Making Changes in 2025? Start Off with a Solid Foundation

By Kristen Hayer

Maybe you just inherited a new CS program. Or maybe you know your CS team is facing a bunch of new challenges in 2025. Perhaps your company is poised for significant growth this year, and you know that will mean scaling your CS approach. Any of these situations can cause a CS leader a lot of stress going into the new year. How should you prioritize the long list of projects? How can you effectively drive change when you know there will be a lot of it?

Start by going back to the foundations of your program. Every time you’re facing a new situation, it can help to revisit these areas to make sure that anything new you add is being built on a solid footing. Here’s where I start when I’m building out or refining any CS program.

Segmentation

You really need to start everything by making sure that you have segmentation in place. Most companies have at least 2-3 groups of customers who behave in different ways and need different things from the customer experience. Most companies also offer price points that are significantly different and have an impact on the level of service that can be cost-effectively delivered. Both of those things need to be balanced to create customer segments that make sense for both your customers and your company.

Journey Maps

Once you’ve settled on segments, it is time to plan the optimal journey for each segment of your customer base. Consider the customers who have had great experiences with you in a particular segment. Ask yourself: What made that experience great? In what ways did you effectively meet their needs? Are there any areas where customers aren’t having good experiences? Are there points of friction internally that cause customers to suffer? Use these answers to map an optimal journey with key touchpoints for each segment.

Staffing Models

With segments and journey maps in hand, you can move on to modeling your team. You need enough people (or automation) in every segment to deliver on the journey you designed.

Estimate how long the touchpoints in your journey will take, per customer, per month, and you can back into how many team members you’ll need to deliver those benchmarks. Balance that with industry benchmarks like how much revenue a CSM should represent or what percentage of revenue a CS program should cost, and you’ll have a metrics-based staffing model.

Compensation Plans

Once you know how many people you need to deliver on the journeys you have developed, you’ll need to provide strong incentives to drive performance. While a lot of people think about commission in terms of sales teams, more than half of CS professionals also have variable compensation plans. Unfortunately, a lot of these plans aren’t well designed and don’t really serve to drive high performance. Focus your variable plan on the 2-3 most important performance metrics you want your team to hit, and keep it simple.

Tech Ecosystem

You will also need to consider your technology ecosystem as a part of building or refining your program. While you may need to purchase something new, often you can use what you have, adopt something another team is using, or refine an existing solution. Audit your technology and be sure to ask your team members about systems they might have adopted and be using without your knowledge (think, Calendly or Canva). Use the audit to map touchpoints from the automated parts of your journey map to your tools and see if you should make changes.

Once you’ve reviewed and adjusted all of these foundations, it will be easier to see where you need to add to your program and prioritize the projects you need to tackle to scale. This will also help ensure that you’re building things out on a solid foundation and won’t have to revisit the basics because some piece of your program has collapsed under the weight of change.

If you need help with any of these program foundations, The Success League offers modular consulting options to get you back on track. We specialize in working with organizations that are outside of a traditional SaaS structure including healthcare, transportation, building, finance, and education. For more information or to set up an initial consulting call, please visit our website at TheSuccessLeague.io.

Kristen Hayer - Kristen founded The Success League in 2015 and currently serves as the company's CEO. Over the past 25 years Kristen has been a success, sales, and marketing executive, primarily working with scaling tech companies, and leading several award-winning customer success teams. She has written over 100 articles on customer success, and is the host of multiple podcasts about the field. Kristen has served as a judge for the Customer Success Excellence awards, and is on the board of several early-stage tech companies. She received her MBA from the University of Washington in Seattle, and now lives in San Francisco.