Quick summary: Executive leadership and CS team members are pressuring CS leaders to integrate AI into their operations. Two crucial decisions to make are whether to build custom AI solutions or buy out-of-the-box tools, and whether to manage CS within a CRM or invest in a dedicated CSP.

CS leaders have important questions to answer as they begin planning for 2027. AI continues to transform the playing field, and CS teams cannot afford to remain complacent or rely on the same strategies that succeeded in years past. Some of the challenges that CS leaders face include:

- AI pressure: CS leaders face pressure from both senior management and CSMs to implement AI.

- Buying vs. building: Organizations have to decide whether it’s preferable to build their own AI solutions or buy them from a third party vendor.

- CRM vs. CSP: For CS teams without a dedicated platform, CS leaders have to decide whether to manage customer success within a sales CRM or sign up for a dedicated CSP.

Ravi Pimplaskar, Senior Director of Revenue Marketing at ChurnZero, recently hosted a webinar with a panel of CS experts to discuss these challenges, as well as their areas of focus for 2027. The panel includes:

- Emily Alexander, Chief Customer Officer at WelcomeHome Software

- Lukas Alexander, VP of Customer Success at ChurnZero

- Jeff Davison, Chief Customer Officer at Unanet

To go along with the start of football season, the webinar was broken into four quarters, with each quarter highlighting different topics. Today’s blog will cover the first two quarters (look out for a follow-up covering the next two).

Check out the full webinar here:

Quarter 1: The pressure to adopt AI and the “build vs. buy” question.

The first quarter covered the pressures for CS leaders to adopt AI, and whether it’s better to build a custom solution internally or buy an out-of-the-box tool.

CS leaders face pressure to adopt AI from both directions.

CS leaders are feeling both top-down and bottom-up pressure to adopt AI:

- Boardrooms and executive leadership are issuing mandates for CS leaders to adopt AI. Ravi noted that a Gartner survey reported 91% of customer service and support leaders feeling increased pressure to adopt AI.

- CSMs are advocating for the use of AI to claw back time spent on heavy administrative workloads, Lukas said. AI tools can give CSMs hours back in their day so they can reinvest that time in activities that drive more value.

Bringing CSMs into the decision-making process early can help teams identify the real-world scenarios where AI can help, Emily said. WelcomeHome established an AI committee that included individual, service-level team members who could evaluate their workflows and help identify where AI automations could make the most difference.

Building custom AI workflows vs. buying out-of-the-box solutions.

One important question is whether to develop AI tools and automations internally, or purchase out-of-the-box tools from a software vendor.

Building custom solutions can help businesses tailor AI to their needs, but that comes with the added cost to maintain, develop, and scale the solutions over time. There are also security hurdles, maintenance overhead, excessive token costs, development constraints, and mounting debt to consider, while out-of-the-box tools present a more sustainable and cost-effective way forward, Jeff said.

“A lot of the time what we find out is it would cost more money, more time, more maintenance for our internal teams than passing that over to a trusted vendor … having [AI] in the tool that we are working out of that houses all of our data just makes the most sense,” Emily added.

Quarter 2: CRMs vs. CSPs.

Both new and maturing CS teams often have to decide what platform they’ll use to manage their operations. There are two common choices: build out a CS module in the CRM solution that the sales team already uses, or buy a dedicated CSP that specializes in customer success.

The panel unanimously prefers using a dedicated CSP. Ravi mentioned that ChurnZero’s Customer Revenue Leadership Study found that CS teams with a dedicated CSP reported 100% NRR, vs. 94% for organizations without one.

Building CS workflows inside a CRM that isn’t built for customer success can take months of development time and require high maintenance costs, while still delivering a tool that goes underutilized, Jeff said. That’s why Unanet now uses ChurnZero to manage CS and shares churn score metrics in Salesforce to provide visibility for the sales team.

Having CSMs work in a dedicated CSP separate from the sales CRM, with bidirectional integrations to bridge connections, also helps prevent teams from getting overwhelmed with system fatigue, Emily said: “Our CSP is where our CSMs will log in, and our sales team will log into our CRM … you need to give [CSMs] as little tools as possible to log into” with integrations to bridge the gap.

CS leaders need to make important platform decisions.

CS leaders face mounting pressure from executive leadership and their own teams to adopt AI. Rather than rushing an AI rollout, leaders should first determine whether building custom AI workflows or buying an out-of-the-box solution is more effective and sustainable. At the same time, they need to decide whether to manage their operations in an established CRM or set up a new CSP. Getting these foundational decisions right can help shape a high-performing customer success program in the years ahead.