Experts of Experience - 5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Customer success is at a crossroads. Is it a revenue engine or just post-sales support? Is it a strategic function or a catch-all for everything customer-related? Lauren sits down with Marybeth D’Souza, Principal at Deloitte Consulting, to tackle the identity crisis facing customer success today. With years of experience leading CS at Salesforce and now shaping its future at Deloitte, Marybeth shares groundbreaking insights from research with 35 top companies on where the best teams are investing.They break down the five biggest trends shaping customer success in 2025, including the shift from CS as a team to CS as a mindset, the increasing reliance on AI and digital automation, and why failing to align with sales and product is holding teams back. Marybeth also reveals why B2B companies need to start thinking more like B2C, how customer expectations have changed, and what CS leaders must do to prove their impact and secure their place at the table. If you’re in customer success (or trying to define its future in your organization) this conversation is a must-listen.Key Moments: 00:00: Who is Marybeth D’Souza, Principal at Deloitte Consulting?03:52: The 5 Key Trends Shaping Customer Success09:25: Proving the ROI of Customer Success15:04: B2B Needs to Think Like B2C22:53: AI in Customer Success: Hype or Game-Changer?36:00: Breaking Down Silos Between CS, Sales, and Product44:00: What’s Next for Customer Success? –Are your teams facing growing demands? Join CX leaders transforming their strategies with Agentforce. Start achieving your ambitious goals. Visit salesforce.com/agentforce Mission.org is a media studio producing content alongside world-class clients. Learn more at mission.org

Customer success is facing an identity crisis right now. How do we just fundamentally turn customer success on its head? This is why I love journey mapping as a tool so much, aligning on what does the customer need from us at all these phases and who's giving that to them? We've interviewed over 35 leading companies around where are they placing their bets, where are they investing? And there's five themes that have emerged.

We have to be really brave in putting the pressure on our company internally to make sure collectively that we are proving business value for our customers. Customer expectations are turning into B2C expectations. I made a purchase, I don't have time to wait. I want to start getting value immediately. If you deploy the right technical expertise, there's a 10 to 20% uplift in expansion. Let me help deliver on the promise you made so that you can go make more promises. Hello everyone and welcome back to Experts of Experience.

I'm your host, Lauren Wood. In today's business landscape, customer success isn't just evolving, it's revolutionizing how companies grow and thrive. And there are few people that understand this better than Mary Beth D'Souza. Mary Beth is a principal at Deloitte Consulting, where she leads their customer success organization

and talent offering. With her journey from customer success leadership at Salesforce to being a strategic leader at Deloitte, she is pioneering a new approach and showing why customer success is truly the heartbeat of modern business. So today we are going to talk about the state of customer success in 2025, how AI is revolutionizing client relationships, and how customer success is no longer just

a team, but an approach. Mary Beth, so great to have you on the show. Thanks so much for having me. Well, I met you at the Women of Customer Success Summit in New York City last fall, which was a fabulous event for anyone who is interested, any women in customer success. It was great. And you gave this amazing presentation about the future of customer success. So I had to have you on the show. And I'd love to just start off by hearing your take, broad question.

But what trends are really shaping customer success today? If you can tell us, what are the handful of things that you're really seeing and how customer success is shifting and changing today. Yeah, well, thanks for having me. And it was really great meeting you. And just the energy at the Women in Customer Success Summit in the fall was wonderful. I've been in the customer success space for over a decade.

And when we talk about customer success, we're really talking about in a B2B context, primarily in tech or software, how are you driving value through adoption in order to retain and grow your customers? And what I've seen is some trends, both through lived experiences or working with clients, but also backed by data, is that customer success now is really at an inflection point. This is no longer optional. It's no longer kind of a bet. Let's see how it plays out.

It is a critical part of driving that ongoing value, helping your customers to really in their business to grow themselves? And then as yourself as a company, how are you actually managing your existing customer base? At Deloitte, we do, as I mentioned through data, we tend to do a number of studies and research that look at the state of customer success.

And we're just coming out with our most recent one, where we've interviewed over 35 leading companies like leaders from these leading companies around where are they placing their bets, where are they investing and there's five themes that have emerged from them and I'll just kind of cover them and you tell me if you want to go over any of them. I love it. The first is that customer success is facing an identity crisis right now. There's been a ton of variation in what customer success means. And so there's really an opportunity to define what the future is, what the value and differentiated impact is of customer success.

The second is that decreased budgets and pressure on efficient growth is forcing customer success leaders to invest in digital capabilities, take advantage of all the technology that's out there. And, you know, again, it's not something you can talk about and like think about like has to be done in order to serve a growing customer base. The third is that customer success is, as you mentioned, no longer just a team. It's really embedded across the entire go-to-market life cycle. It's a mindset. It's a capability that organizations take to their customers. And so that requires quite a bit of organizational shift and change. The fourth is that customer success teams are themselves

disrupting. And so those that are in customer success roles, individual contributors, managers or leaders, really like the skills that are needed, how their career paths are navigated. Those are changing right now. And there's a huge opportunity from a talent standpoint. And then the fifth, which again is one of those things that I think we've talked about, but it's like, you know, the time like you need to actually action on it these days is the coordination and collaboration with product and customer success. but it's like, you know, the type like you need to actually action on it these days is the coordination and collaboration with product and customer success and the Tight integration the collaborative like I said, the collaboration is really needed to drive insights and growth in

Environment. So those are the five themes that you know have emerged in the last couple of months based on our research with some of the leading companies. Yeah. I mean, all of those ring so true to me as a customer success leader myself and someone who has just been obsessed and studying how customer success is changing. Because even three years ago when I was in a customer success leadership role before I started my consulting business, all of those things were ringing true, but it's only been exacerbated as AI has really transformed how we're approaching business and also just the state of the economy

and things. And I want to dive into all of these things. And the first thing I would love to talk about is really the identity crisis that you mentioned, because I look at so many different organizations who use the word customer success to describe a different role, a different set of responsibilities. And I'm always wondering, like, why is it so difficult for customer success to have like a standard function, a standard approach? What would you say to that?

Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about this because I think there can be so much value in what customer success drives. And it's almost like the benefit is the curse. People who tend to be attracted to customer success are the ones who want to advocate for their customers. They want to solve problems. They want to be there in order to help their customers. But then the downside of that is sometimes they tend to do a whole bunch of things and it's not really clear again what their differentiated value is.

Are they covering for support? Are they taking product feedback? Do they complain that sales over... There's no room for that, really, where the leaders, the organizations that are effective, that have sustained over the last couple of years where there's been a lot of pressure, and in some areas, restructuring of customer success organizations, they're the ones who have, we say, pick a lane. They've made statements around where their differentiated value is.

They've aligned on that cross-functionally. And they are committed to delivering financial results, whether that's signing up for an NRR or GRR number, or it's through attribution by saying, we know that what we're doing is going to attribute to higher growth, whatever that may be based on the situation, but they are committed to those financial results. And in those areas, I think the customer success as an identity is thriving and there's opportunity

for them to continue to grow and make an impact on the organization. So what I'm hearing you say is there needs to be a direct revenue focused activity that customer success owns. Makes total sense. But I feel like it's a little easier said than done because I see a lot of organizations say that and then they say, and you're going to do support and you're going to help the sales team and you're going to do this and you're going to do that and you're going to do support, and you're going to help the sales team, and you're going to do this, and you're going to do that. The customer success team is not really set up for success in achieving the revenue potential that they can drive.

And I think it really, in my opinion, comes down to the customer success leader to say, no. If you want me to achieve a positive NRR, if you want me to go after this number, if you want me to drive revenue, I'm not customer support anymore. I'm not on boarding or I'm not whatever it is that doesn't make sense that isn't actually helping to drive that number. I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. Because I think so many CS leaders struggle with this so greatly. Yeah, I completely agree.

And I would say, you know, it is around, like, what is that differentiated role that you're driving in order to deliver on the results that you've said, which those results, which, by the way, hopefully they are committed to at an executive and a board level, like there should be a conversation there. And to your point, like, then let me lock arms with my support leader, or my sales leader, or my product leader, so that collectively, we can understand what each organization's role is, and we can support each other collectively. And I do see that it's a leadership opportunity. And, that point, I did a set of interviews

with some CS leaders about 18 months ago and said, OK, so what's made you so successful? Or what's your future? And one of the key insights that came out was, as you're moving from, say, an individual contributor of a manager to a leader, the skill sets that we need in our CS leaders are business and financial acumen. Spend some time with your CFO or your finance team and understand really how you are fitting

into the business and how you can drive the financial results. And it was a really good insight, I think, around some of that growth and kind of expanding the mindset. That brings me perfectly to my next question around the ROI of customer success. Because as you also mentioned, budgets have been cut, customer success has been on the chopping block. I think it's also part of the reason why customer success becomes kind of this hodgepodge of all these different roles because leaders are saying, well, customer success doesn't drive that much value, so we're going to just like reduce

headcount over here and give it to customer success and it gets messy. But how, for organizations that are struggling to prove the ROI of customer success, what are the most valuable pieces of data, the most important insights that they should be bringing to the table to really show that. Yeah, I think, you know, one of the things I anchor on is that customer success can be an orchestrator of a proactive orchestrator of the customer experience. That means that they're not going to do everything, but that they can help orchestrate and look across the entire lifecycle around a customer's

journey around really where they do realize value or maybe they're at risk or maybe there's a propensity to grow. And so I think having that full view and bringing folks together to have that full view is, first of all, that's important to then understand, okay, what data do we need to look at and how do we think about it? And so if you have that understanding, then kind of looking at, let's say, three different buckets of data. One is kind of what we naturally think about.

What's your performance like with your customer? Are they using your product or service? What kind of insights can we get from the level of usage that they have? The second is really then the experience value and what's their sentiment? How easy do we make it to do business with us? Or are we make, anytime they have a question,

how quickly are we responding with the right answer at the right time? And then the last one is financial value, which is really hard, but if you are able to work with your customer around understanding how are you driving their own business and tying to their own financials and their own growth, then you're able, again, to be embedded in their business and be able to articulate the value that you're providing.

And I do believe that that is uniquely something that customer success can do. They can uniquely get into those insights. The thing about this that's so difficult is that it takes a lot of work to figure out these numbers and to figure out the lines to these numbers. I mean, the last one that you just shared, that means getting the company to share with you,

getting your client to share with you. Here's the business impact that we've seen on our side, which I think a lot of CS leaders and CSMs feel hesitant to ask about, or they feel like there's not time that their clients are willing to give to get into that. And my take on it is we have to be looking at every client from the outset that this

is a business partnership and that we need ex-information in order to ensure that we're servicing you in the best possible way for your business. But it is, I think, one, harder to get later on in the relationship, but it's not impossible. And it is such an important factor to understand, are we driving the impact that we said we're going to drive or that we know we can drive or that we want to be driving? And it's also going out on a limb, because if we're not driving that impact, that might be a churn risk. But I think we have to be really brave in going after it and also putting the pressure on our company internally to make sure collectively that we are proving business

value for our customers. It is hard. But it's also like if we think about it, and I recognize this is kind of going in a direction of more of an enterprise motion. There's definitely different considerations if we're talking about more of a high velocity motion or things like that. But there's a ton of value here, I think, in talking about this motion. The sales team can get that information during the sale.

They often can get, what's the business value? Let's put together a business case because someone at your customer is putting their neck on the line to make a purchase with you. And so the question is, how do we bridge that gap from the minute that decision is made to continue to track and have that value conversation once we have made that decision and afterwards? And then, you know, in subsequent years to come, and how do we adjust it?

Because there are so many macro environments that are changing, the businesses are probably changing. And so that is about that again, that I think is some of the value in how do we bridge that gap and how do we have those conversations in an ongoing regular way through success planning or executive business reviews, or when we talk about AI, like putting some of that in the hands of your customers, how do you surfacing that information to them so that they're mutually engaging in their own success and it makes sense for them to share that information. Like, you don't want them to share the information because you're curious, but it really helps

to tailor your interactions, you know, target your conversations, give them more personalized recommendations around what they should be doing. So if you can bridge that gap, improve that value, then I think there's an opportunity there. I mean, at the end of the day, value is what it's all about. We need to be able to show value. And a key piece of that is understanding

what are the challenges that our clients are facing, asking questions, listening to the need behind the need for what they are really dealing with. And at the end of the day, we know it all comes down to money. We know revenue is the number one thing that every business is focused on. And so really listening to understand how can we help you to achieve your goals and then reflect back to you how we are doing that. And if we can do that, we are probably in a good spot and can then prove the ROI of customer success to our...

Say goodbye to chatbots and say hello to the first AI agent. Agent Force Service Agent makes self-service an actual joy for your customers with its conversational language anytime on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com. How do you think that when it really comes to defining the value of customer success and communicating the value of customer success cross-functionally, do you have any thoughts on that? Because I also think a lot of companies struggle to really share that throughout the organization. Yeah, I break it down. If I think customer success can influence your adoption, it can influence your growth, it can influence your growth, it can influence your retention.

Break it down into these chunks and then say, okay, how can we articulate that? If I am able to have a customer success capability that helps my clients or my customers realize value, the intended value in the time that they were planning on or faster, then you know what? Then I can tee up my sales counterparts or the sales organization to be in a position to go sell the next thing. And so, you know, there's a kind of an agreement that needs to happen with your sales team of like, let me help deliver on the promise you made so that you can go make more promises.

So I think that there's an understanding then of like, okay, then what does adoption mean? Or what does time to value mean? What are the things that we need to do immediately? I'm going to mention before, I think there's a lot we can learn, like B2B can learn from B2C, B2C can learn from B2B. This is one of those, you know, customer expectations are turning into B2C expectations. Where I made a decision, I made a purchase, I want to start getting value immediately.

I don't have time to wait. I want to start getting value immediately. And so that critical role, I think, of customer success helping there. If I think about the expansion or growth, we do know, and like, no, and I've seen and we have data around it that says if you deploy in certain areas, if you deploy the right technical expertise to via customer success and you have the, you know, tailored best practices and insights to your customers, there's like a 10 to 20% uplift in expansion. That's how you articulate the value is you show If I put the right skillsets or I put

the right capabilities in front of my customers, we're going to have a higher expansion, accelerated expansion that's revenue. There you go. They give me more of that. And then the same thing on retention. I think if we're able to, you've delivered on the value, you've expanded your footprint or relationship, and there's a higher likelihood and propensity to renew, less churn, and you are committed to what's our revenue retention rate intended to be, again, you're articulating the value. I think the leaders who are willing to do that and say, I'm going to put in place the instrumentation to attribute what my teams or my technology is doing, and then they're able to report on that,

they're getting more investment and they're getting more funding. Another piece of this, I'd love your thoughts on it, is it's one having the data structure to be able to understand what value are we giving to our customers so that we can report on it. But I also think that there's a piece of training for client-facing teams around how to listen for and provide value that I see companies missing or teams missing sometimes where the CSMs or whoever is facing the client is just taking what the client says at face value and not digging deeper into what is it that they really care about?

Like, what are they really doing over there on the client side so that I can speak to that and not only show value in terms of the number, because of course the number really matters, like that is the name of the game, but there's also like other crumbles of value that you can be reflecting back. Do you think about this or have any thoughts on that? It's an interesting question and it makes me think of a few things, which is one, with the proliferation of technology and data, it is really hard sometimes to sort through what is really important.

The other is that as we have a lot of pressure on our customer success teams, and there is a ton to be done with technology in order to scale the teams. But we may make some questions around coverage and segmentation that actually increases the book of business. You're actually putting some of that at risk because you're like, what is the level of time and how am I spending time with my customers in order to move from that transactional? Like, did we do what we said we were going to do? Let's check off the activities to some of those meaningful conversations, insightful conversations.

And I think that that's a really important push that you're making of like, let's not over index too much and take time away from some of that and those insightful conversations. Yeah. I mean, I think that there's two ways and this kind of is a segue into our AI conversation and take time away from some of those insightful conversations. Yeah. I think that there's two ways, and this is a segue into our AI conversation and how AI is changing customer success.

Actually, I'm going to ask you some questions about that, and then I'll share my opinion later. But how would you say that customer success is changing in the face of AI? What are some of the trends that you're seeing? With the introduction of AI, there's a ton of opportunity to change customer success. We have talked about, and in the industry, people have talked about digital CS for years. It started as a segment. It's like, okay, we're going to have digital CS to handle the lower end.

Now, digital is not a segment. It should be deployed and leveraged for all segments. And then it's really, for our previous conversation, how do you deploy humans or interventions where it makes sense? And the introduction of AI is really just helping, you know, to make that, I would say, table stakes now, where I said before, companies may have invested a little bit, but not fully. Now it's table stakes to have the right infrastructure and the right data in place in order to leverage AI, because you're going to need to do it with your teams and your customers also expect it.

Your customers expect you, how about this data on me? I'm sure you're introducing, whether it's very low-hanging fruit, like meeting summaries and notes and follow-ups to something much more transformational. They're expecting it of the companies that they're working with as well. From an employee standpoint too, I think employees are expecting that their organizations are going to invest in tooling to enable them to do their jobs better and faster and more efficiently. And there's so many things that can now be utilized to help us take the low-hanging fruits of our day-to-day and automate them or just remove that clunkiness from our workflows.

And I think this is where my opinion comes in. I see organizations taking, this is a bit of a generalization, but one of two approaches. One is let's reduce the amount of work that the team needs to do in order to provide a great experience to the customer so that they can spend more time with the customer,

more time thinking about the customer, more time strategizing about the customer, and really understanding their needs so we can provide that value. That's one camp. And then another is, let's use technology so that the team can take on more clients. We can have less people and everything will just be cheaper. And I'm not saying that one is better than the other. I think it depends on the business. It depends on your

customer. It depends on your customer's needs. But I will always come back to build your business for your customers needs, and structure your team structure your technology so that your team is able to provide to the customer what the customer really needs to be successful. So there's my soap box moment. Love it. How else are you seeing?

Like, what are the opportunities that you're seeing when it comes to AI and customer success? And if you're kind of looking down the line, I mean, usually I would ask this question, what's happening in five years? But like, six months is going to be a totally different game. One year is going to be a totally different game. So in the

somewhat near future, what are you seeing and how is AI going to transform the function of customer success? Yeah. The way I think right now, the challenge that we have is moving from experiments. Like last year was the year of pilots. People are like, let me try a pilot leveraging AI. How do you move from an experiment to actually scaling? In order to do that, there's some things that need to be true. You need to have the right data model. You need to have the right infrastructure there within your company in order to do that. We find a lot of AI projects end up being data projects

because that's the precursor to that. You need to have the right level of governance and infrastructure in place in order to manage at an enterprise level so that little AI experiments don't get out of control. And you need to also have an understanding with the organization around what's the level of trust we have, how do we introduce this while still having a human in the loop, and how are we navigating this change? And so that's really, I think, the moment we're in right now is there's been a lot of really interesting things that have happened that maybe you save some time that as you look to scale those, it's going to require leadership and cross-functional kind of collaboration in order to do it. The other way that I see the opportunities for AI in CS is I look at them in three buckets. There's the efficiency play, like the stuff that like,

let's pick, let's save some time. How do you prep for a call better? How do you pull your materials together better? Send some emails or follow ups. So those are efficiency things. They're interesting, but they're not really gonna drastically change your engagement with your customer. The second bucket's more interesting,

which is the experience, which is, how do we take a process and make that end-to-end better? And I'm seeing companies take that approach and introduce and really fundamentally change, say, the success planning process to have more insight, be more insights driven. And then what I'm really excited about, which is the exponential change, like how do we just fundamentally turn customer success on its head? And, you know, like I said before, but like,

how do we put adoption in the hands of our customers? How do we engage them in realizing our value? How do we make sure that we have the insights that we need to give them the most tailored and personalized recommendations? That's not something you're gonna be able to solve in like a day, you know, or with one use case, but it's really this exponential. And so I'm excited about all three of them. I think it's gonna take a combination in like a portfolio approach in order to, to make some meaningful change. But I think there's, there's a huge amount of opportunity.

Do you have an example for that last one? Is it something we've seen yet? Like, can you, can you share anything that you've seen that would really fall into that bucket? I would think, think about, there's some companies out there who have surfaced like their own, I would say customer success, success dashboard to their customers that says, you know, here's, you know, your progress on certain areas. Here's, you know, we know who in your organization has certifications or training and oh, by the way, you might have a gap in a certain area because

someone just left. Here's benchmarks relative to your peer set and where you're leading or maybe where we should have some opportunities. So there are some companies out there who have surfaced those insights in a digital form to their customers. You're reminding me of Salesforce when they launched their success plans. It was last year, I believe. And we had Jim Rother, the SVP of customer success. Apologies, Jim, if that is your wrong title. I know it's changed, but he came on to tell us about that. And I think it's such a, when we think about really providing value, it's saying here are

the key metrics that we know you care about when it comes to this product. And we're going to reflect that back to you and make it really easy for you to be able to make decisions and really easy for you to know how well you are utilizing this investment. And now we have something that's a shared understanding that we can speak on and work to improve. And it's just providing so much more transparency

and ease as well. Like going back to one of the other examples that you spoke about, it's just like the ease. How can we make sure that that journey is more useful for the customer, which is so incredibly important when it comes to creating a great customer experience. Talk about that all the time on the show. I'm curious to know though, what about for people in customer success today? Everyone's

thinking about how is our role going to change? What skills do I need? What advice would you give to people in customer success in terms of where to upskill so that they can really be at the front of this AI wave? I think about this a lot because this is critical to anything that we've been talking about. What's the talent you have or who are you attracting into customer success or even sending out to other parts of the organization? Because you want to have ambassadors for CS in other parts of the organization. There's three buckets of skill sets. One is what is the technical expertise and capability that you're bringing? It may be product, it may be an industry or vertical that you're serving, or it may be some other sort of capability and process that you're

advising your customers on, but you need to have some level of technical capability that you're advising your customers on, but you need to have some level of technical capability that you're bringing to your organization and to your customers. The second is data and insights and the ability to look at data, analyze data, and really understand how do you use that to inform what steps and actions you take. A lot of historical CS, I would say, is based on gut feel

or experience, and that is absolutely valuable, but in today's world it needs to be augmented with and driven by data that's available to us. And then the third is the enduring or human skills. How do you manage executive-level relationships? How do you navigate conflict? How do you manage executive level relationships? How do you navigate conflict? How do you think through ambiguity? And others out there probably have other suggestions of different skill sets, but I found that it fundamentally comes down to those three buckets. And then understanding, okay, what's the company I'm working with, the maturity, the size, the stage, that's going to inform what proportion of skill sets you kind of need at the time and really then, you know, and then how you

grow. So you may need, you know, to flex in one area, but then over time, you're going to need to round out with some of the other areas. I would get a little bit specific on that. I talked to a lot of folks who are looking for their next role or thinking about their career path. And when it's very general of I've managed customers or, you know, I advocate for the customer, it's really hard to internalize for someone who may be, it's hard to internalize what that differentiated value is. I don't think there's a ton of value in it, but you have to articulate it in a way

that others outside of CS will understand. Yeah. The human element, those human relationships, I think is something I think about a lot. My hope is that AI relieves us of a lot of technical things, especially as we get further on in our careers and we are leading more relationships, whether it's internally or externally. And how can we really excel

in those human-to-human moments that we have, which will become fewer and far between, I think, maybe? How can we really make sure that those moments are excellent and really create a human to human experience that's memorable? I think it's just such an important factor to think about. So I love that you brought that up. I'm curious to know, where do you feel like that is really important for folks? You said that as people transition in their career and grow, those three buckets will change. Where do you think that's really important for people? There's probably an element of it that's always important. Whether you're looking at internally, what's the level of influence or collaboration you need from other

groups? Like, do I need information from another team in order to bring that information to my to my customer? Or, or are they relying, is another team relying on me? There's a level of, I think that collaboration and navigation that's always important. I think it does, as you progress, probably that portion, and I talked about kind of the balance, that portion probably increases because your external facing and influence,

like navigating conflict may continue to be more prevalent. And so it's something to hone in on and build through experiences over time. It's a passion point for me. So that's why I dug into it. I wanna talk about our last key topic here about the cross-functional element of customer success and how customer success is not just a function, but also a mindset, but kind of sprouting from the CS

org. How are you seeing that change and what advice would you give to customer success professionals around really bridging the gaps throughout their company. I would say embrace it. In the last couple of years, there has been a couple of things that have happened in organizations. There's been more of a convergence, I would say of like sales leaders

and post sales leaders to work together like what the scope is. There's also been this debate about where does where do renewals sit? Do they sit with sales? Do they sit with CS? Is it a separate one? And all what there's others what that you could probably share that you've seen as well. What all of that shows to me is that the CS capabilities are now being recognized in other parts of the organization. But there is an understanding that the renewal happens when the sale happens.

It's like starting when the sale happens. That there's always indications of how healthy is a customer gonna be. There's an intent and a recognition that, maintaining and growing your existing customers is gonna probably have a lower cost to serve than going out and getting the existing customers is going to probably have a lower cost to serve than going out and getting the new customers. And product teams absolutely recognize that as well.

And so there's just this recognition that we all can play a role in those capabilities. And so it's kind of like, so you embrace it. That's great. Let's figure out what is the right thing that we need to do with our customers. And if there are certain capabilities or activities that happen earlier in the process with a BDR

or a salesperson, fantastic. That'll make the downstream roles and value even greater. If there are certain things that you can build within your product or leveraging your operations team, great, do it. It'll only maximize the value. So it really comes down to just throw away any functional silos and work through how to drive that integrated experience for your customers. I feel like the companies that do this really well, where there is a clear understanding of how customer value is being

provided, each of the phases, what needs to happen at each of the phases of the business or each of the departments in order for that value to be seen and experienced by the customer, those are the companies that are really providing exceptional products and services. And personally, as I look under the hood of different companies, when there's very strict silos and saying, no, that's customer success's job, or like, we don't need to do that because

customer success will do it later, that's where things really start to break down. And it just creates all this friction internally. That being said, we spoke about this a little bit earlier. The silos, I personally believe that the silos within a company are important for creating clarity for a team. They know this is my role. And what's happening right now is customer success is kind of starting to break those silos where it says this is all of our job.

It's not just mine. It's not just customer success. It's all of our jobs to make sure that we're getting the right information from the customer at different periods, sharing it with each other, and providing that feedback. How are you helping organizations through that? Honestly, it's go back to the basics.

Do we have a common understanding of what our customer's journey is, what their expectations are from us at different stages of their journey, what our roles are and where we all work together. Do we have a common vernacular that we're using or are we talking about similar things but using different language?

And are we working off of the same data set and the same technology and the same data sets? It's interesting are we working off of like the same data set in the same technology in the same data sets? It's interesting. It's kind of, you know, you kind of have to laugh at it. It's actually, you know, it's not revolutionary. It's go back to the basics. And maybe, maybe that customer journey and that end to end alignment that you had three years ago worked. But let's recognize that like macroeconomics conditions have changed, what our customers are expecting has changed, technology has really disrupted our thinking and possibilities. Have we reflected that in how we are all aligned?

And a lot of times what I'm finding is the answer is no. So let's take a step back and let's realign on that. And anytime we do a customer journey, two things happen. One is there's always, if you take a journey, there's always a set of things where there's many, many people involved or roles or interactions with the customer that are overlapping and super confusing. And then there's also always a big gap, at least one.

Sometimes there's more, but there's a big gap. You're like, okay, so if I look at the customer in year two, who's taking care of them in year two and three? Totally. That's really where I think we have right now. Let's like, take a step back, go back to the basics. Are we all aligned?

Okay, now we know what we can do together. Oh my God, I could not agree more. It's always like onboarding, everyone's on top of the customer, and there's like all this redundant work happening. And then later down the line, they're like, oh, yeah, those guys. That customer, I forgot about that. And really, this is why I love journey mapping as a tool so much. Even just in the most simple form of aligning on what does the customer need from us at all these phases and who's giving that to them? Who needs to be involved in this? And let's just take a step back, look at it all, look at where we've come to because the

nature of businesses, they're always growing and evolving and we're problem solving and creating solutions for different things. But that creates a lot of organizational debt and just wait that we need to then redistribute every once in a while and kind of realign on how are we giving the customer what they need throughout this experience that they have with us. Yeah, I did a journey workshop not too long ago and it was great because one of the insights

was the support team was like, oh yeah, we've been having these calls come in or cases come in and we absolutely think they need another product or some recommendations. And how was this shared with the rest of like, did you act on it? And how was this shared with other teams so that they could act on it? It was like, okay, there's an opportunity. So how do we systematically instill that? Because yeah, you do have a lot of insight in one area of the organization that others will benefit from.

So it's a tried and true tool, but I think it's even more relevant today. Oh my gosh. I completely agree. And really understanding where do we not have pipes across our teams? In this case, if there's no feedback loop between the client-facing teams and the product team, what a missed opportunity. And now with AI, we can make that so much easier as well and take unstructured data and make it into structured data and all that great stuff. But yeah, I'm a big fan, big fan of the journey map. Well, Mary Beth, we are coming to a close here.

We have just a couple of last minutes. I have two last questions for you. We're going to rapid fire it. What is a recent experience that you had with a brand or a company that left you impressed? That left me impressed. I've been super impressed with DoorDash recently. We recently set them up with business accounts and it's been a game changer in how I've been able to support my teams, myself, and my clients

and not just food delivery, but also some of the expansion that they've had into other verticals and some of the experience. It's the offers, the rapid innovation, the ease has been really great. But also when there's been an issue, and it doesn't matter whose fault it is, they have instantly responded and resolved it and made it even better than what it was before. So I've been super impressed with them lately. Yep. I had that experience as well, where something went wrong and they responded immediately, problem solved. They're clearly using AI, I'm sure, but they're doing it really well. I think it's a great, great use case.

Thank you for bringing that up. And then my last question for you is what is one piece of advice that every customer experience leader should hear? Don't underestimate the amount of time that is needed to influence and collaborate cross-functionally. Time is finite.

How are you spending your time and making sure that you are doing enough to collaborate, influencing, and break down those cross-functional silos so that your teams can do better and really, like you meet and exceed your customer expectations. And this needs to come top down too, just to add onto this, is we have to account for the time it takes for us to work together.

It is not just checking off all these tasks. There's always going to be a need for us to cross-functionally collaborate, to have workshops, to take time to have conversations and really understand the needs of our internal clients, which is our different departments. So I could not agree with you more on that one.

Marybeth, it's been wonderful having you on the show. Thank you so much for coming and sharing all this wisdom with us. It is clearly a very exciting time for customer success. And I am sure everyone listening has learned a lot from you. So thank you so much. Thank you, it was a pleasure.