Customer Success is a watershed.

Chris Bové leads and advises global CS teams in strategy & operations.

Not long ago, the trusted business model of how companies sold and retained customers began to break down. 

Everyone was great at selling products, but there were gaps in making sure customers saw value.

The remedy? Customer Success. 

Today it is as much an industry as a cohesive engine that delivers value at-scale. However, It is not a set-and-forget solution. CS requires constant sensory input and recalibration. 

That's why leading global teams in CS is such a thrill. It intersects product, revenue, and customer lifetime value to turn risk into retention. 

Enable your customers. Let them define their needs and lead the way.

"You've got to start with the customer experience, and work backwards to the technology." - Steve jobs

Helping customers find value so that they stay.

When CS is siloed, it fails. When the entire company owns it, with trusted handoffs to/from various teams, it is highly effective as an engagement framework. It smashes renewal records and closes OKRs in the full spectrum LAER workflow. 

Chris Bové can help you evaluate your company's CS strategy as well as its current maturity. Are your CSMs currently owning all stages of a customer's lifecycle? Or is your program more mature, separating onboarding, value realization, and retention into different motions, each owned by its relevant expert?

We'll start with the desired customer outcomes, then design and drive the strategy to achieve them. 

• Set the tone with progressive adoption
• Create proactive engagements
• Work 1:1 to help them achieve the success they deserve.

[Learn more about CS]

USERS (not customers) are your strongest influencers of churn.

In B2B SaaS, "customers" refers to the roles of purchasers and people managers. "Users" are different. They represent the dozens, hundreds, or thousands of individual seats.

Their opinions are as much the influencers of churn as cost and data... if not more so. 

Track User Success in a similar way to how we all get measurements from Customer Journeys... with a new process called "User Quests", placing specific adoption goals in front of each user. By allocating "customer" to Customer Journey and "user" to User Quest, we double the metrics, double the potential outcomes, and create a more intuitive and predictable framework.

This has one major headwind: executives don't think in terms of these "quests". Revenue leaders care about renewal stages, accounts, and the progression of the lifecycle. However when these "quests" add the same gamification that User Communities do, real change is seen.

[Learn more about US]

Users realize a company's strength through its Community.

Customers have less patience today. They want to see immediate value. They want a proactive, resource-rich environment that supports its products. 

Your Community can provide this internally to stakeholders through many metrics including ones you may not have heard of. (Ever hear of EoV: Evidence of Value tracking? Or VBIs: Vibe-Based Insights?) 

Gone are the days where your Community is just there to regurgitate the value props put forth by the marketing team. It can now be a truly proactive growth tool. 

It starts with progressive adoption, and runs consistent learning (called "everboarding"). Then...

• Deploy onboarding to net-new. 
• Craft customer enablement. 
• Support it with conversational AI. 
• Connect it to CRM and your Support Teams for a seamless CX.

[Learn more about Community]

Enablement empowers users to succeed on their own.

If Customer Success is the full strategy for helping customers achieve their desired outcomes, then Customer Enablement is one of the key ways that strategy gets executed.

A Customer Enablement team creates the reusable training materials that support users at-scale

Customer enablement builds scalable resources like:

• Knowledge bases and help centers 
• Training programs and academies 
• Product documentation 
• Tutorials, webinars, and certifications 
• In-app guidance and onboarding flows 

So instead of doing things for the customer, enablement is about teaching customers how to do things themselves.

[Learn more about Customer Enablement]

The new strategy is upgrading from LAER to LASER.

Digital Customer Success is evolving too quickly to hold on to strategy from even 2-3 years ago. The targets of proactive reach-out include customers, users, freeware usage, and also much more segmentation in Enterprise, Mid-Market and SMB. 

DCSM requires different enablement materials; different tactics in proactive reach-out; and different playbooks that drive success.

Leverage AI-companioned workflows, automation, and human-touch Digital CSMs. Examine scaled workflows. Reconfigure Customer Journey for LASER.

Scale is determined by the levels of tech-touch and hybrid engagement a company can support.

[Learn more about Digital CS]

ProServe is your company's own consultants on strategy + tech.

The Professional Services Org is the specialized consulting and implementation arm of the company. It helps customers get the product configured, adopted, and delivering real value. 

This is highly necessary for complex deployments, either for strategic accounts or for when the product itself is complicated.

The PSO team's mission may vary, but here are the bullets:

• Set up success from Day 1. 
• Accelerate measurable ROI
• Project-based customer-focused consulting
• Get in, get out. Let Support and CS handle the rest.

Also, note that in 2025–2026, buyers are:

• Cutting budgets
• Consolidating vendors 
• Demanding more impact 
• Seeking cheaper or AI-native tools
   

In that climate, the Services team becomes a value proof engine, not just an implementation arm.

[Learn more about PSO]

Seatbelts on! CS Ops is about to go from 0-60 in 2026.

The Ops Team always seems to be the last in line - the one that never hears about anything until it's too late. But don't worry, that's changing this year. 

Countless companies out there have made a huge shift in priorities in the last two years, consolidating their tech stacks and shedding unnecessary workflows. Conserving spend is everywhere, but the pendulum is swinging back. 

Solutions Engineering teams are going to be the next big focus, and it'll probably hit in Q3 2026 as companies plan on transforming their homegrown internal CS Ops in a big way. 

Note: If you're in Ops now, and are not yet solving real CS problems with an open-mind and with a hyper-proactive attitude, then you may fall behind the curve.