Customer success as a strategic function can play a crucial role at every step of the customer journey. But sometimes, especially in industries where repeat purchases are infrequent, continuing to build brand loyalty requires thinking outside the box. On Shopify Masters, Polysleep cofounder and CEO Jeremiah Curvers explained how the mattress brand met this challenge by starting a referral program to keep customers engaged between purchases.

Strategies like these, which create long-term relationships and turn existing customers into advocates, are part of the larger methodology of customer success. But executing them effectively requires operational support behind the scenes—the systems, processes, and data that keep new initiatives running smoothly. Depending on company size, this customer success operations function may be spread across existing teams or formalized into its own department.

This article explores customer success operations, including its goals, roles that support it, and the five pillars that keep it running.

What is customer success operations?

Customer success (CS) is the proactive work a business does to help its customers use its products or services effectively. While customer service responds to problems, customer success focuses on long-term satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. As Jeremiah explains, “A misconception is that a transaction ends with a dollar amount being exchanged. What we really start working on once that transaction has passed is figuring out what the elements of friction are that we’ve got to work on to ensure the experience is amazing.”

Customer success operations (CS ops) is the function that enables CS teams to do their jobs. Rather than working directly with customers, like the customer success staff, the CS operations team provides back-office support. That support includes creating processes, systems, and workflows; collecting and analyzing relevant data (and choosing the right tools to do so); and evaluating progress with the goal of consistent adaptation and improvement in meeting higher customer expectations. CS ops often works closely with sales, marketing, and product to share insights across the business.

What are the goals of CS ops?

Customer success operations promote efficiency, provide valuable insights, and contribute to the success of the business in many ways. An effective CS ops function will:

• Develop support systems and workflows for the customer success team

• Streamline operations and automate routine tasks

• Define key performance indicators (KPIs), track customer success metrics, and evaluate how to use customer data to inform customer success strategy

• Improve the customer experience and raise customer satisfaction 

• Share insights across departments to align customer-facing teams

• Drive business growth through stronger customer retention and advocacy

Expanding on Polysleep’s referral program, Jeremiah notes that the goal is to build a “very strong customer base, so even though [customers] don’t buy a mattress every three years, whenever they have the opportunity to talk to someone in their family or friends, they will most likely refer your brand.”

This highlights a key outcome of CS ops: creating the infrastructure that enables loyalty and advocacy, which are often more valuable than repeat purchases alone.

Common CS ops roles

In smaller companies, CS ops responsibilities may be folded into broader customer success roles. But as teams grow, many businesses formalize these positions: According to a 2025 report from the Customer Success Collective, 48.5% of companies have a team specifically dedicated to customer success operations. Depending on the size of your company, this might be one strategist or project manager, or an entire department with multiple levels of responsibility. 

• Director of customer success operations. Professionals in this role oversee entire customer success operations teams. They set strategy, define roles, manage people, and liaise with customer success leadership and executives from other internal teams and departments. The director may report to higher-level customer success leaders or the leadership team of a broader revenue operations department.

• Customer success operations manager. People in this role are also involved in strategy, but the role is more hands-on than the director-level role. They work directly to optimize CS team workflows, implement new systems, and improve day-to-day operations. A CS ops manager may also work with customer success managers and help streamline customer success operations processes themselves. They may report to the director of customer success operations.

• Customer success operations specialist. On larger CS ops teams, there may be one or more junior customer success operations roles under the operations manager. These specialists help deploy specific tools, work with data, and assist with various administrative or manual tasks. 

• Customer success operations analyst. People in these roles, which can be more junior or senior depending on the team structure, focus specifically on the data. They analyze information to better understand consumer behavior and facilitate more data-driven decisions.

5 pillars of customer success operations

1. Data: pinpointing actionable insights
2. Processes: Creating consistency and efficiency
3. People: Supporting the team behind success
4. Systems: Managing the customer success tool kit
5. Strategy: Guiding long-term improvement

The work of customer success operations is often described through five “pillars” that hold up the overall operational infrastructure: data, processes, people, systems, and strategy. Together, these pillars ensure customer-facing teams can work effectively, scale their impact, and deliver better customer experience outcomes.

1. Data: Pinpointing actionable insights

CS ops collects customer success metrics such as engagement, retention, and perceived service quality. These can come from surveys, focus groups, digital analytics, or specialized customer success platforms. “The direct-to-consumer model is amazing to gather data,” explains Jeremiah, adding that the model can be “leveraged, adapted, and rehashed” in all sorts of ways. 

But gathering data is only step one. CS ops also interprets that data, building dashboards, reports, or presentations that highlight patterns leaders can act on. This ensures customer feedback doesn’t sit unused—it becomes the foundation for new initiatives.

For example, customer success ops at a company with a referral program might track referral performance—how many referrals come in, conversion rates, and payout return on investment (ROI).

2. Processes: Creating consistency and efficiency

Customer success requires consistency. CS ops creates workflows that improve operational efficiency and ensure the team delivers a reliable customer experience. This may involve standardizing playbooks for common scenarios, documenting institutional knowledge, or designing cross-team processes that prevent duplication of work.

For example, customer success ops might create a living document detailing standard operating procedures and step-by-step instructions for managing the referral program. This would ensure new hires could quickly get up to speed and existing team members were following standardized procedures.

3. People: Supporting the team behind success

While CS ops often focuses on tools and systems, people are central to its mission. Ops teams lighten the administrative load for frontline staff, lead training on new software, and help onboard new team members. They also serve as advocates, ensuring the CS function has the resources it needs to succeed.

For example, if the referral program grows rapidly, senior CS ops staff might identify the need for a dedicated program administrator and run the request up the chain, ensuring the team has the capacity to keep it running smoothly.

4. Systems: Managing the customer success tool kit

CS ops manages the tools that power customer success. This includes evaluating software platforms, managing integrations, and constantly checking whether the current “tech stack” meets the team’s needs. The right systems can reduce manual tasks, improve data accuracy, and free frontline staff to focus on customers.

Because technology evolves quickly, CS ops also monitors new solutions, balancing cost with efficiency and making the case for upgrades when needed.

To support a referral program, customer success ops might research referral platforms like Friendbuy (which Polysleep uses to manage theirs), integrate it with the business’s CRM software, and automate reward distribution. This reduces the amount of manual work for customer support staff and ensures payouts happen quickly.

5. Strategy: Guiding long-term improvement

The final pillar of CS ops is strategy. Beyond supporting day-to-day workflows, ops teams step back to look at the bigger picture: What’s working? What isn’t? How can customer success evolve to meet changing expectations?

This often means synthesizing data, insights, and frontline feedback, then collaborating with other departments like sales, marketing, or product. By connecting dots across the organization, CS ops helps shape decisions that improve outcomes for customers and the business as a whole.

For example, after tracking referral performance for a period of time, CS ops might discover that certain customers are particularly strong advocates. They could then recommend moving those individuals into a formal affiliate program (as Polysleep did for theirs).