FALLS CHURCH, Va. – General Dynamics Information Technology (GDIT), a business unit of General Dynamics (NYSE:GD), announced today that it was awarded the Enterprise Network Operations and Cybersecurity Support (ENOCS) contract to deliver comprehensive enterprise IT and cybersecurity services for the Army National Guard and other federal government partners. The new $1.3 billion contract, awarded by the General Services Administration (GSA) Assisted Acquisition Services, has a one-year base period and six one-year option periods.

Through this contract, GDIT will support the Guard and other federal government partners to upgrade and build new enterprise IT environments that support mission needs. GDIT will provide integrated IT services, including standing up new operations centers, workforce support, technology provisioning and on‑site services. The company will also operate, modernize, integrate and defend the Guard’s classified and unclassified networks, further strengthening its cyber posture. In addition, GDIT will apply advanced artificial intelligence, data analytics and communication capabilities to enhance mission execution. Together, these capabilities will create a more agile and resilient enterprise environment – streamlining operations, enabling faster access to IT services, improving security and elevating service quality for the Guard and its partners.

“The Army National Guard depends on resilient, modern networks to support communities and government partners and safeguard the nation,” said Brian Sheridan, GDIT senior vice president for Defense. “We look forward to bringing the full strength of GDIT’s digital modernization, AI and cyber capabilities to enhance the mission readiness of the Guard and its partners.”

The award builds on GDIT’s partnership with the Army National Guard and a broad portfolio of Army-wide support, including delivering enterprise mission IT services for U.S. Army Europe, global integrated base defense sustainment support, flight school training and mission training complex support.

GDIT is a business unit of General Dynamics, a global aerospace and defense company that offers a broad portfolio of products and services in business aviation; ship construction and repair; land combat vehicles, weapons systems and munitions; and technology products and services. General Dynamics employs more than 120,000 people worldwide and generated $52.6 billion in revenue in 2025. More information about General Dynamics Information Technology is available at www.gdit.com. More information about General Dynamics is available at www.gd.com.

General Dynamics announced today that Paul Nedzbala, who currently serves as senior vice president and chief business officer at GDIT, has been appointed acting president of GDIT. Nedzbala joined GDIT in 2018 when it acquired CSRA, where he served for 19 years in a variety of roles, including executive vice president.

“Paul is a proven leader who brings decades of experience in federal IT services,” said Phebe Novakovic, chairman and chief executive officer. “We are grateful for his willingness to serve in an interim capacity until a new GDIT president is named.”

Amy Gilliland, who joined General Dynamics in 2005 and has served as president of GDIT since 2017, is no longer with the company.

“We thank Amy for her contributions to our company and wish her all the best in her future endeavors,” said Novakovic.

RESTON, Virginia -- General Dynamics (NYSE:GD) announced today that its board of directors has elected Danny Deep, who currently serves as president of the company, to be CEO, effective January 1, 2027. Deep will succeed Phebe Novakovic, who will transition to executive chairman after serving as CEO since 2013.

“Danny is a highly skilled executive with rich operating experience. It has been a pleasure working closely with him and I am certain he will be an outstanding CEO,” said Novakovic. “I very much look forward to our continuing collaboration.”

“On behalf of the board, we thank Phebe for her outstanding leadership and lasting contributions to General Dynamics,” said Laura J. Schumacher, independent lead director. “Phebe has led with vision, integrity and a deep commitment to our people and our Ethos. We have greatly benefitted from her efforts in setting a clear strategic vision, creating enduring value and in building a strong and capable leadership team.”

“We look forward to her continuing role with the company and to working together with Danny,” said Schumacher. “We have every confidence that he will continue the outstanding leadership and legacy that Phebe has exemplified.”

“Phebe has been an extraordinary leader for General Dynamics, and I am grateful for the close partnership we’ve shared and the opportunity to continue working together in the future,” said Deep. “I am profoundly honored to be selected as the next CEO of General Dynamics and humbled and deeply thankful for the board’s confidence.”

Deep has been with the company for 25 years, serving in positions of increasing responsibility. Before becoming president of the company in 2025, he served as executive vice president of Global Operations, executive vice president of Combat Systems, and president of Land Systems.

Headquartered in Reston, Virginia, General Dynamics is a global aerospace and defense company that offers a broad portfolio of products and services in business aviation; ship construction and repair; land combat vehicles, weapon systems and munitions; and technology products and services. General Dynamics employs more than 120,000 people worldwide and generated $52.6 billion in revenue in 2025. More information is available at www.gd.com.

Quick summary: Customer success and sales lose expansion revenue when they define the same moments differently, and writing down five shared terms gives both teams one language for who owns what and when to act.

Customer success flags an account as expansion-ready. The sales team never follows up because they were waiting for a different cue.

Scenarios like this play out every day inside revenue organizations. Customer success and sales often share goals, collaborate regularly, and even report on many of the same accounts. Yet they often use different definitions for four moments in the customer lifecycle: expansion-ready, renewal risk, ownership, and commercial opportunity. When those terms mean different things to each team, handoffs slow down, opportunities stall, and the customer experience grows inconsistent.

A shared revenue strategy requires a shared revenue dictionary.

The challenge of unclear boundaries.

In our annual CSM Confidential Report, we asked CSMs to name their single biggest challenge in commercial conversations. The most common answer, given by 24% of respondents, was unclear boundaries between CS and sales teams.

As customer success has taken on a larger commercial role, many organizations have expanded responsibilities without establishing a common framework for how the two teams should work together. Questions that should already have clear answers often get decided account by account.

Who owns what? What does an account look like when it’s ready to expand? How will the handoff work? Who’s going to handle the outreach? How should renewal risk change ownership?

Without shared definitions and answers to those questions, your teams develop their own interpretations. A shared revenue dictionary creates consistency.

Start your revenue dictionary with these five entries.

Expansion-ready account

- Where the definition differs: CS often marks an account as ready by looking at usage depth and stakeholder engagement, while sales is more likely to wait until a budget cycle ends or the customer shows clear intent to buy.

- The shared definition: An expansion-ready account has demonstrated sustained value from the product, needs more seats or features, has shared positive feedback, and has a confirmed commercial window for a buying conversation.

- What a shared definition changes: CS sends sales opportunities that they can act on immediately. Sales gains confidence in the opportunities that CS recommends.

Expansion trigger

- Where the definition differs: CS may view increased product usage as enough to start an expansion conversation, while sales waits for an explicit request from the customer.

- The shared definition: An expansion trigger is a predefined event, customer behavior, or combination of the two that both teams recognize as the appropriate moment to begin active commercial outreach.

- What a shared definition changes: Expansion conversations happen at the right time instead of getting delayed, because both teams are watching for the same thing.

Renewal-risk account

- Where the definition differs: CS often identifies risk when a customer shows signs of disengagement or a shift in sentiment. Sales may not recognize that there’s a renewal issue until it affects forecasting.

- The shared definition: A renewal-risk account is one that meets defined risk criteria, such as declining usage, negative sentiment or executive or sponsor turnover. Each one raises the likelihood of downsizing, delaying or not renewing.

- What a shared definition changes: Both sales and CS see risk early enough to coordinate a response and save the account from churn.

Ownership trigger

- Where the definition differs: Without a defined trigger, ownership is negotiated case-by-case, sometimes even mid-conversation with the customer.

- The shared definition: An ownership trigger is a predetermined, documented event that transfers responsibility for a post-sale revenue opportunity from one team to another.

- What a shared definition changes: With a RACI framework documented, ownership is clear. But the handoff itself matters, too. When CS brings sales into a growth conversation, the customer shouldn’t feel passed from one team to another. Sales should have the context it needs to pick up the conversation naturally, so the customer never repeats themselves and the opportunity stays intact.

Rules of engagement

- Where the definition differs: Left undocumented, sales and CS build their own informal expectations for how to work together, which amounts to no standard, fewer post-sale expansions, and an inconsistent customer experience.

- The shared definition: A documented framework that defines who identifies, qualifies, owns, and closes opportunities, when responsibility changes hands, what customer context gets passed between teams and how credit gets assigned across the revenue organization.

- What a shared definition changes: Sales and CS operate from the same revenue playbook, making collaboration on every account.

Agreeing on shared definitions is only the first step. Applying them consistently across every account requires visibility into customer behavior and the ability to catch those moments as they happen. With ChurnZero’s AI agents, CS and sales see the same expansion opening and the same renewal risk at the same moment, with account context already attached. Outreach goes out once, from whoever owns it. When CS and sales carry that context forward, the growth conversation continues instead of restarting. A shared revenue dictionary gives both teams the same language, but strong collaboration puts that language into practice. Write the definitions down this quarter, and the next expansion conversation starts with both teams already agreeing.

This is a guest post by Marley Wagner, head of customer success programs and strategy at EverHealth.

Quick summary: Your customers can log in every day and still fail to get what they bought. Score them across five dimensions instead: adoption, business outcomes, relationships, sentiment and support health.

One of the biggest misconceptions about health scores is that they’re designed to measure a customer’s activity when they should be designed to measure a customer’s success. A customer who logs in every day, attends every training session and opens every email isn’t necessarily healthy. Healthy customers are the ones who are achieving what they purchased your product to do. Effective health scores should combine inputs across multiple dimensions rather than relying on one category of data.

Think about health through the following five lenses. The right mix will likely vary based on industry, company size, maturity and how long the customer has been using your product. And while your health score doesn’t need to include every bullet, it can get you into the right mindset so you can narrow it down to what matters most in your environment.

Product adoption

Focus on:

- Are customers using the features that matter most to what they’re trying to accomplish?

- Have they adopted the workflows tied to business value as they define it?

- How quickly did they reach that value? (This might not be the same as how you internally measure time to value.

Whether customers use the standard, newest or most popular features matters less because that functionality may not apply to their goals.

Business outcomes

Focus on:

- Have they reached the success milestones established during onboarding?

- Are they seeing measurable return on investment (ROI)?

- Are they making progress toward the objectives they set when they started?

Following your process in a standard way isn’t required for success; CSMs should flag deviations as a trigger for outreach, but a different route doesn’t automatically mean a customer is at risk.

Relationships

Focus on:

- Are key stakeholders, including the executive sponsor, participating in strategic conversations?

- Do you have relationships beyond a single champion?

- Have there been any recent changes or departures among key contacts?

Having a quarterly business review (QBR) won’t tell you much on its own. Even if the right stakeholders attend, they need to engage for you to assess the relationship.

Customer sentiment

Focus on:

- What is the CSM hearing in conversations?

- How do executive stakeholders feel about the partnership?

- Are renewal conversations becoming more positive or more cautious?

CSAT captures a single moment, so it rarely gives a full picture. And by the time a bad NPS score comes in, it’s often too late to act.

Support and operational health

Focus on:

- Is onboarding progressing as expected and as mutually agreed upon?

- Are issues being resolved quickly and effectively if and when they arise?

- Are recurring problems preventing customers from realizing value?

Comparing ticket volume between churned and renewed accounts can sometimes reveal meaningful patterns, but the number itself matters less than how the tickets were resolved.

Quick summary: NRR and GRR run on the renewal cycle, so you won’t see your first 90 days in them. Marley Wagner offers four leading indicators you can move sooner: time to first value, product adoption, execution velocity and movement in renewal risk.

New customer success leaders often put a lot of pressure on themselves in the first few months. Within a short time, you expect to learn the product, lead a new team, and show impact to prove yourself as a worthy addition to the company. During a recent ChurnZero webinar, Marley Wagner, Head of Customer Success Programs and Strategy at EverHealth, walked through a 30-60-90 day framework for new customer success leaders. One of her recommendations is to be deliberate in what you measure.

Check net revenue retention (NRR) and gross revenue retention (GRR) for early signs of progress and you won’t find much. Those numbers likely won’t move because they are tied to a full renewal cycle. You rarely see day-one changes in those metrics within 90 days.

Leading indicators work differently. They show whether your changes are working before the revenue number catches up. Marley suggests four helpful metrics to watch in the first 90 days.

Metric #1: Time to first value.

Tweak the onboarding process and this one can move quickly, Marley says. She likes it because it shows whether customers are getting to use the product the way they want. Finishing the steps in an onboarding flow doesn’t say much by itself. What matters is whether that happens faster than it did before. Because time-to-first-value can move inside a single quarter, it’s one of the earliest signs that what you’re doing is working.

Metric #2: Feature and product adoption.

Product adoption can also be an early indicator of progress. For example, a feature could have launched or updated before you arrived but customers have yet to use it effectively or at all. Adding a slide about that feature to QBR and check-in decks, or adding some training, can be enough to move adoption.

Usage alone doesn’t prove a customer is getting value from the product. But it’s still one of the better leading indicators because it shows what customers are using. You’ll have to find out later if that usage pays off for the customer.

Metric #3: Execution velocity.

Execution velocity measures the team’s output, whether CSMs are able to effectively use their time to execute on their objectives. That could mean more strategic meetings and fewer status updates because a manual task finally got removed from their plate.

You might move certain tasks from CSMs to the support team. Other ways are automating data collection that used to live in a spreadsheet or building a deck template so team members don’t have to rebuild the same presentation from scratch every quarter. Any of these free up hours CSMs can spend protecting the account instead of doing admin work, and it’s one of the easiest wins to show early.

Metric #4: Movement in renewal risk.

Movement in renewal risk tracks how early a CS team can flag accounts that are unlikely to renew, rather than finding out at the last minute. It’s the hardest of the four to see this early, but it’s possible, according to Marley. A common pattern shows up across CS teams that can jeopardize renewals. CSMs will wait for the customer to bring up the renewal instead of raising it themselves, out of habit or nerves.

Coach the team to start that conversation six months out. Leaders get a more accurate read on which accounts are at risk, and CSMs get runway to act long before the renewal date. Addressing the renewal early gives the best accuracy in predicting retention or churn before NRR or GRR would be able to show it.

Build your own list.

These four metrics aren’t the only options. Every business needs its own metrics that are tied to a product or a specific problem a new leader was hired to solve. Use this list as a starting point, then build one that fits your business.

Watching a metric that’s already moving is a better use of the first 90 days than staring at one that hasn’t caught up yet. NRR and GRR will get there but they’re just not the first thing to check.

Quick summary: SaaS companies face pressure to accelerate customer onboarding, but it’s important to balance automation with a personalized experience. Keeping AI behind the scenes and automating strategically helps teams work more efficiently while delivering value to the customer.

SaaS businesses have a lot of incentive to streamline and automate their customer onboarding. Many companies are shifting to a consumption-based pricing model where they invoice their clients based on how much they use the platform – which means SaaS providers are financially motivated to get customers onto their platform faster.

But at the same time, customers expect personalized service that addresses their specific needs. And if you rush to automate your whole onboarding process, you risk missing important details that separate a finished onboarding from one that actually delivers value.

As the VP of Customer Experience Delivery at ChurnZero, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to streamline the customer experience without sacrificing the personal touch that makes a big difference for our clients. Let’s get into the risks of automating, along with ways to strategically improve your customer onboarding without fumbling your first impression.

The risks of automating customer onboarding.

There are some trade-offs that happen when you automate onboarding tasks that human beings used to do:

- Business context: B2B implementations require a lot of contextual information about how the customer wants to use the software. Generic AI tools often lack the ability to process these details and see the big picture.

- Repeatability: B2B implementations have stages and steps that repeat, but the way each customer gets there almost never does. Their internal processes, their data structure, and the way their accounts and contacts are organized all feed into the build, and none of it looks the same twice. Outside of the repeatable parts, it’s kind of the Wild West, and that’s where automation struggles.

- Performance measurement: Automation is supposed to enable teams to work faster. But time spent onboarding is only one piece of the puzzle, and businesses should be tracking other metrics that predict a customer’s long-term success.

How to automate onboarding while delivering value to the customer.

Onboarding teams can roll out automation tools to work more efficiently without sacrificing the customer experience. It just requires some strategic planning around where and how to automate:

Define success by more than just time-to-value.

Onboarding teams want to move faster because it frees up resources and helps the bottom line. But strict timelines (like a mandatory 45-day, 60-day, or 90-day setup) put the focus on the date instead of on what the customer can actually do when you’re finished.

In the B2B world, timing is a dangerous primary indicator. It matters to me as a leader for staffing and capacity, but we very rarely talk about it with customers beyond setting goals and making sure we’re aligned on what they want to do. Instead of just focusing on how fast you get through onboarding, you should measure if the onboarding actually delivered value and set your customer up for success:

- Customer satisfaction scores: Conducting surveys at key points of the journey can help you determine your customer’s satisfaction and find areas for improvement.

- Use case deployment: Confirm if your customers are using your product for the specific use cases they presented during the onboarding process.

- Adoption of what you built: Are customers actually using the configurations you built for them during implementation? When they aren’t, there’s sometimes a good reason, like priorities or processes changing. Dig in and find out why.

Maintain a personal connection.

SaaS implementations require many touch points with the customer. At ChurnZero, we’re dealing with customer experience professionals all day, every day, so their bar is higher. They know the game and they know what we’re trying to do, which means we have to be really good at it. We’ve been deliberate about not asking customers to interact with AI tools in place of those conversations, and about not losing the context those conversations give us.

The implementation process involves highly complex information. We build a lot of AI into our own platform, and we use all of it. The tooling on the market for running an implementation team is a different story: most of what I’ve demoed is designed for B2C, so in the B2B world it either does too little to be worth the effort or takes so much customization that you’re better off with your own approach. That’s changing fast, and a couple of tools are starting to look interesting. In the meantime, you can roll out automation strategically behind the scenes to maintain a personal connection and control over the onboarding:

- Automate manual tasks. One of the best uses for AI is automating administrative and repetitive tasks like data collection and data entry, turning whatever process documentation a customer sends over into a starting point for their configuration, and the low-value setup work your team repeats on every build.

- Maintain human understanding: Human beings are still better at understanding customer requirements and providing guidance. While AI can gather information and provide advice behind the scenes, the onboarding team should be front-and-center making recommendations to the customer.

- Avoid AI on top of AI: Every stage of the customer journey has a meaningful amount of AI in it now. Sales uses it to summarize meetings and pull pipeline information, the SDR team runs AI outbound, and by the time any of that reaches your onboarding team, the inputs you’re analyzing were themselves generated by another AI tool. Each layer takes you one step further from reality because you’re looking at a summary of a summary.

Use onboarding to drive future customer value.

You can also drive value in the future by positioning the onboarding journey as the first step in an ongoing relationship with your customer. During onboarding, you can set your customer up for long-term success, which is what keeps the renewal conversation from being a battle.

Take the information gathered during onboarding, like the use cases they came to you for and the goals they set, and carry it into the business reviews your CSMs run. Three months in, you can look at what the metrics say, whether they’ve reached those goals, and what needs adjusting as you iterate.

Ideally, you can show that you had a plan in place from day one. And your customer success teams can look back at the customer’s journey and say, “Here’s what we accomplished.”

Experiment with limited customer groups.

Keep in mind, you don’t have to use automation to overhaul every aspect of the onboarding process right out of the gate. Onboarding teams can test new workflows or automate certain processes with a limited group of customers. Successful tests can be expanded, while unsuccessful tests can be abandoned or tweaked and re-tested.

Don’t feel like you have to fully commit to any approach. At ChurnZero, we like to try little experiments with a small number of customers to see how it goes. In my mind, there’s no bad experiment because every test teaches you something.

Customer onboarding should enable customer success.

As SaaS companies update their pricing models and manage client expectations, they should build an onboarding process that blends automation with personalized customer service. Relying on rigid implementation timelines puts the focus on a date instead of on what the customer can actually do with your product. And when you put AI front and center, you lose the context that makes an implementation work.

Keeping AI behind the scenes to handle repetitive tasks frees your onboarding team to work more strategically and handle personal interactions with customers. Measuring the value you bring, looking for opportunities to drive future renewals and experimenting with automated tasks can help onboarding teams work more efficiently but still set their customers up for long-term success.

Quick summary: With football season here, we’re continuing our look at how customer success teams get ready for their own season: one quarter at a time. Check out what happened in the first and second quarters. The old adage says you play to win the game. And using tools not suited for customer success to grow your customer base isn’t playing to win.

A hard-fought first half has left your team locked in a scoreless tie at the half. Your defense has been great, but your offense has sputtered in the red zone. A good team may stick to the game plan and hope to pull out a close win at the end. A great team? They flip the field, create turnovers, and give the offense primo chances to run up the score.

This is how a CS platform built with AI designed exclusively for customer success separates itself from a CRM or generic AI. And while our first two quarters showed that a CS platform beats both those options at stopping churn, the real opportunity isn’t just holding the line. It’s turning defense into offense.

In the first blog in this series, we shared that our 6th annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study found that most companies’ revenue lives with customers already won. That’s exactly why a strong defense matters. But the game is shifting: Benchmarkit’s 2025 SaaS Performance Metrics report found that expansion revenue accounts for 40% of all new ARR: up five points in a single year.

That’s how you flip the field and score points nobody expected. A defense that only prevents losses isn’t championship caliber. It’s the one that turns stops into points that gets the glory.

Here’s two reasons a CRM or spreadsheet can’t flip the field for you:

A CRM’s “healthy” is a guess, not a measurement.

A green status in a CRM doesn’t show which features a customer uses or how they compare to expectations. That means renewal conversations get built around what you think you need to sell, not what they need. A CS platform should measure every engagement, qualitatively and quantitatively, so your pitches focus on goals, ROI, and their real pain points.

How it looks on the field: A customer’s license utilization increases beyond what they contracted for. Your CRM, however, doesn’t track product usage, let alone compare it to what’s in the contract. With ChurnZero, everything you need to see for an upsell gets flagged immediately. A native license utilization field tracks usage against what the customer purchased. On top of that, the health field in your CRM that was based on a “gut feeling” is now replaced by real-time, data-driven health scores. AI-driven relationship scores scan every engagement to get a qualitative read on what the customer cares about. In short, nothing slips through the cracks.

CRMs don’t create open running lanes. They hope the CSM finds one themselves.

Even all-star CSMs need someone to block for them. A CRM may have automated workflows, but they fire on schedule or with a manual trigger. You may miss opportunities for big plays while your CSM looks for running room. The opening may have been there, but the play took too long to develop. A winning platform would act like a Pro Bowl lineman: flagging the opportunity in real time, recommending an action, and clearing the way for the CSM to act in one step.

How it looks on the field: Your CSM has a meeting scheduled next month. As the meeting draws closer, they notice an expansion opportunity. They prep a message to deliver at the meeting, but by that time the moment’s gone cold. With ChurnZero, Beacon, one of our 20+ purpose-built AI agents, is constantly listening for expansion opportunities. When it finds one, the CSM gets a recommended playbook for the opportunity and a bespoke email they can review and send in one click.

Stopping churn keeps you from losing. It doesn’t win you the game. The teams pulling ahead this season aren’t just holding the other side scoreless. They’re turning every stop into points. A platform that only defends is playing not to lose. A platform built to flip the field is playing to win.

Now, the scoreboard reads HOME: 28. CHURN: ZERO. The stops are becoming points. Can you close out the victory?

Next week, Quarter 4: how to win the game efficiently while keeping your team fresh for next week.

Want the whole game plan? Register for the Playing to Win: The Customer Success Post-Game Show on September 23rd.

Quick summary: More agent autonomy can give your customer success team time back, or it can add noise. ChurnZero founder YouMon Tsang walks through the five conditions that decide which one you get.

The promise of AI is that if you hand agents more autonomy your customer success team gets more time back. Fewer alerts to chase and fewer tedious tasks mean more room for strategic work. While all of that is on the table, that treats AI like something that arrives ready to go. Whether it ends up making your team’s lives easier or just adds noise comes down to some conditions you set before it ever reaches a customer.

In a recent conversation on the Startup Builders and Backers podcast, YouMon Tsang, founder and CEO of ChurnZero, walked through those conditions. Here’s what he shared and what each one can do to help your customer success team as much as it can. Watch the full interview.

Pair facts with information.

The difference between a successful and unsuccessful AI implementation often comes down to data quality.

“There are really two major pieces of data: one is your facts, and then there’s information,” YouMon says. “It used to be [that] facts were the most important thing. Now you have to add the information.”

CS teams already have facts in their systems or processes. This includes contract dates, pricing, ARR, and points of contact. Information, on the other hand, gives context to the relationship, like call transcripts, email threads, and information about your products and services and how to use them. Feeding your agent both facts and information will help it deliver more strategic, sophisticated recommendations. 

Build trust in your agents the way you built trust in automation.

It’s easy to forget that CS teams have been through changes like this not so long ago. For instance, CSMs had to get acclimated to a static message being sent to a customer when they hadn’t used the product for two weeks. Automated outreach had an adoption curve and YouMon points to that time as a helpful playbook for implementing AI agents.

“There may be a time where [AI] could make better decisions than a human can in the moment, because it can absorb so much more information more quickly,” YouMon says. “But until now, I think the comfort level is really what dictates full automation… And that’s different for every organization. Every organization has its level of comfort.”

A good approach for agents could be full autonomy on some actions and an approval step on others. This balance will shift over time as your team’s confidence in the output grows. There’s no fixed timeline for that shift, and it looks different for every team. Treat this as a gradual handoff rather than the flip of a switch.

Match your AI strategy to the outcome you own.

Not every CS team is optimizing for the same result so it is important to identify which one applies to your organization.

“There’s a difference between affecting top-line outcome and impacting the profit margin, the expense line,” YouMon says. “I think both are really important. I wouldn’t say one is better than the other…Depending on what your department’s goals are, your AI has to service that goal.”

If your team isn’t expected to directly bring in revenue, your goal is to support customers. The better approach is then to focus on efficiency so that could mean automating tickets and reducing manual work. Teams measured on growth should focus on retention and expansion like catching churn risk early, spotting upsell opportunities, and strengthening relationships. Get clear on which one describes your team first. That’s what your AI strategy should be built around.

Fix timing and empathy will follow.

CS leaders worry that automated outreach loses the empathy a CSM would convey. YouMon says this can come down to timing.

“Bad timing is very obvious to see. It’s like, why are you sending me this now?” he says. “If you fix the timing problem, the empathy problem can follow pretty easily.”

AI can already customize language for a given situation. Timing is more difficult, because it depends on the system having the right information like previously mentioned. While you can’t necessarily program empathy into a system, fixing the timing of outreach can ensure that customers are treated with sensitivity.

Free your CSMs to do the job you hired them for.

Gaining more time doesn’t do much on its own, so leaders have to point their team toward what fills it. CSM job descriptions say they are looking for new hires to be consultative and curious but that rarely is what they end up being used for. The day-to-day defaults to admin work and routine follow-ups that don’t leave much time to be strategic.

“We should be hiring exactly the same way we’ve always wanted to hire, this aspirational hire,” YouMon says. “With AI handling the routine things, it’s up to the humans to do the work we hired them for to begin with.”

AI adoption doesn’t change what a CS job calls for. It finally lets team members spend their time on the work the role was supposed to be about.

What to do next.

Here are three places to look before you expand what your agents are allowed to do:

- Check what’s feeding your CS platform. If it’s contract and usage data alone, your agents are working with facts but no information. That puts the quality of their recommendations at risk.

- Figure out where your CSMs are spending too much time. This could be a tedious routine or reactive work. See if it could move to an agent with an approval step. That’s the fastest way to free up time for the relationship-building work that is more impactful.

- Determine if your CS team is geared toward servicing the customer or being growth-focused. If your AI roadmap doesn’t already reflect that, it could be optimizing for the wrong thing.

Quick summary: With football season here, we’re closing out our look at how customer success teams get ready for their own season: one quarter at a time. Check out what happened in the first, second, and third quarters. The old adage says you play to win the game. Ignoring every little detail will cost you when the game is on the line.

Winning a game means you did everything right for one game. Winning a championship requires operating at peak efficiency at all times. Managing the clock, staying ahead of the chains, and avoiding game-changing mistakes. No panic, even when things get tough. 

Salesforce found that service professionals spend less than half their time (46%) with customers. They spend the rest on administrative tasks. Those tasks need to be done, of course, but running at maximum efficiency means not letting them derail days of effort that could go toward customer success.

That’s the game of inches many teams are losing: the training that took weeks, the fire drill that could have been caught early, and the upsell that required hours of prep.

Here are three ways ChurnZero helps you win the game of inches

In-App content turns a crease into a running lane.

Other CRMs deliver customer answers, resources, or reminders via email or support tickets. Good enough to run through, but is it enough to take you all the way to the end zone? ChurnZero’s in-app content widens the lane. Quickly send announcements such as webinar invites, release notes, and support notifications. Robust Success Centers provide a single, customizable hub for collaboration. Or use WalkThroughs to streamline training for new users or introduce features. All of it removes friction, making winning plays much easier to find.

How it looks on the field: A customer needs a quick answer about a feature they are setting up. Other platforms would have an email or support ticket waiting in a queue – or perhaps leave the customer to figure it out themselves. With ChurnZero, a walkthrough or Success Center gives them quick access to the answers they need, getting them down the field faster.

The playbook is built for your scheme.

If a coach invests in a great QB but later realizes he doesn’t fit with the rest of the offense, should they replace him or adjust the playbook? The situation will dictate the choice, but, like the coach above, CS teams shouldn’t be forced to choose if their platform isn’t a perfect fit out of the box. Your platform should give you the power and flexibility to customize… without the admin drag.

No two customer success teams face the same issues. They’ll run into different walls. One team needs a ChurnScore that weighs a signal nobody else cares about. Another needs a Playbook step that sends a bespoke email instead of a template because the template doesn’t apply to that account. Journeys or Surveys should be shaped to fit their lifecycle. A platform built around a single fixed model forces you to work around the wall. ChurnZero is built to bend around any wall you hit in the way that is best for your business.

How it looks on the field: A team adopts a platform that looks great out of the box. Then an account encounters a situation unique to its business that the template didn’t anticipate. Now they are waiting for someone to build that exception. With ChurnZero, that exception is the playbook, giving you enterprise-level power without enterprise-level processes and slowdown. Instead, you can adjust in the moment: a bespoke email instead of a canned one, a skipped step instead of a forced one.

Every week is business as Uusual.

The best teams in football look the same every week. The same is true in customer success. Onboarding, renewal, and QBR time should all come with the same operational vigor. In G2’s Fall 2026 Grid Report, ChurnZero holds the highest overall Satisfaction score compared to our leading competitors. That edge holds across the board with the highest Net Promoter Score (89, against a next-best of 73), Likelihood to Recommend (94%), Ease of Doing Business (96%), and Quality of Support (96%). That’s not one good game. That’s a team built for success, no matter who’s on the other side of the ball.

How it looks on the field: You pick a platform that evaluates well. But when implementation time comes, day-to-day operations become clunky. Work moves slower than expected, and you’re sweating bullets about losing resources and time you can’t get back. With ChurnZero, you don’t just get a platform; you get a partner. Your team stays on schedule, with no drop-off even when QBR season hits full speed.

ChurnZero’s CEO, YouMon Tsang, predicts, “By the end of 2026, the average CSM will have 25–50% more bandwidth” thanks to pairing smart humans with smart systems. Whatever your platform is, it should extend the bandwidth of your current players. That’s how you build a championship-caliber customer success team.  

The scoreboard reads HOME: 42. CHURN: ZERO. That’s not luck. It’s a decisive victory for a team built to win the championship.

Want the whole game plan? Register for the Playing to Win: The Customer Success Post-Game Show on September 23rd.