As part of our series exploring different Salesforce-adjacent career paths, let’s dive into the world of Customer Service (or Customer Success) Operations.

Customer Service/Success Operations

What It Is

If you read the Sales Ops description, then Customer Success Ops is basically a parallel. It’s all about using tools & systems to guarantee that your Service agents work efficiently to resolve customer issues and deliver quality service.

These roles aren’t as common as sales ops, but they are on a similar trajectory.

What It Can Look Like

Customer Success Ops jobs typically call for a person to:

• Create reports & dashboards to measure success metrics
• Be familiar with CRMs or other case management platforms. The big ones include Salesforce Service Cloud, Zendesk, & Jira
• Recommend process improvements and create best practices around data collection/entry for service agents
• Potential cross-department collaboration, often with the Sales team
• Data analysis, to help answer key business questions
• Have a solid understanding of the service rep experience

How it Differs from Admin

Salesforce pros in this line of work typically aren’t focused on “maintenance” work, like provisioning users or managing permissions. Depending on the team, they’re almost exclusively focused on the Service Cloud suite.

The exception to that last rule is if an org doesn’t use Salesforce for case management, but instead uses a separate tool that integrates with Salesforce (like Zendesk or another popular helpdesk platform).

Who It’s Good For

This is a great route to consider for anyone who’s worked in customer service or case management…even if you hated it! (I have a friend who spent many years as a customer service rep in some trying jobs. But she loves the customer experience side & is now building up her own team at a startup. You GO, girl.)

Tips for Breaking In

Familiarize yourself with success metrics used by service teams. Common ones that come to mind include net promoter score, customer satisfaction scores (CSAT), and time to resolution.

In your Trailhead study, spend time on Service Cloud, any customer service & report + dashboard modules. Excel skills matter here too! And if you already work as a rep in a customer service environment, see if there’s room to take on more of this analysis/operational work. That way, you can pad that resume.

More resources on Customer Success Ops careers:

How to Build An Effective Customer Success Operations Team by Spendesk. This article is written by someone who transitioned from customer service into operations. She does a great job breaking down what the job looks like and career questions to consider.

Customer Success Operations: Turning your Team into a Profit Center by UserIQ. While written for companies, there’s a good explanation of the CS ops function.