CHURN IS DEAD
Customer Success Doesn't Deserve to Survive
6 minutes · Strategy
The Function That Watched Itself Die
Last month, Workday gutted 400 people from their Global Customer Operations team. Not sales. Not engineering. Customer operations.
Their official reason? "Realigning resources toward high-growth areas."
Translation: We're moving money away from humans who manage customers and toward AI and revenue-generating roles.
A week earlier, Salesforce quietly cut thousands—with customer support roles specifically in the crosshairs.
The CS community responded exactly how you'd expect. LinkedIn erupted with the usual chorus:
"CS is more important than ever!"
"Companies will regret this!"
"We just need to prove our value!"
And here's the part nobody wants to hear:
Most CS teams don't deserve to survive.
This Is Not a Layoff Problem. This Is a Credibility Problem.
Let me be very clear about what I'm saying. I'm not arguing that customer success as a *concept* is dead. Helping customers achieve outcomes is obviously critical. That's not going away.
What I am saying is that the way most CS teams operate—the way they're structured, the way they measure themselves, the way they spend their days—has been a slow-moving credibility crisis for over a decade.
And the layoffs aren't an injustice. They're a market correction.
Here's what a typical CSM's week looks like at most SaaS companies:
- Monday: Internal standups about customer health scores that nobody trusts
- Tuesday: QBR prep—pulling screenshots from dashboards the customer could pull themselves
- Wednesday: "Check-in" calls where the customer politely wonders why they're on this call
- Thursday: Chasing product for a feature request update that won't happen this quarter
- Friday: Logging notes into a CRM that nobody reads
Now tell me: which part of that is *irreplaceable*?
Which part of that justifies a six-figure salary?
Which part of that makes a CFO look at the CS line item and say, "We absolutely cannot cut this"?
The uncomfortable answer is: almost none of it.
The Three Lies CS Tells Itself
Lie #1: "We own the relationship."
No, you don't. The product owns the relationship. If your product disappeared tomorrow and you called the customer to chat, they wouldn't pick up. You are an intermediary, and intermediaries get disintermediated.
The CS teams that survive understand this. They don't "own" the relationship—they *shape* the decisions customers make about the product. There's a massive difference.
Lie #2: "We prevent churn."
Show me. Specifically, show me the customer that was going to churn, and the exact action you took that saved them, and the revenue number attached to that save. If you can't do this for at least 60% of your accounts, you're not preventing churn. You're monitoring it and hoping for the best.
Most "churn prevention" in CS is really just "churn detection after it's too late." The customer decided to leave six months ago. You found out two weeks before renewal. That's not prevention. That's a funeral arrangement.
Lie #3: "We need a seat at the table."
This one hurts the most because it's been the rallying cry of CS leaders for years. But here's what nobody says: you don't *earn* a seat at the table by asking for one. You earn it by making decisions that move revenue.
Engineering doesn't ask for a seat at the table. Sales doesn't ask. Finance doesn't ask. They sit there because removing them from the conversation would break something.
If removing CS from the conversation wouldn't break anything, that's not a political problem. That's an *impact* problem.
So What Does a CS Team That Deserves to Survive Look Like?
I've spent the last year studying this—inside my own enterprise accounts and across conversations with CS leaders running teams in some of the most complex environments in the world. Public sector. Cybersecurity. Infrastructure. Places where a single renewal can be worth millions and the implementation timeline is measured in years, not weeks.
The teams that are untouchable—the ones no CFO would dream of cutting—share five characteristics that I'm packaging into what I call the Survival Framework.
The CS Survival Framework: 5 Non-Negotiables
1. Revenue Attribution, Not Revenue Adjacency
Surviving CS teams can point to specific dollars they influenced. Not "we supported the renewal." Not "we were involved in the expansion conversation." They can say: "This customer was going to consolidate vendors and cut us. I ran a business impact analysis that showed $2.3M in operational risk if they migrated. The customer renewed for three years."
That's attribution. Everything else is adjacency—being near the revenue without causing it. Adjacency gets cut.
[ACTION] For every account in your book, write one sentence that starts with "Because of my specific involvement, this customer..." If you can't finish that sentence with a measurable outcome, you have a gap. [/ACTION]
2. Technical Credibility, Not Just Relationship Warmth
The Custify 2026 CS trends report nailed this: "Products are more complex, integrations are deeper, and customers expect CS to understand architecture, not just workflows." In enterprise environments, your customer's technical team will test you. If you can't speak their language—if you can't understand why their Splunk instance is over-provisioned, or why their SOAR deployment has visibility gaps—you become a scheduling coordinator with a nicer title.
Surviving CS teams invest in technical depth. They can sit in an architecture review and add value. They can challenge a customer's implementation approach because they've seen what works and what doesn't across dozens of similar environments.
[ACTION] Identify the three most technically complex aspects of your product's deployment. Can you explain them to a customer's engineering team without bringing in a solutions engineer? If not, that's your learning plan for the next 90 days. [/ACTION]
3. Customer Decision Shaping, Not Customer Relationship Managing
Here's the litmus test: Did a customer make a different decision because of your input?
Not a different *feeling*. A different *decision*. Did they expand into a new use case because you showed them what was possible? Did they restructure their team's workflow because you recommended it? Did they choose to stay because you reframed the value in business terms their CFO understood?
Surviving CS teams are in the business of shaping decisions. Dying CS teams are in the business of maintaining vibes.
[ACTION] After every meaningful customer interaction, ask yourself: "What will this customer do differently as a result of this conversation?" If the answer is "nothing different," the conversation was a waste of both your time. [/ACTION]
4. Veto Power, Not Just Responsibility
One of the sharpest observations from this year's CS discourse: "CS is often asked to compensate for weak qualification and inflated promises. That's not strategy—that's damage control."
Surviving CS teams push back upstream. They have the authority—or they've built the credibility—to say "this deal is going to be a disaster and here's why" before it closes. They reject bad-fit customers. They challenge unrealistic timelines. They make sales uncomfortable when necessary.
If your CS team inherits every deal regardless of fit and then gets blamed for churn, you don't have a CS problem. You have an organizational design problem. And surviving CS leaders are the ones brave enough to name it.
[ACTION] Review your last five churned customers. How many were bad fits from day one? Build a "deal health" criteria that CS uses to flag risk before implementation begins. Present it to your CRO. [/ACTION]
5. Proof of Absence, Not Presence
This is the most counterintuitive one. Most CS teams prove their value by showing what they *do*—calls logged, QBRs delivered, emails sent. Activity metrics.
Surviving CS teams prove their value by showing what would *break* if they disappeared. They're embedded so deeply in the customer's operational workflow that removing them creates a gap. Not an emotional gap. An operational gap.
When your customer's team says "We can't run our quarterly security review without our CSM's framework" or "Our entire monitoring strategy was built on the architecture our CS engineer recommended"—that's proof of absence. That's what makes you uncuttable.
[ACTION] For your top 10 accounts, answer this: "If I vanished tomorrow, what specific operational process would break for this customer?" If nothing would break, you're replaceable. Start building something that would. [/ACTION]
The Hard Truth for CS Leaders
If you're running a CS team right now, here's the question that should keep you up at night:
If your CEO walked in tomorrow and said "Justify every headcount on your team with specific, measurable revenue impact," could you do it?
Not with stories about relationships. Not with NPS scores. Not with health dashboards. With dollars.
The CS leaders who can answer that question will thrive in 2026 and beyond. They'll hire more people, not fewer. They'll get bigger budgets. They'll get their seat at the table—without having to ask for it.
The ones who can't? The layoffs aren't coming for them.
The layoffs are already here.
Your Survival Playbook
I've turned the CS Survival Framework into a complete diagnostic and implementation guide that you can run on your own team this week.
The CS Survival Audit includes:
- Revenue Attribution Scorecard — Map every account to specific, measurable CS-driven outcomes
- Technical Credibility Assessment — Identify and close the gaps in your product knowledge
- Decision Impact Tracker — A template to measure whether your customer interactions actually change behavior
- Upstream Influence Checklist — How to build veto power and flag bad-fit deals before they become your problem
- Proof of Absence Diagnostic — The exercise that reveals whether your team is truly embedded or just present
*The function isn't dead. But the version of it that hides behind relationships and hopes nobody asks hard questions? That part needs to die.*
*— Kuber*
*P.S. — I know this one stings. If you disagree, I want to hear it. Hit reply and tell me why I'm wrong. The best responses will get featured in next week's issue. And if you're nodding along feeling uncomfortable, that's probably a sign the Survival Audit is worth running.*
By Kuber Sethi · All issues · Subscribe