Are your CS team metrics aligned with reality?
- Deborah Knight
- Jun 6
- 1 min read
Most CS teams are being measured on the wrong things
If your Customer Success team’s performance looks off, don’t assume they need more training. More often than not, the problem isn’t capability – it’s misalignment.
What you want them to be doing, and what they are doing, are often two very different things.
The reactive trap
Early-stage and scaling teams tend to live in a reactive loop.
Even if they’ve got “Success” in their title, they’re often acting more like a support function – handling tickets, patching up onboarding gaps, manually bridging product issues, and dealing with whatever comes in.
Meanwhile, leadership is setting proactive KPIs: renewals, upsells, advocacy, adoption.
But a team that’s spending 80% of its time responding to problems has no chance of hitting strategic targets. The mismatch between daily activity and expected output is what burns teams out – and burns down trust.
Aligning metrics with the reality of now
You might not like the reality – but you have to work with it.
If your CS team is plugging product gaps, that’s fine for now. Own it. Set expectations accordingly.
If you’re still building – and you're not ready to focus on retention or advocacy – stop expecting those outcomes.
Give the team a chance to succeed based on where the business actually is, not where you want it to be, so you’ve got a realistic starting point from which to build.
Final thought
“Are your team metrics matched to what they’re actually doing day to day?”
If you’re not sure – or don’t like the answer – it’s a good time to check in.
