When people ask me how I define customer success, I describe its purpose as value creation and value capture. Then they pause, because that’s surely not the whole answer, and I go on to tell them some flavor of the following.

Warning: this essay is for people with a working knowledge of what customer success teams do. This is not intended for someone like my mom, who still has no clue what I do.

Customer success is a young discipline and still figuring out the boundaries of where it sits within a company. At some organizations it’s a highly technical role requiring product depth and domain expertise. At others it focuses instead on being the orchestrator, bringing in the right expertise at the right time to help the customer. The commercial side varies just as much. Some CSMs own a quota, handle the paper process, and manage the contract. Other CSMs create the conditions for renewals but don’t touch contracting.

Over the course of my career, I’ve worked with customer success teams that looked radically different from one another. What mattered wasn’t whether they shared the same job description. What mattered was whether they were aligned on their purpose.

It’s not obvious how to craft that purpose, so I looked to other disciplines as a guide.

During a strategy class in my MBA program, our professor explained strategy as deciding what to do given limited resources. At a basic level, businesses create value and capture value. The choices made in one shape the possibilities of the other.

This concept happens to work just as well for customer success! It provides a framework you can use to decide the shape of your CSM function.

Value Creation

Value creation is the process of creating something for a customer that helps them achieve their business goals.

For a CSM, value creation starts with understanding what your customer values. Broadly speaking, every customer wants to increase revenue and decrease costs. Your software must contribute to those goals. Some software sits very close to revenue and costs, like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, but other software requires more work to draw the connection, like a Learning Management System (LMS).

While productivity and efficiency capture the company’s goals, it flattens the motivations of the individual people who comprise the company. A great CSM uncovers what value means to each stakeholder: departmental goals, personal development, integration with their workflows and tools, status and career advancement, etc.

The CSM’s job is to connect those definitions of value to what the company can realistically provide. The product is the primary tool. Some CSMs are responsible for configuration, integration, and training on the software being offered, while other organizations have a dedicated implementation team for that.

Competent CSMs understand not only what the product does but what it enables customers to accomplish. They also have more tools than the product alone. They can bring in an executive sponsor to strengthen senior relationships, partner with a Technical Account Manager or Solution Architect to solve complex challenges, connect customers with peers who have already achieved similar outcomes, run workshops, host onsite sessions, or create opportunities for customers to learn from one another.

Value Capture

Value capture is the process of turning the value created into renewals, expansions, and advocacy.

This is where the sharpest distinctions between customer success organizations often emerge. Some CSMs own commercial conversations and contracting. Others don’t. Regardless of who owns the paperwork, customer success plays a critical role in value capture.

Before a contract is signed, the value exchange must already be clear. The customer needs to understand the outcomes that have been achieved, the outcomes that are still possible, and why continuing the partnership makes sense. Done poorly, you leave money on the table by failing to secure renewal uplift or expansion. Done very poorly, you risk losing the renewal entirely.

Don’t let the finance team read this, but value capture is about more than just the money. Advocacy is a critical form of captured value. Imagine a CSM who spends a year helping a customer embed a product into daily workflows, ultimately saving thousands of hours across the organization. If that success stays confined to the CSM and customer, it becomes a failure of value capture. Success could look like a case study, a LinkedIn post celebrating the results, a presentation at an industry conference, or an introduction to a prospective customer facing similar challenges. In each case, value created for one customer creates value for the broader business.

Setting the Boundaries

The challenge for leaders is that the boundaries between value creation and value capture, and the related boundaries between customer success, services, and sales are rarely obvious. They cannot be left to individual CSMs to negotiate on their own. Leaders are responsible for defining the strategy: the choices the company will make with limited resources, and translating that strategy into clear responsibilities.

I saw this firsthand when we built the customer success organization at Highspot. One of the most common frustrations from the field was uncertainty about who was responsible for what. Rather than leave each individual to work it out themselves, we brought together the leaders of customer success, implementation, technical account management, advisory services, and account management to establish principles and define responsibilities. We reinforced those decisions through training, scenario-based role plays, and open discussion forums. The goal wasn’t to eliminate every gray area. It was to ensure that people were operating from a shared understanding rather than negotiating the same questions repeatedly.

Customer success will never have a universal job description. Different companies need different models. What matters is that each organization makes deliberate choices about how customer success creates value, captures value, and partners with the rest of the business. The consequences of not doing so show up in NRR, GRR, cross-functional friction, and team morale.

I don’t see the ambiguity of customer success as a flaw. As products, markets, and companies change, so too will the teams that operate within them. In customer success, we have the freedom to be more creative in how we structure our teams and responsibilities, how we create and capture value.