Just One Customer Success Thing

This week, my guest and I talk about when he was put in charge of a company that got acquired and led to his CS team being forced to transform from a traditional, human-led model to a data-driven, digital-first approach. We explore how mapping customer journeys with real usage data can dramatically improve retention and long-term success.

In the latest Just One Customer Success Thing episode, I spoke with Victoria Spencer, Senior Director at Oracle, about how AI agents are redefining digital customer experience — especially when supporting thousands of smaller cloud customers. These smart assistants go far beyond ChatGPT-style prompts by pulling real-time, company-specific insights to save time and boost impact.

Today, I’m joined by Eleni Vorvis, a seasoned fractional customer success leader, who shares why the handover from sales to CS is the most crucial—and often overlooked—moment in the customer journey. If you’ve ever struggled with inconsistent onboarding or poor cross-team alignment, this conversation is packed with insights you won’t want to miss.

My guest this week shares her slant on the topic of customer success plans. It’s a simple to implement idea and yet is a really powerful one to maximise the benefit that having these plans generate.

We often hear about the importance of Sales to CSM handovers but just as critical is when customers move from one CSM to another. There are of course many similarities but Chinelo explains where these handovers need to be handled differently.

My guest this week argues the case for late stage start-ups to simplify their revenue organisation. At this point in a company’s evolution, retention revenue will far exceed new business and therefore a new type of leader is needed. Thomas argues that CS leaders are the natural fit for this senior leadership role.

We all know what tactics are, but my guest this week takes them to the next level! She explains how her and her team spend time every week creatively designing and then executing new measurable tactics which have had stellar results.

Have you ever suspected that lesser-known clients are perceived by internal teams to be less important than the well known brands? Well here’s a simple idea that can help to put this right and has some other positive side effects too! Promoting clients internally will raise their profile, provide more context to people and help to level up all our customers. The added benefit is that by doing this...

If you don’t have great user adoption when your client goes live you risk the whole project being a failure. My guest this week really drives home the need to overcome the very normal resistance to change and the tactics we can deploy help this. The stakeholders responsible for making the purchasing decision will have gone through the whole sales process and will be excited by the new system but t...

"Being able to accurately forecast revenue is the most important way to identify high performing CS teams". My guest this week really drives home the importance of merging all the great things CS teams are known for and adding the ability, learned from Sales, on how to accurately forecast revenue figures.

Not sure you’re using the right KPIs to motivate your teams and prove value to your organisation? Well, this week’s guest explains ALL about that and in particular describes the framework she uses which is called ALL. ALL stands for Action Lagging and Leading KPIs.

The value and purpose of Quarterly Business Reviews has been under scrutiny lately in Customer Success circles. Sangita, my guest today, explains her experience and approach to these strategic customer meetings. She is passionate that they are still relevant and indeed has an example where they have transformed a client relationship and have helped to significantly grow revenues.

If your product is sufficiently complex, you might have a professional services team to onboard your clients. How customer success and professional services interact is really important for the successful management of the client and, as Steve explains, also potentially great for additional recurring revenues.

A large part of what Customer Success is all about is helping customers change what they are currently doing to something that will make them more successful. Helping customers launch a new product or continually helping improve adoption levels are examples of this. Luckily, Change management (and methodologies such as ADKAR) is a mature discipline and we can learn from the experts, one of whom is...

This week Victoria shares with me, Dean Colegate, the way she uses a dedicated data science resource to enable Oracle to effectively communicate at scale with their tens of thousands of customers.

Helping customers maximise the value they get from your platform is the core purpose of Customer Success. That said, it’s not always straightforward to define this value and the KPIs to measure it. My guest this week is Emilie Dubau (VP of CS at Sana Commerce), she and her team developed a systematic framework for doing this that was adopted by her whole business and helped their clients achieve g...

Are you ever unsure of the right cadence and method of engaging with your customers? It’s easy to think there is a ‘best practice’ methodology you should use and stick to come what may. My guest this week is Stephen O’Keefe (Senior Director of Customer Success at HubSpot )who describes his decision to revert to simplicity and how it made significant improvements - not just for his key client metri...

There’s a skill that every great customer success person has that is often not fully appreciated. This relates to having to present complex datasets and explain what various dashboards mean. What my guest Elena Cocco explains is that in order to bring the data alive, CSMs need to be able to paint a compelling narrative around this data.

The title of this episode is a little misleading. My guest, Aileen Brown from Workday, isn’t talking about the return of CSMs being the clients trusted advisor, she is saying this role has never gone away. The trend in many CS organisations might be to have CS be the people who also own upsell and renewal revenue however this is not the case everywhere. Aileen explains why in her organisation, the...

If you have a particularly technical or involved product or platform, you might find it challenging to discuss what your product does in a uniform way with people within your company and with your clients. My guest today, Adrian Beck (VP of Customer First at OKTA), shares with me how he instigated a project to define a product taxonomy based on use-cases that simplified what the product does and a...

It might seem obvious but really understanding the business value drivers that your new customer wants to achieve is fundamental to the overall success of the partnership. Customers have a dream to improve efficiency or reduce costs, etc. but if you don’t know the specifics of their dream, how are you going to make their dream come true?

On this week’s ‘Just One CS Thing’ Podcast, Nicole Baxby (VP of Customer Success at Quantifind) explains that having customers who are achieving success with your product and who therefore grow and renew is not the responsibility of just the CS team. The whole company from the top down needs to really understand that everyone has their part to play.

On this week’s ‘Just One CS Thing’ Podcast, Mohammed Alqaq (Strategic Customer Success Leader at Oracle) explains that those organisations that take the time now to deeply consider what data we feed AI, will achieve the greatest benefits.

On this week’s 14 min ‘Just One CS Thing’ Podcast, Chris Braley (Director of CS at Workiva) explains how tempting it is for CS teams to get carried away working on many customer related tasks and lose sight of what's really important. Keeping objectives simple will help move the overall needle the furthest.

In this week’s 8 min ‘Just One CS Thing’ podcast, Valerie Focke explains an important way she keeps client onboardings on track is to ensure the main stakeholder engaged. Particularly with large enterprise clients, the main stakeholder might pass off the implementation to their team and step away - if they do this there is a risk that momentum might be lost.