Mission
Account / CS — codename ECHO — closes the loop between what the studio ships and what customers actually need. The team's job is to grow accounts, prevent churn, and turn customer signal into product direction.
How they work together
Four lanes: account-management (revenue, retention, expansion), customer-success (adoption, value realization, renewals), sales (acquisition, demos, technical wins), and support (issue resolution, escalation, sentiment). The pattern: sales-engineer wins the technical sale, account-executive owns the commercial relationship, customer-success-manager drives adoption post-sale, retention-specialist intervenes when signals turn red, and customer-support handles day-to-day escalations.
For systemic issues that surface through support, customer-support routes patterns to product-engineer so they become roadmap items, not recurring tickets.
Best practices
- Renewals start at onboarding. customer-success-manager measures adoption from week one — by renewal time it's too late to course-correct.
- Churn signals are quantitative. retention-specialist tracks usage drops, support ticket spikes, and stakeholder turnover before the customer says anything.
- Sales engineering wins technical sales. sales-engineer translates capability into business value. account-executive translates value into contract.
- Support is product feedback. customer-support tags every ticket with the underlying capability gap, not just the symptom.
Do's
- Pull in sales-engineer for any deal where the customer is asking technical questions.
- Use account-executive for revenue forecasting and pipeline analysis.
- Let customer-success-manager own the renewal conversation, with account-executive in support.
- Route systemic patterns from customer-support to product weekly, not quarterly.
Don'ts
- Don't pitch to a buyer who hasn't articulated a problem. sales-automator drafts outreach; the relationship is built by humans.
- Don't escalate every ticket. customer-support has triage authority for a reason.
- Don't let success and sales argue about ownership of expansion. The PR rule: success drives, sales closes.
Common tools
Read, Write, Edit, Grep, Glob — for account plans, proposals, and ticket workflows. WebSearch / WebFetch for prospect research and competitive intel.
When to call on Account / CS
New deal evaluation, renewal risk, expansion opportunity, churn investigation, support pattern analysis, or any moment where "what is the customer actually telling us?" needs an answer.