There are two ways a company can undervalue Customer Success, and only one of them gets discussed.

The familiar one is the company with bad service delivery. CS exists there to bridge a gap between what was sold and what the product does, and the gap is too wide to bridge. The team fails, visibly and constantly, because they were set up to. Leadership watches people fail and concludes the function is a drain. It isn't a drain. It's a fire brigade being blamed for the fire.

The other one is the company that delivers beautifully.

The Compliment That Removes the Budget

Somewhere in a company with genuinely good delivery, someone says a version of this: our product is excellent, our onboarding works, customers get to value without much help. Do we really need all these CSMs?

It sounds like praise for the product and it works as an argument against the function.

What usually happens next is a move to something lighter. Self-service. Tech-touch. Digital CS. Pooled coverage. The reasoning is the human was compensating for product friction, the friction is gone, so the human is overhead.

That reasoning has a hole in it, and the hole is what Customer Success was always actually for.

The Relationship Was Part of What They Bought

Desired Outcome is the Required Outcome plus the Appropriate Experience. Two customers can need the identical result and need completely different experiences to get there, and the experience isn't packaging around the outcome. It's half of what they bought.

For a large number of B2B customers, a person who knows their account is part of the Appropriate Experience. Not because they can't run the software. Because they want somebody who understands their situation, who they can ask a question that isn't a support ticket, who notices things on their behalf.

Take that away and you haven't removed overhead, you've changed the product. The customer bought a version of your service with a person in it, they're now getting a different one at the same price, and nobody told them.

The customer will rarely say "I miss my CSM." They will say the value isn't what it used to be, or they'll just get quieter, and neither of those points at the thing you actually changed.

Why the Damage Doesn't Show Up in Retention

This is the part that makes the mistake so easy to keep making.

Renewal survives on inertia. Staying is the absence of a decision, and plenty of accounts renew while nobody involved feels much of anything. Strip the relationship out of a well-delivered service and most of those customers will renew anyway, at least for a while. The dashboard reports success, and the cost saving is immediate and legible on a spreadsheet.

What goes missing is everything that needed somebody paying attention.

Nobody notices the customer who has outgrown their current setup. Nobody hears the offhand comment about a new initiative starting next quarter. Nobody catches that the champion left. Nobody's there to say "given what you just told me, there's a thing you should know about." Those conversations were never on anyone's dashboard, so their absence isn't either.

The number that moves is expansion, and it moves slowly enough that by the time anyone notices, the decision that caused it is two years old and nobody connects them.

The Honest Version of the Question

None of this says every account needs a named human. Plenty don't. Some customers genuinely prefer to be left alone, and forcing a quarterly call on them is worse than useless.

So ask it properly, because the sloppy version gives you the wrong answer.

The sloppy version is: is our product good enough that customers don't need help? For a well-run company that's often yes, and it's the wrong question.

The right one is: what does this segment need to keep getting more valuable to us over time, and does that need somebody who knows them? Those are different questions, and the second one's answer changes by segment, by contract size, and by how much of the outcome depends on the customer's own capability.

A customer whose success mostly depends on your software behaving can often be served well at a distance. One whose success depends on their own team changing how they work can't, however good your product is, because the hard part was never the software.

What to Do Instead of Cutting

If delivery really has improved, the right response isn't to remove the humans. It's to change what they're for.

A CSM whose week was consumed by firefighting and hand-holding has just been freed. That capacity should be redirected at the thing nobody was doing while the fires were burning: knowing where each customer is going, noticing when they arrive somewhere new, and being ready with what comes next.

That work has a measurable output, which the firefighting never did. It's also the only version of the function that survives a CFO asking what it returns, because the answer stops being "fewer disasters" and becomes a number that grew.

Good delivery doesn't make Customer Success unnecessary. It makes it possible for the first time.