There is a question worth asking about the recent RIFs affecting Customer Success Managers across Oracle Consumer Industries:
Why does it appear that Hospitality CSMs are carrying a disproportionate share of the reductions compared with Food & Beverage?
The question becomes more interesting when you consider the nature of the two businesses.
Hotel technology particularly at the enterprise level is incredibly complex. A Hospitality CSM may be dealing with global hotel companies operating hundreds or thousands of properties, OPERA Cloud deployments, integrations, payments, distribution, loyalty, partners, escalations and major transformation programs.
These aren't simply account-management roles. The best Hospitality CSMs often become the connective tissue between the customer, Support, Development, Consulting, Sales, Product and executive leadership.
If Hospitality is also delivering stronger profitability and margins than F&B, as some believe, the disparity becomes even more difficult to understand. It would be useful to see the actual numbers.
And there is another question that probably needs to be asked:
Does the background of the current Consumer Industries leadership play any role in how Customer Success resources are being allocated?
With leadership experience coming from the F&B side of the business, could there naturally be greater familiarity with or a different view of the F&B Customer Success model and its staffing requirements?
That doesn't mean anyone is deliberately protecting one organization at the expense of another. Nor is this an argument that F&B CSMs should be losing their jobs instead.
It's a question about whether the two businesses are being evaluated using the right criteria.
If Hospitality has greater customer complexity, larger enterprise transformations, significant integration requirements and attractive margins, what is the business rationale for deeper reductions in Hospitality Customer Success?
Maybe there is a good answer.
But employees and customers deserve to understand the strategy.
What metrics are actually determining where the CSM reductions occur and are Hospitality and F&B truly being evaluated on an equivalent basis?