larger companies have the resources to hire dedicated CS ops and enablement roles separately. These roles are more specialized and provide more detailed and comprehensive approaches to customer success operations, team management, and development.
• Smaller companies have a limited budget to hire separate people to specialize in certain areas, so CS ops and enablement may not be split. These responsibilities are delegated among the existing workforce, most often to the CS leader or manager. In such cases, individuals should take multiple responsibilities and cover the essential functions of operations and enablement.

The role of automation in CS

Automation has revolutionized customer success by reducing the burden of repetitive tasks and freeing up teams to focus on relationship-building. Here’s how it transforms CS:

• Streamlining workflows - Automation can handle tasks like scheduling check-ins, sending follow-up emails, and collecting feedback surveys. This ensures that your playbooks run on autopilot — the important tasks are completed on time without manual intervention.
• Delivering real-time insights - Automated reporting tools provide CS teams with up-to-date information on customer health, product usage, and engagement. This enables teams to identify and prevent churn risks or upsell opportunities quickly.
• Supporting scalability - As your customer base grows, automation ensures you can maintain high levels of service without overloading your team. For example, automated onboarding workflows can help new customers get started without requiring extensive one-on-one support.

Process automation in sales and CS also serves as a stepping stone for introducing Ops and Enablement roles. By automating basic processes, companies can identify gaps and refine workflows before formalizing these functions.

When do you need to introduce dedicated ops & enablement roles to your team?

Having dedicated CS ops and enablement roles in your team is essential and beneficial, but it may cause trouble if you don’t make it at the right time. There is no such to-do list to determine that time, but there will be some hints that your company and process will give you.

• Increased customer volume and operational demands: As you have more customers, customer needs and their interaction with support will become more complicated. The CS team may be under pressure, and when customer satisfaction declines due to organizational constraints, dedicated positions can help streamline processes and maintain quality.
• Difficulty maintaining customer satisfaction and retention metrics: If your team cannot maintain high satisfaction and retention, specific CS ops and enablement positions can. These functional roles help your team remain agile and adaptive while handling large business volumes through streamlining, offering solid training, and using data.
• Data indicating operational or skills gaps: Organizational performance indicators, including decreased response speeds or consistent skills deficiency among employees, can indicate the need for special attention. These issues can be solved by introducing more rigour to the hiring and promotion process for CS Ops and Enablement roles so that the team has the proper training for dealing with a vast and significantly more diverse customer base.

Evaluating these strategic measures helps firms proactively establish targeted services that optimize customer satisfaction results and improve long-term revenue.

Best practices to empower your CS team

For companies that may not yet have the resources for dedicated CS Ops and Enablement roles, there are still effective ways to support your CS team:

• Leverage automation and processes: Automating redundant processes frees up the team's time to spend caring about customers. Integrating effective practices is one way of managing efficiency within an organization.
• Foster cross-functional collaboration: Engage with and befriend product, sales, and engineering to ensure that customer information is passed around the organization. It contributes to developing a single notion of how to overcome the shortcomings of the customer’s experience.
• Invest in team training and development: It’s essential to educate and continue the skill development of your CS team. Through learning opportunities, your CS team’s capability will be developed to assist customers and prepare the team for future challenges.
• Optimize tools, data, and reporting: Ensure that the CS team has adequate matrix and software support for data analysis and informed decisions. Properly acquire technology to support the team and work, such as tracking performance indicators.

These best practices will help you to build a solid infrastructure and empower your CS team to reduce the organizational barrier.

Conclusion

Customer success is a cornerstone of sustainable business growth. By investing in Customer Success Operations and Enablement, you create a foundation for delivering exceptional value to customers at scale. These roles not only enhance team efficiency and effectiveness but also drive revenue through improved retention and upselling.

Whether you’re a startup laying the groundwork or an established business scaling operations, prioritizing CS Ops and Enablement ensures you’re not just acquiring customers but fostering lasting relationships that fuel long-term growth.

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