Different companies use the same title to mean different things, so I can really only speak for what I've seen at my own SaaS company, but - customer success pe

Different companies use the same title to mean different things, so I can really only speak for what I've seen at my own SaaS company, but - customer success people have the job of making sure the customer is successful in using the product. This involves training them to use it, providing insights as to how best to take advantage of it given their particular use case, following up to make sure the customer is getting value out of the product, and helping to resolve any roadblocks along the way. At least at my company, the CS folks are not very technical - so when those roadblocks are technical in nature, that's when support (which is the team I'm on, so the perspective I'm coming at this from) gets roped in. Depending on the situation, support may advise the CS person who still handles the communication, or support may jump right in and take over the communication, or support and CS may both be communicating with the customer (I personally try to avoid this last configuration because it promotes diffusion of responsibility and I expect it to be more confusing to the customer). From the perspective of the business, by improving the experience the customer has with the product, CS folks maximize the odds that the customer will be happy with the product, and therefore stay subscribed to it, increase their subscription tier, and recommend it to others. The experiences described in this writeup are pretty terrible and I'm not sure that organizing those particular CSMs any differently would have produced better results. Organizing CSMs by location also has the benefit that the customer tends to be able to get ahold of the same people on short notice because they're working in the same timezone. And there are a lot more industries than there are timezones. While it does seem plausible to me that if you could pull off CSMs-by-industry it would be more successful, it would be a lot harder and more expensive to do so. I personally don't know whether it's worth the tradeoff.