Three steps to overcome common CS & PS service delivery disconnects
Kate (Hare) Alger is the Senior Product Strategy Director for Customer Success Cloud at Certinia, where she brings over 15 years of experience in fostering customer-centric solutions and services. Get her insights here on strategies and solutions to help Customer Success and Professional Services work better together.
You’ve got a Customer Success (CS) team focused on adoption and value realization. You’ve got a Professional Services (PS) team nailing implementations and complex projects. Both are working hard for the customer, right? But are they working… together?
Too often, CS and PS operate in separate orbits. This creates friction not just internally, but for the customer experience too.
Think of your recurring revenue model like an engine. If the CS and PS cogs aren’t perfectly meshed, that engine sputters. Efficiency drops, costs rise, and worst of all, customer value gets lost in translation.
We recently sat down with Mari Cross, Chief Customer Officer at Infor (a Certinia customer), and Ross Fulton, Founder & CEO at Valuize (a Certinia partner), alongside Certinia’s own Chief Product & Technology Officer, Raju Malhotra, to discuss exactly this challenge.
The consensus? Breaking down these silos is essential for delivering customer value with certainty.
The Usual Suspects: Common CS & PS Disconnects
Why does this disconnect happen so often? We see a few recurring themes that contribute to the friction.
Sometimes, the core missions or charters of the CS and PS teams aren’t fully aligned, leading them to pull in slightly different directions. This can ripple outwards, causing process gaps, like the lack of a standard way to define customer value or manage risk across both functions.
The dreaded “handoff” between teams often becomes a point of failure; as Mari Cross rightly pointed out, “handoff is a dirty word for me.” It needs to feel more like a seamless handshake.
Furthermore, misalignment can stem from how teams are measured. Are CS and PS incentivized in ways that inadvertently conflict, such as prioritizing short-term project margins over long-term customer outcomes?
Working from different systems or datasets also creates technology and data silos, preventing a single source of truth and hindering collaboration.
Finally, simple enablement gaps often exist, where teams lack a deep understanding of what the other does and how best to engage effectively.
So, how do we fix it?
Three Steps for Unifying CS and PS
It starts by centering everything around the customer’s definition of value.
First, define value together. Establish a clear, shared framework for what customer outcomes look like and how your products/services deliver them. This needs to be agreed upon with the customer at each stage of the lifecycle, ensuring everyone’s rowing in the same direction.
Then, make success planning the bridge. Use success plans not just for CS, but as the central construct linking sales, PS scoping/delivery, and ongoing CS activities. It becomes the shared blueprint for achieving those agreed-upon outcomes.
And ultimately, measure what matters. Align metrics across teams to focus on the ultimate goals: customer value realization, retention, and expansion.
The Right Technology Connects the Dots
A unified customer view requires a unified internal approach. As Raju Malhotra emphasized, it starts with a single source of truth about the customer, typically anchored in the CRM.
Certinia, being native to the Salesforce platform, provides this connected environment, linking CS and PS workflows directly to the customer record. This eliminates integration pains and ensures everyone sees the same, real-time picture.
It’s also beneficial to shift focus from rigid roles, which can lead to overlaps or gaps, to the competencies needed to drive outcomes. Think about the specific skills required – advisory, technical configuration, education, relationship management – and map these competencies to customer outcomes and segments. This allows for more effective deployment of resources, whether human or digital.
Having an integrated platform like Certinia allows you to manage the entire services lifecycle – from estimation and staffing through project execution, billing, and customer health monitoring – all in one cohesive system.
The Future is Integrated (and Intelligent)
The integration of CS and PS continues to evolve, driven by new approaches and technologies.
In fact, we’re seeing a move beyond ad-hoc services towards prescriptive “Success Packages”. These thoughtfully bundle the right CS and PS activities – generalist, specialist, and digital – based on specific customer outcomes and segments. Mari Cross shared how Infor designed their “CareFor” program precisely this way, combining CS individuals with a menu of value engagements delivered by their services teams.
AI is also playing a significant role as a practical tool for integration. Predictive AI helps optimize project margins, staffing, and forecasting. Generative AI can summarize vast amounts of project and customer data, providing quick, actionable insights. And Agentic AI is emerging to automate tasks and offer proactive assistance to both CS and PS teams, freeing up human experts for higher-value, strategic work.
As Mari wished for, AI holds the potential to finally eliminate those painful manual handoffs by automatically contextualizing information for different teams as needed.
Certainty Starts with Connection
Siloed CS and PS teams risk inefficient operations and, more critically, an inconsistent customer experience.
By unifying these functions around a shared definition of value, integrated processes enabled by a common platform like Certinia on Salesforce, you create a seamless journey for your customers and unlock greater certainty for your business.
Want to dive deeper into how you can unify your customers’ journeys? Watch the full webinar recording here!
