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 internal client promotion it also demonstrates to the whole company that CS really does understand the important details about our customers.

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 the users have just got to get on and use it. Is it any wonder that they don’t see the benefits they might get from this change.

"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.