Value vs Noise: Where is your CS Team Spending Its Time?

You can’t scale if your team is stuck absorbing noise

One of the quickest ways to diagnose a struggling Customer Success team is to look at how they’re spending their time.

You might think they’re focused on renewals, proactive outreach or driving adoption – but more often, they’re buried in repetitive support, patching process gaps, or firefighting issues that shouldn't be theirs to solve.

The question isn’t “are they busy?” It’s “are they busy with the right things?”

Cost-based vs value-based activity

Here’s the split I use:

• Cost-based activity is work that absorbs operational demand. Think: chasing onboarding steps, responding to ticket noise, reporting by hand because product gaps haven’t been closed yet.

• Value-based activity is work that moves the needle commercially. Think: early renewal conversations, usage insights, adoption strategies, success planning.

The risk? Most early-stage teams are stuck doing the first – and don’t even know how little time they’re spending on the second.

You don’t need more hours – you need to see where they’re going

I’ve worked with businesses where CSMs were burning out, missing KPIs, and being labelled underperformers – when in fact, they were simply drowning.

Once we did a real audit of where their time was going, it was obvious: they were overwhelmed by reactive demand. The structure hadn’t kept up with the business.

When you shine a light on time use, two things usually happen:

1. You start saying “no” to things that shouldn’t be in CS

2. You start designing better workflows that protect the team’s capacity

   
   

Final thought

“How much of your CS team’s time is spent adding value vs absorbing noise?”

If the honest answer is “I’m not sure” – then it’s time to find out.

Interested? Click here to check my diary for a time that works for you.