The Invisible Work of Customer Success

By Stephen Wise,
CEO & Co-Founder of Snowise Technologies

The Work No One Plans For

There’s a kind of work that doesn’t show up in dashboards or performance reviews. It’s the invisible layer that holds the entire customer experience together.

Four hours of admin work for a one-hour call.

Ten emails to get legal sign-off for a case study quote.

A 35-thread Slack discussion aligning product, marketing, and sales before a renewal.

All of it, the admin, the updates, the coordination, is in service of one outcome: the customer’s success. It’s the great unplanned center of SaaS. And it belongs, almost entirely, to the people in Customer Success.

The Misunderstood Core

Modern Customer Success was created to solve a very specific problem: how to onboard and retain customers in a world of increasingly complex products. The roles that existed before weren’t failing; the environment had changed. Products became more technical. Customers were asked to do more, learn more, and integrate deeper.

Someone had to bridge that gap. Someone had to make sure that promises sold were promises kept. That’s where Customer Success Managers stepped in.

They became translators, connectors, and advocates, the people who make complex software human. But somewhere along the way, the role built on empathy and execution became buried under the weight of the very systems meant to support it. Tools were built for management visibility, not daily usability. Processes were designed to measure output, not impact.

The result is that brilliant operators now spend more time explaining their work than doing it.

And even in companies that don’t have a dedicated “Customer Success” function, I assure you someone, somewhere, is still doing this work.

The Unspoken Reality

Ask any CSM what a “typical day” looks like and they’ll laugh. There is no typical day. They move from product expert to project manager to therapist to executive translator, often before lunch.

They are the connective tissue between nearly every function in the company: product, sales, support, marketing, legal, finance. Yet despite being at the center of everything, the role is still too often seen as reactive, a cost center rather than a strategic force.

That’s the paradox of this work: it’s both everywhere and invisible at times.

The Recognition We Owe

This is an ode to the operators who keep customers moving forward even when the systems around them fall short.

To the CSM who rebuilds a QBR deck at midnight because the story changed that morning.

To the implementation lead who documents every process by hand because the toolchain doesn’t fit their workflow.

To the post-sales teams that carry the weight of continuity, ensuring nothing falls through the cracks.

It’s time to stop treating this work as background noise and start treating it as the backbone of retention, growth, and reputation.

The Path Forward

Yes, everyone agrees that Customer Success is at a crossroads. In truth, we’ve been standing here for quite some time. The debate is fierce and familiar:

Should CS take on more revenue?

Should it become more technical, more strategic, more scaled, or less of each?

But the real question isn’t about evolution. It’s about honesty.

Hard truth #1: Too many companies use their post-sales teams to mask product problems by “rubbing some CS on it.” When your product gaps are being backfilled by human effort instead of systemic fixes, that creates an invisible tax on your people. It leads to burnout, hidden labor, and entire teams operating in reactive mode just to hold things together.

Hard truth #2: The work of Customer Success existed long before the title did. The real crossroads isn’t whether the function survives, it’s whether companies will finally be honest about who they expect to do this work and what they’re willing to invest to help them succeed.

And by invest, we don’t mean another dashboard or KPI. We mean:

 • Equipping CSMs with systems that capture context, not just activity.

 • Giving them time for analysis, not just reporting.

 • Investing in their professional development as future leaders, not just frontline responders.

Few roles demand this much cross-functional literacy and emotional intelligence. Fewer still combine it with the pressure of renewal and retention.

When companies give Customer Success the same level of intention and infrastructure as Sales or Engineering, they don’t just improve customer outcomes, they strengthen the entire organization.

Closing Thought

Customer Success isn’t soft work. It’s the work that holds everything else together.

Here’s to the people who do it daily.
Here’s to building systems that finally see them.

Stephen Wise - Stephen is the CEO and Co-Founder of Snowise Technologies, creators of Monocle, an AI-powered assistant built for post-sales professionals. Before founding Snowise, Stephen led post-sales teams at GitHub and Chef Software. He writes about human-centered AI, the evolution of Customer Success, and the future of post-sales work.