What does a Head of Customer Success do?

Short answer

The role is responsible for the company having a working way of ensuring customers get value – and for that producing measurable results. It covers strategy, operating model, segmentation, data and cross-functional collaboration, and often commercial responsibility. Line management is common, but not a requirement.

“Head of Customer Success” is one of the most varied titles in Norwegian business. In one company, the person leads a large department with several teams. In another, it is a single person who has been given responsibility for the customer journey, without direct reports. In a third, the title is a senior specialist role within a Customer Support team.

All the variants can be right. But they involve very different responsibilities, authority and expectations. For an overview of the other roles in the field, see Roles in Customer Success. This article describes what the role typically covers, and which questions determine what it should look like in a particular company.

The core of the role#

Whatever the size and organisation, the role has a common core: the Head of Customer Success is responsible for the company having a clear and working way of making sure customers achieve value – and for that producing measurable results.

This means the role is more than leading a team. It is about owning a question on behalf of the whole company: what happens to customers after they have bought, and how can we do better?

Strategy#

The Customer Success strategy describes how the company will create value for existing customers, and how that connects to the company's overall goals. A good strategy answers questions such as:

Which customers are most important to retain and develop, and why?
What are the main reasons customers leave – and which of them can we influence?
Where in the customer journey do we get the most effect from investing?
What role should Customer Success play in growth: retention, expansion, or both?

The strategy has to fit the business model. A company with a few large customers needs a different strategy from one with thousands of small ones.

Operating model#

The operating model describes how the work is actually done: who does what, for which customers, with which tools and processes.

This involves decisions on, among other things:

Coverage model. Do customers get a dedicated account owner, a shared team, digital customer journeys, or a combination?
Capacity. How many customers can one person follow up meaningfully in each segment?
Processes. How do handover from sales, onboarding, risk follow-up, renewals and escalations happen?
Tools. Which systems are needed to see the customer's situation and act on it?

A common mistake is to copy the operating model from another company. Models that work for large software companies with high contract values rarely work without adaptation for companies with many smaller customers. This is described in more detail in Customer Success in the SMB market.

Segmenting customers#

Not all customers need the same thing. Segmentation is about dividing customers into groups that will receive different follow-up.

Common dimensions are:

Value: current revenue and potential
Complexity: how demanding it is for the customer to get value
Life stage: new customer, established customer, customer close to renewal
Behaviour: usage patterns and signals of risk or growth
Industry or need: when different customer groups use the product in different ways

Segmentation determines how limited resources are used. It should therefore be a deliberate decision, not a result of which customers shout loudest.

Retention and commercial responsibility#

Most Customer Success leaders have responsibility for retention, either formally or in practice. But how far the commercial responsibility extends varies a great deal:

Model	What Customer Success owns	Typical consequence
No formal commercial role	Customer value and customer health	Easy to build trust, harder to show business value
Retention	Renewals and churn	Clear link to revenue; requires good insight into risk
Retention and expansion	Renewals, cross-sell and upsell	Strong commercial position; risk that advice is perceived as selling
Shared with sales	Customer Success identifies opportunities, sales closes	Requires a clear division of responsibility and shared incentives

Simplified. Many companies have hybrid forms, and the model often changes as the company grows.

There are good arguments for all the models. The most important thing is that responsibility is clear, and that the targets used can actually be influenced by the people measured on them.

Cross-functional collaboration#

Customer Success can rarely solve the most important customer problems alone. Many of the causes of churn lie in the product, the price, the sales process or Customer Support. A large part of the role is therefore about influencing others.

With sales: what did we promise the customer? Are we selling to customers who fit the product? How does the handover happen?

With product: where do customers experience friction? Which features hinder or create value? How is customer insight used in prioritisation?

With Customer Support: which enquiries could have been avoided? How do we share information about customers at risk?

With marketing: how do we communicate with existing customers? Which content helps customers succeed?

With finance: how do we calculate retention, and how do we forecast renewals?

A Head of Customer Success who only leads their own team will often find the same problems coming back. The effect lies in changing the causes.

The effect lies in changing the causes, not just in handling the consequences.

Improving the customer journey#

The customer journey – the customer's overall experience from purchase to renewal – is rarely owned by one function. Customer Success is often well placed to see it as a whole, because the function follows the customer over time.

In practice, this means:

mapping where customers stall or drop off
identifying unnecessary friction and unnecessary enquiries
prioritising improvements by effect
following up that the improvements actually work

Data and reporting#

A Customer Success leader needs data to prioritise and to show value. That means:

Retention measures such as GRR, NRR, customer churn and revenue churn
Customer health and early risk signals
Customer journey indicators such as time to value and completed onboarding
Capacity and workload in the team

It is also about explaining the figures honestly. It is rarely possible to attribute a particular share of retention to Customer Success alone. Read more in How do you measure the value of Customer Success?

Automation#

In most companies it is neither possible nor desirable to follow up every customer manually. Automation makes it possible to give relevant help to many customers, and frees up time for the situations where people make a difference.

Typical uses are automated onboarding flows, alerts based on usage data, reminders before renewal, and priority lists for the team. Automation requires good data and clear rules, and should be evaluated in the same way as other Customer Success work: does it work?

Organisational maturity#

What the role should focus on depends on how mature the company is.

The role's focus by maturity

Early stage
Establishing onboarding, a simple overview of customers and the first measurements. The leader does a lot themselves.
Growth stage
Segmentation, scalable processes, recruitment and a clear division of responsibility with other functions.
Mature stage
Optimisation, more advanced use of data, commercial responsibility and influence on product and strategy.

Leadership and line management#

It is common to assume that a “Head of” manages people. That is not always the case.

Some companies use the title for a leader with several teams and middle managers. Others use it for a person with functional responsibility – responsibility for Customer Success working in the company – without direct reports. The person exerts influence through processes, data, collaboration and a mandate from management, not through line management.

Both can work. But they require different skills, and they should be described clearly. When the role manages people, it also covers recruitment, staff development, building expertise and the working environment. When it does not, the ability to exert influence across the organisation is even more important.

Three questions clarify a lot:

Responsibility: which results is the role responsible for?
Authority: which decisions can the role make on its own – about processes, tools, budget and priorities?
Scope: which customers, functions and staff are covered?

When responsibility is greater than authority, the role becomes frustrating. When the scope is unclear, the results become hard to assess.

Reporting lines#

Who the Head of Customer Success reports to varies. None of the models is always best, but they give different centres of gravity:

Reports to	Typical strength	Typical risk
Chief executive (CEO)	Close to strategy and priorities	Requires the CEO to have capacity to follow up
COO	Link to operations, processes and efficiency	Commercial potential may be deprioritised
CRO	Link to revenue and alignment with sales	Short-term sales targets may dominate
CCO	A coherent view of commercial customer relationships	Depends on how the role is defined in the company
VP Customer Experience	A coherent customer experience across channels	May become distant from revenue and commercial decisions

Editorial assessment based on common organisational patterns, not on systematic surveys.

The most important thing is not the reporting line itself, but that Customer Success has access to the decisions that affect customers, and that its goals are aligned with the rest of the leadership.

Summary#

A Head of Customer Success is responsible for the company understanding, following up and developing its existing customers – and for that producing results. The role covers strategy, operating model, segmentation, data, collaboration and often commercial responsibility. It may manage people, but does not have to.

For companies about to hire or define the role, it is wise to start with the questions of responsibility, authority and scope. The title says little. It is the content that determines what the role can achieve.