Evolution of Customer Success by the Numbers - Kellie Capote, Chief Customer Officer Gainsight

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, Founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics That Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Kellie Capote, the Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight. Today, we'll be covering three main topic areas with Kellie. First, key insights from the 2022 Customer Success Benchmarking Index. Second, the evolving priority of customer success, especially in today's cautious capital environment. And third, the role of the Chief Customer Officer. Kellie, please take a moment to give a brief background of your journey to becoming a guest on the Metrics Measure Up podcast.

**Kellie Capote** (1:09)
Yes. Thank you so much for having me, Ray. Excited to be here. So hi folks, as Ray said, I'm the CCO here at Gainsight. I've had the immense pleasure of spending the past about five and a half years at Gainsight really transforming and evolving through the CS organization. So the entirety of my career has been spent in the CS umbrella here at Gainsight, building out in the early days our enterprise arm of customer success, leading those teams, having the opportunity to then expand my remit and lead the entire customer success organization. Then I had the immense pleasure about a year and a half ago to really spread my wings and lead the post-sales organization as CCO, then taking in the pillars of support, professional services, the CSM org, and then we have a centralized CS ops and scale organization as well. A large part of what I do, Ray, is I have the fun and the pleasure of interacting with other CS executives, in addition to our customers, but in the industry more broadly to trade notes about leadership advice and continue to trailblaze the next version of what customer success is going to look like for organizations.

**Ray Rike** (2:17)
I look very forward to discussing the evolution of the customer success organization and the chief customer officer role. But let's start with this baseline of data. And it was based upon the customer success benchmarking index that we partnered on over the last three or four months. And there's some really interesting data and insights that we found during that research. So, Kellie, let's start with what were some of the top findings that you saw in the benchmarking research that we conducted?

**Kellie Capote** (2:46)
Yeah, it's a great question. So there was a few findings that I will say I was pleasantly surprised about. Like in a good way, I was excited because these were kind of monumental and they're just they're tangible results that I think kind of crystallize where we've been in customer success and the maturity and evolution that we're now seeing. So one of them was 41% of companies indicated that CS ops organizations were newly formed. And then in total, 61% of organizations have some version of a CS ops organization. To me, this is really critical and important to underscore because it's synonymous in my mind to sales and sales operations or revenue operations. It shows the level of operational rigor and operational excellence from an investment standpoint that organizations are taking to really double down and kind of sophisticated those principles and workflows within their CS teams. So that was a big one. I was also pleasantly surprised and pleased to see that when we kind of looked at the performance metric side of things for CS organizations, that 63% of them were tracking net revenue retention. So NRR as a core metric. Again, I think that this really emphasizes that CS is now being appreciated as a growth engine for organizations. And it's not that limited view of customer success or the CSM organization just being this churn fighting machine, right? So it's shifted a little bit from kind of the defense to the offense. And a big piece of that too is 45% of CS organizations actually have true renewal responsibility. I think that that'll be a number that we continue to see shift up into the right over the next several years. So those were some of the key statistics that I thought were like a good sign of where customer success has been and where it's going.

**Ray Rike** (4:45)
Well, as our listeners know, we love to talk metrics and data, so thank you for throwing out a lot of data there, Kellie. I'm going to dig down into a couple of those. And first of all, that 63% of customer success organizations are tracking net revenue retention, a real key to enterprise value. But at the same time, what I was a little surprised at was, I think it was only about 20% of CS organizations had primary responsibility for the upsell and cross-sell motion. And since net revenue retention is based upon both renewal rates on a dollar basis, but also on the expansion revenue, upsells, cross-sells, how does CS effectively drive better NRR where they don't drive the upsell, cross-sell process?