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Experts of Experience
5 Customer Success Trends You Can’t Ignore in 2025
00:45:11
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?
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Transcript49 lines
- [00:00]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Customer success is facing an identity crisis right now. How do we just fundamentally turn customer success on its head?
- [00:07]
Lauren Wood
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.
- [00:15]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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.
- [00:24]
Lauren Wood
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.
- [00:34]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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, you see a 10 to 20% uplift in expansion. Let me help deliver on the promise you made so that you can go make more promises.
- [00:55]
Lauren Wood
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 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.
- [01:51]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Thanks so much for having me.
- [01:53]
Lauren Wood
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. 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 in how customer success is shifting and changing today?
- [02:31]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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 we're. 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 kind of 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. Like it is a critical part of driving that ongoing value, helping your customers to, you know, really in their business to grow themselves and then as yourself as a company. How are you actually managing your existing customer base? We at Deloitte, we do, as I mentioned, kind of 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 of 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 COVID them and you tell me if you want to go to any of them.
- [03:58]
Lauren Wood
I love it.
- [03:59]
Mary Beth D'Souza
The first is that customer success is facing an identity crisis right now. There's been a ton of variation, you know, in what customer success means. And so there's really an opportunity to, 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 again, it's not something you can talk about and think about, 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, 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 collaboration, like I said, the collaboration is really needed to Drive insights and growth in today's environment. So those are the five themes that have emerged in the last couple of months based on our research with some of the leading companies.
- [05:48]
Lauren Wood
Yeah, I mean all of those ring so true to me as a customer success leader myself and someone who has just been obsessed in studying how customer success is true 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, 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?
- [06:48]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Yeah, I've spent a lot of time thinking about this because I, I think there can be so much value in what customer success drives. And it's almost like the, the benefit is the curse. Like the 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, to help their customers. But then the downside of that is sometimes they, 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 covering taking product fe there's, you know, do they complain that sales over. So like 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 a statement 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 GR 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, you know, I think the customer success as a, as an identity is, is thriving and there's opportunity for them to continue to, to grow and make an impact in the organization.
- [08:24]
Lauren Wood
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. And it's it. 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 onboarding 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.
- [09:24]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Yeah, I completely agree. And I would say, you know, it's, 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 this 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 to that point, I did a set of interviews with some CS leaders about 18 months ago and said, okay, 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, even 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, that growth and kind of expanding the mindset.
- [10:46]
Lauren Wood
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?
- [11:27]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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 again, that means that they're not going to do everything but that they can help orchestrate and look across the entire life cycle around in 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, that's important to then understand, okay, what data do we need to look at and what, and how do we think about it? And so if you have that understanding, then kind of looking at three different buckets of data, one is kind of what we naturally think about. What's your performance like with your, with your customer? Are they using your product or service? What kind of insights can we get from the level, the level of usage that they have? The second is really then the experience value and what type, what's their sentiment? How easy it. Do we make it to do business with us or are we making, you know, anytime they have a question, how quickly are we responding with the right answer at the right time? And then the, the last one is financial value, which is really hard. But if you are able to, you know, 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, you know, again, to be embedded in their business and be able to articulate the value that, that you're, you're providing. And I do believe that that is uniquely something that customer success can do. They can uniquely get into those, those insights.
- [13:09]
Lauren Wood
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 X information in order to ensure that we're servicing you in the best possible way for your business. But it is, 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.
- [14:34]
Mary Beth D'Souza
It is hard, but it's also like if we think about, and I recognize this is kind of going in a direction of more of an enterprise motion, there's definitely different considerations if you'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. 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's so many macro environments that are changing. The businesses are probably. And so that is the. 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 are you surfacing that information to them so that they're mutually engaging in their own success? And it, 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, if you can bridge that gap, improve that value, then I think there's, there's an opportunity there.
- [16:12]
Lauren Wood
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 for service agent. Make self service an actual joy for your customers with its conversational language anytime, on any channel. To learn more, visit salesforce.com agentforce Leadership Teams. How do you think that when it really comes to like 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, think a lot of companies struggle to really share that throughout the organization.
- [17:37]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Yeah, I break it down if I think customer success can influence your adoption, 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 a 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 know, I want to start getting value immediately. I Don't have time to like wait. I want to start getting value immediately. And so yeah that critical role I think of customer success helping, helping there. If I think about the expansion or growth, you know, we do like know and I've seen and we have data around it that says if you deploy in certain or 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 it. I put the right skill sets or I put the right capabilities in front of my customers then we're going to have a higher expansion, accelerated expansion. That's revenue. There you go. Like they give me more of that and then the same thing on retention I think, you know, if we're able to, you know, 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, you know, you're articulating the value and I think the leaders who are willing to do that and say I'm going to put in place the, the instrumentation to attribute what my teams or my technology is doing and then they're able to report on that. They're, they're getting more investment and they're getting more funding.
- [20:16]
Lauren Wood
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. That is the name of the game. But there's also other crumbles of value that you can be reflecting back. Do you think about this or have any thoughts on that?
- [21:22]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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.
- [21:37]
Lauren Wood
Yeah.
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Mary Beth D'Souza
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 those insightful conversations.
- [22:24]
Lauren Wood
Yeah. I mean I think that there's two ways and this kind of is a segue into our AI conversation and how AI is changing customer success. Actually, I'm going to ask you some questions about and then I'll share my opinion later. But how would you say that customer success is changing in the face of AI and what are you, what are some of the trends that you're seeing.
- [22:42]
Mary Beth D'Souza
With the introduction of AI? There's a ton of opportunity to change customer success. We have talked about and in the, in the industry people have talked about digital CS for years. Yeah, it started as a segment like it's like, okay, we're going to have like digital CS to handle the lower end. And 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 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 like your customers expect. You have all 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.
- [23:56]
Lauren Wood
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 like 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 general 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 soapbox moment.
- [25:27]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Love it.
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Lauren Wood
How else are you seeing, like what are the opportunities that you're seeing when it comes to AI in 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, the function of customer success?
- [25:51]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Yeah, the way I, 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, let me try a pilot leveraging AI. And, and so it's how do you move from an experiment to actually scaling? And, and in order to do that there's a couple of, there's some things that kind of need to be true. You need to have, is it like the right data models? You need to have the right infrastructure there in order to, within your company in order to do that. We find a lot of AI projects end up being data projects because that's a precursor to that. You need to have the right level of governance and kind of 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, 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? 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 save some time but as you look to scale those, it's going to require leadership and cross functional collaboration in order to do it. The other way that I see AI kind of the opportunities for AI in CS is there's, I look at them in three buckets. There's the efficiency play, like the stuff like let's pick, 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? Those are efficiency things. They're interesting, but they're not really going to 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. I'm seeing companies take that approach and introduce and really fundamentally change, say like I said, 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 going to be able to solve in like a day, you know, or with one use case. But it's really this exponential and, and so I'm excited about all three of them. I think it's going to 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.
- [28:51]
Lauren Wood
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?
- [29:00]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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. To their. To their customers.
- [29:40]
Lauren Wood
You're reminding me of Salesforce when they launched their success plans was last year, I believe. And we had Jim Roth, 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 is just like the ease, how can we make sure that that journey is more easeful 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?
- [31:09]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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 and 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, you know, or vertical that you're serving, or it may be, you know, some other sort of capability that and process that you're advising your customers on. But you need to have some level of technical capability that you're bringing both 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 I think in today's world it needs to be augmented with and driven by, 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 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 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 talk 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, like it's, it's really hard to internalize for someone who maybe it's hard to internalize what that differentiated value is. I'm not saying there's a ton of value in it, but you have to articulate it in a way that others outside of CS will understand.
- [33:29]
Lauren Wood
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?
- [34:28]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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 are they reliant 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 proportion probably increases because you're external facing and influence navigating conflict may continue be more prevalent. And so it's something to hone in on and build through experiences over time.
- [35:15]
Lauren Wood
It's a passion point for me. So that's why I dug into it. I want to 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?
- [35:45]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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 do renewals sit? Do they sit with sales? Do they sit with cs? Is it a separate one and all? What there's others 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. There is an understanding that the renewal happens when the sale happens. It's like starting when the sale happens that, you know, there's always indications of how healthy is a customer going to be. There's an intent and a recognition that, you know, maintaining and growing your existing customers is going to probably have a lower cost to serve than going out and getting the new customers like you know, 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 embrace it. That's great. Let's figure out what is the right, like 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 like a BDR or a sales person, 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 and 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 I would say integrated experience for your customers.
- [37:44]
Lauren Wood
I feel like the company's 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 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 and sharing it with each other and providing that feedback. How are you helping organizations through that?
- [38:55]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Honestly, it's. Go back to the basics, like, do we have a common understanding of what our customers 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 vernet that we're using? Or you know, are we, are we talking about similar things but using different language? And do we, are we working off of like the same data set and the same technology in the same data sets? It's interesting. It's kind of, you know, you kind of have to laugh at. You're like, 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 macroeconomic 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 one, but there's a big gap. You're like, okay, so if I look at this 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.
- [40:44]
Lauren Wood
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, they're, oh yeah, those guys, you know, that customer 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.
- [41:40]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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, you know, product or another, some recommendations. Like, and how was this shared with the rest? Like, did you act on it? And how it was shared with other teams so that they could act on it. It was like, okay, there's an opportunity, 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.
- [42:29]
Lauren Wood
Oh my gosh. I completely, I completely agree. And really understanding, like where, where do we not have pipes across our teams? Like 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 big fan, big fan of the journey map. Well, Mary, that we are coming to a close here. We have just a couple 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?
- [43:12]
Mary Beth D'Souza
That left me impressed. I've been super impressed with DoorDash recently. We recently set them up as a business with business accounts and it's been a game changer in how I've, you know, 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. So it's like 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, like 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.
- [43:55]
Lauren Wood
Yeah, I had that experience as well where something went wrong and they were, 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?
- [44:15]
Mary Beth D'Souza
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 you know, making sure that you are doing enough to collaborate, influence and break down those cross functional silos so that your teams can do better and really like you, meet and exceed your customer expectations.
- [44:39]
Lauren Wood
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. Mary Beth, 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.
- [45:26]
Mary Beth D'Souza
Thank you. It was a pleasure.