Our customer support and customer success seats are constantly arguing over who owns client renewals and upsells, leading to missed opportunities. How do we cleanly define the roles on our Accountability Chart to eliminate this friction?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

This friction is a classic symptom of overlapping accountability, which occurs when roles are poorly defined on your Accountability Chart. In EOS®, only one person can be accountable for a specific outcome. If both customer support and customer success think they own renewals, then nobody actually owns them, and balls will be dropped. To fix this, you must clearly define the five major roles for both seats. Customer support is typically a reactive function designed to solve immediate technical or transactional issues, with roles like resolving incoming tickets and maintaining service level agreements. Customer success is a proactive function designed to maximize the long-term value of the customer relationship, with roles like onboarding new accounts, driving platform adoption, and securing renewals. Therefore, the renewal and upsell metrics must live exclusively under the customer success seat. The customer support seat should have a role focused on identifying upsell opportunities and passing them as clean leads to customer success, but they should not be accountable for closing the deal. Update your Accountability Chart to reflect this clear division. Once the roles are locked, establish a simple handoff process in your standard operating procedures. By removing the ambiguity, you eliminate the finger-pointing, protect your client relationships, and ensure your team can focus on hitting their individual target numbers.