The Convergence Of Customer Success, Experience, And Service

by Stephen Diorio

Five Keys to Aligning Customer Engagement Teams, Systems and Processes to Create More Value

It is common knowledge that delivering superior digital customer experience and maximizing customer lifetime value of customers’ needs to be the primary goal for any business that wants to grow in a digital age. Today, the vast majority (90%) of business leaders are making CX a primary focus. There are almost three million customer service representatives working in the US according to the Department of Labor, and almost every (95%) technology and Software as a Service (SaaS) firm has a Customer Success function according to Gainsight research.

Over the last decade, the lines have blurred between the roles of Customer Success (CS), Customer Service, and Customer Experience (CX) management to the degree that they even all sound the same. In a modern commercial model, all three of these previously siloed functions have aligned their goals, processes, metrics, and systems on the same three things:

• Growing top line revenues through loyalty, cross-sell, and expansion;

• Proactively addressing customer issues, questions, and opportunities;

• Orchestrating different teams in the business to improve customer experience.

For example, organizations increasingly recognize that Customer Success influences the entire customer lifecycle. This has led to the emergence of more unified Customer Success strategies that are forcing growth leaders to think holistically about the customer journey—from marketing and sales to post-purchase engagement.

"Customer success is no longer just about retention or support; it has evolved into a proactive, revenue-generating force that touches every part of the business," says Michael Marchand, who has managed customer success and experience operations over the past twenty years with WP Engine, Dell Technologies, and Deloitte Consulting. "What we're seeing now is a more integrated approach where marketing, product, sales, and customer success teams collaborate to drive business growth."

This integration is particularly evident at Oracle, where Mohamed Alqaq leads customer success efforts. With decades of experience in the field, Alqaq stresses that customer success should be regarded as a company-wide philosophy rather than a department. "Customer success isn’t about reactive support, it’s about being a maestro, orchestrating the relationship between teams and ensuring that every department is working toward a unified goal," Alqaq explains. "Sales, marketing, product, and support each contribute a piece to the puzzle, but customer success is the thread that connects them all."

With the broader adoption of Revenue Operations we are seeing customer success, service, and experience functions are taking on more strategic importance across the revenue cycle. This has led to a new generation of growth leaders with titles like Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) and Chief Customer Officer (CCO), who now have authority to better coordinate the teams that support customer health with the teams that support sales, account management, and marketing. This new growth leadership structure makes it possible to integrate Customer Success with service and experience teams beyond their traditional roles to radically transform business growth - enterprises that deploy a CRO-like role show 1.8-times higher revenue growth than their peers according to research by McKinsey.

So as customer success, service, and experience converge around the customer what is the difference between these three customers facing functions? Increasingly the answer is “not much.” I recently posed that question to executives and experts in these respective fields in a webinar, and I learned five keys to successfully managing the convergence of these functions in a B2B organization at every stage of the revenue cycle.

1. Investing in customer success, service, and experience as a revenue driver rather than a back-office capability. One factor that is blurring the lines between the operations managing customer experience, customer service, and customer success is their growing role in revenue and profit growth. In a modern commercial model revenues are increasingly tied to sustained loyalty, cross-selling, usage, referrals, penetration, and expansion revenues. As such, the lines between CX and CS have become less clear. While the top goals of Customer Success teams remain gross revenue retention (95%) and scale and efficiency (89%), more and more businesses are asking their CS teams to generate growth through renewals (41%), revenue expansion (28%) and new business in the form of customer success sales qualified leads (41%) according to a survey of 250 companies conducted by Gainsight. "Customer success managers must increasingly act as advocates—helping customers navigate their business challenges while driving strategic growth for their own organizations,” says Michael Marchand.

2. Building trust through a coordinated set of proactive education, engagement, and problem-solving actions versus acting in separate silos. “Once a prospect becomes a customer and post-sales implementation begins, Customer Success is increasingly playing the role of the ‘maestro’ who proactively engages the client across all their needs – training, onboarding, education, product updates, and support,” according to Mohammed Alqaq, a Strategic Customer Success Manager with Oracle, with over 20 years of client facing experience and supporting key account teams which serve large, complex accounts in engineering and design industries. “What is changing is the growing role CS now plays proactively orchestrating internal interactions with sales, service, product, and marketing teams to get feedback, share signals, answer questions, manage risks, and ensure value is delivered and the conditions exist for cross-sell, referrals, and success,” says Alqaq in a recent webinar entitled The Intersection of Customer Experience and Success.

Operationally CS has always involved coordinating people, processes, data, and technologies to enable a series of post-sales workflows to onboard, train, support, and retain customer relationships. But increasingly Customer Success involves account management, relationship development, and expansion activities that span the front of the revenue cycle. “Customer Success was once a siloed department – but now it is a company-wide growth strategy,” says Brent Krempges, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. “Organizations across industries increasingly recognize CS as central to the customer lifecycle, driving collaboration across departments. This has made CS indispensable for recurring revenue models and extended its influence beyond traditional B2B enterprise tech boundaries.”

Nick Mehta, CEO of Gainsight and author of Digital Customer Success, adds “CS has progressed from call‐center personnel responding to help requests and trouble tickets into CSMs [Customer Success Managers] who proactively collaborate with customers, as well as with Sales, Marketing, Product, IT, and more to design, execute, measure, and monitor customer journeys that deliver the greatest possible value to the customer.”

Today, a third of customer service professionals are shifting their focus to proactively solving customer problems, according to a survey of 2,000 customer service professionals by Intercom. "Clients don’t care about internal politics, job titles, or company silos”, says Michael Marchand, who also leads operations and strategy at Advantage Solutions, a $3B tech-enabled business services organization. “What they care about is whether their provider is easy to work with and has their back." Marchand, whose role spans the service, support, and product teams operations which span the entire customer lifecycle, has in-depth experience in connecting the dots across each of these functions. "Customer success managers must act as advocates—helping customers navigate their business challenges while driving strategic growth for their own organizations. If a client is experiencing repeated issues, waiting for them to reach out isn't the answer. You must get ahead of the problem, communicate solutions, and ensure they feel supported.”

3. How and where to deploy contactless, digital, and AI driven tools to deliver scale and speed at lower cost. Another factor transforming customer experience, service, and success is the rapid adoption of digital self-service channels and AI in customer facing interactions. Over two thirds (72%) of Customer Service professionals are actively using AI to automatically respond to inbound inquiries according to the Gainsight study. More than half (52%) of Customer Success teams are incorporating AI into their workflows, using tools that strengthen early indicator systems, automate processes, and provide richer customer insights. And 59% of traditional CX teams want to become more AI-driven in the next year according to a survey of 5,504 CX and CS teams by ZenDesk.

These tools deliver fast responses and scale at lower costs. For example, most business leaders (57%) feel their investment in conversational chatbots are delivering a large ROI on minimal investment according to research by Accenture. By automating tasks like data entry and churn detection, AI saves CS teams more than 10 hours per week, but they come with risks and downsides as well. Many customers don’t want to engage with a robot. Mohammed Alqaq suggests that businesses which add digital engagement models must ensure they are adaptable to changing customer preferences. "Some customers prefer human interaction; others want automated solutions. It’s not just about generational differences, it’s about the complexity of the solution and the customer’s level of maturity with the product," he explains. "Flexible communication channels are key to ensuring customers feel supported regardless of their engagement style."

4. Finding the right balance between the human touch with algorithmic and AI engagement. Pivoting too hard to AI and digital CS can pose big problems. Why? It turns out that the more we adopt AI and digital technology to enhance customer experience, the more customers value human engagement. Most customers (82%) will want to interact with humans more as technology improves in the future according to a global survey by PwC. That makes the art of balancing the human touch with digital and AI engagement critical to maximize customer lifetime value and differentiate the experience. There is an unintended side effect of all this focus on automation - it can diminish trust, commoditize the customer experience, and diminish long term customer relationship equity. That’s important because trust is at the core of customer success and a key to sustainable growth.

“Technology is supposed to be a force multiplier that augments the impact, effectiveness, and scale of customer service and success teams - but in some ways, it has overwhelmed and marginalized the role of human engagement and empathy,” says Brendan Kamm, CEO of Thnks, and the coauthor of The Power of Gratitude in Sales, Marketing and Customer Success. This has many experts saying the pendulum needs to swing in the other direction towards a more human approach to selling. “As AI becomes a bigger factor in the customer engagement model, people will increasingly notice the ‘human touch.’ So, to a large degree, our customer-facing processes need to become more human, not less,” says Kamm.

“You don't want to over-digitize things, because if everyone's getting an AI-powered email or interaction, is that authentic anymore?” writes Nick Mehta in his book Digital Customer Success. “Maintaining a balance between human creativity and machine capabilities is the challenge.” A good start is by incorporating authentic expressions of emotion and empathy, such as gratitude, into the revenue cycle. For example, something as simple as expressing appreciation of customer milestones, or a minor gesture of gratitude for their business, can make a big impact given that one of our most compelling needs as humans is the feeling of significance or importance. Making experiences memorable matters: according to McKinsey & Company, 70% of buying experiences are based on how customers feel they’re being treated,

5. Developing data-driven insights, metrics, and incentives to keep up with a changing set of business objectives. Another issue managers face is adapting their measurement systems to keep up with the changing focus and goals of customer-facing teams in service, success, and support. For example, the metrics most organizations use to measure the performance of these digital CX and CS channels are leading people to focus on the wrong objectives. The vast majority of Customer Success leaders (89%) are making scale and efficiency a primary goal of their efforts, according to a survey of research conducted by Gainsight. By comparison, only half of firms emphasize metrics focused on customer health, and less than a third on measures of onboarding satisfaction or account expansion. This means the metrics most organizations use to measure the performance of these digital CX and CS channels are leading people to focus on the wrong objectives.

Both Marchand and Alqaq agree that data-driven insights are reshaping customer success strategies. Instead of relying on historical trends alone, companies are leveraging analytics, AI, and customer feedback to identify risks and opportunities in real-time.

"A unified health scoring system shouldn’t just come from customer success—it needs input from sales, marketing, and support," Alqaq explains. "If a customer suddenly stops responding to surveys, attends fewer webinars, or raises an increasing number of support tickets, those signals matter. Combining data from multiple departments allows us to see the full picture."

Marchand builds on this idea, noting that successful organizations use data to create personalized customer experiences. “It's not just about revenue—it's about understanding individual customer needs,” says Marchand, referencing his speech on aligning CX to create value. When clients give feedback, whether directly or through their behavior, we have an opportunity to act on it and demonstrate value in ways they didn’t expect. AI opens up the opportunity to provide more human coverage for both large and mid-sized accounts, while automating routine activities that clients will find fast and convenient.”