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 AI strategy 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
Chapter 1: What is the identity crisis facing customer success?
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.
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Chapter 2: What are the key trends shaping customer success in 2025?
Chapter 3: How can customer success prove its ROI?
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? 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, you know, 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, you know, optional. It's no longer kind of a bet. Let's see how it plays out. Like it is a critical opportunity. 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 a 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.
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Chapter 4: Why do B2B companies need to think like B2C?
I love it.
The first is that customer success is facing an identity crisis right now. There's been a ton of variation in 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 And again, it's not something you can talk about and think about. It 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 lifecycle. 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, 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 that's, The tight integration, 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.
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Chapter 5: Is AI a game-changer for customer success?
Yeah. I mean, all of those rings so true to me as a customer success leader myself and someone who has just been obsessed in 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've 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. Like the people who tend to be attracted to customer success are 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 are... 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 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 in the organization. Mm-hmm.
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.
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Chapter 6: How can customer success break down silos with sales and product?
Spend some time with your CFO or their finance team and understand really, you know, 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.
And 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. Right. But 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, again, 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 and a customer's journey around really where they do, you know, 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, can I 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 type, what's their sentiment? How easy 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 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,
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Chapter 7: What does the future hold for customer success?
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 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.
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 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. 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? Cause there are so many macro environments that are changing. The businesses are probably, and so that is the value 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?
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