At our recent Growth Forum in New York, Carlos Granda, Chief Customer Officer (CCO) of Hg’s Value Creation Team, discussed how the role of the CCO has become pivotal in fostering a customer-first culture and driving revenue.

Customer success isn’t just about keeping customers happy or sticking to “what worked before.” It’s about delivering measurable value and becoming the engine that drives revenue growth. Gone are the days when customer success could exist as a siloed department or even just a cost-center. Today, it needs to be baked into every decision, interaction, and strategy across the customer journey.

At the center of this transformation is the CCO. This role has evolved from a title to a key leadership position, serving as the driving force behind a customer-first culture. By focusing on five key areas such as fostering empathy, leveraging data insights, mapping the customer journey, and shifting from firefighting to fire prevention, businesses can elevate customer experiences, build loyalty, and become the engine that helps drive organic revenue.

What challenges are we addressing?

In today’s economic climate, compounded by disruptive innovations like AI, software companies must balance two critical priorities: customer retention while driving operational efficiency. Success is no longer about flashy product features; it is about delivering an exceptional customer experience throughout the journey.

This shift makes customer success teams vital growth engines, responsible for protecting the current customer base and unlocking upsell and cross sell opportunities. With the cost of acquiring new customers being 5x higher than retaining and nurturing existing ones. According to Harvard Business Review in “The Value of Keeping the Right Customers,” acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 25 times more than retaining an existing one.

Furthermore, revenue sources tend to align with the Pareto principle, where 80% of future profits typically come from just 20% of existing customers. Additionally, research done by Frederick Reichheld of Bain & Company (the inventor of the net promoter score) shows increasing customer retention rates by 5% increases profits by 25% to 95%.

In the Software as a Service (SaaS) landscape, achieving sustainable growth requires a proactive customer success strategy. By addressing these challenges head-on, organizations can transform their customer success efforts into engines of organic revenue growth, leveraging key areas to deliver a world-class customer experience. In this article, we’ll explore five key areas that enable companies to unlock growth, retain valuable customers, and drive long-term success.

Five key focus areas for a world-class CX organization

To rise to these challenges and foster lasting customer loyalty, businesses need a clear and actionable playbook. The following focus areas lay the groundwork for building a world-class customer experience organization:

1. Understanding the critical role of customer success and the CCO

The CCO is pivotal in driving a customer-first culture and ensuring customer success is embedded in the business strategy. The CCO must lead customer-centric transformation, influence cross-functional alignment, foster collaboration and utilize data insights to shape the customer experience.

Although the CCO may have limited control over product roadmaps or sales strategies, their role is crucial in aligning teams to prioritize customer needs across the organization. A key aspect of this alignment is establishing clearly defined roles and responsibilities within the customer success function. Establishing clear responsibilities for account and customer success managers will streamline all customer interactions and removes obstacles at every touchpoint. Embracing a customer-centric and revenue engine mentality allows organizations to align roles with specific business objectives, making customer success teams more efficient and impactful.

2. Fostering a culture of customer empathy across the organization

Empathy is the cornerstone of a customer-centric culture, and it must permeate all levels of an organization, from product development to marketing, sales and beyond. Every department plays a critical role in understanding and addressing customer challenges and emotional drivers. Beyond simply solving problems, it’s about anticipating needs and creating an environment where customers feel genuinely valued and understood.

Organizations must create systems, training programs, and incentives that ensure customer-centricity is reflected in daily actions and long-term strategies. When empathy becomes ingrained in the fabric of the organization, businesses can cultivate lasting relationships, improve customer satisfaction, and foster unwavering loyalty.

3. A data-driven culture

Cultivating a strategy informed by data is essential for creating a proactive and customer-centric organization. By leveraging customer data, businesses can predict behaviors, prevent churn and clearly identify areas for improvement. Leading indicators, such as customer health metrics, enable teams to anticipate challenges and address them before they escalate, ensuring a smoother and more strategic approach to customer success.

Metrics are only as effective as their clarity and alignment. Clearly defining key metrics, like Gross Retention Rate (GRR) or Net Retention Rate (NRR), is crucial to avoid confusion and ensure actionable insights. Misaligned definitions can erode trust and hinder decision-making. While lagging indicators like Net Promoter Score (NPS) provide useful insights, businesses must prioritize predictive metrics to enable proactive intervention and drive meaningful impact.

Success lies in the CCO's ability to manage these metrics effectively, ensuring data-driven insights are integrated into every decision that impacts customer experience. By aligning metrics with broader organizational goals, the CCO helps guide investments, focus areas, and strategies that drive sustainable growth. This preventive, data-centric approach transforms customer success into a true engine for business expansion.

4. Mapping the customer journey – core values that drive a world-class organization

To create exceptional customer experiences, businesses must view the journey through their customers‘ eyes. Mapping every interaction throughout the GTM motion, from the first contact to post-sale moments, reveals friction points and highlights areas for improvement. This insight enables organizations to proactively address issues, refine processes, and ensure smoother, more satisfying interactions that build loyalty and boost retention.

Beyond problem-solving, journey mapping fosters cross-functional alignment by providing teams across sales, marketing, product, and customer success with a shared understanding of the customer experience. By simplifying processes and anticipating customer needs, businesses can exceed expectations, deliver consistent value and stand out as a world-class organization.

5. From firefighting to fire prevention

Transitioning from a reactive, firefighting mentality to a proactive approach is critical for sustained success. Customer success is not just about solving problems as they arise. A key ingredient is building a foundation to proactively evaluate customer engagement, implement methods to act on signals and establish the discipline needed to prevent issues from occurring in the first place. A core element of this shift is leveraging data effectively to create actionable signals. These signals allow businesses to anticipate challenges, enabling teams to intervene early and address potential problems before they escalate.

This approach enhances the morale and productivity of customer success teams. Constantly being in "firefighter mode," where every day feels like an emergency, can be exhausting and demoralizing. It places unnecessary stress on the team and detracts from their ability to focus on strategic, value-adding initiatives. By fostering a culture that emphasizes fire prevention, organizations create an environment where customer success managers can dedicate time to proactive and rewarding work. This proactive mindset builds resilience, strengthens customer loyalty and allows teams to thrive while focusing on long-term, scalable solutions rather than immediate crises.

Customer Experience is no longer a mere support function or a nice-to-have investment. It has evolved into a strategic cornerstone of sustainable business growth. In an economy where the customer experience outweighs the allure of product features, organizations that prioritize customer retention and loyalty are better positioned to thrive. By embracing the Five Key Focus Areas, businesses can transform customer success from a reactive service into a growth revenue engine.

This shift not only enhances operational efficiency but also drives scalability and strengthens customer relationships. When customer success becomes ingrained in the company’s DNA, it creates a ripple effect of satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy that fuels long-term success. Ultimately, businesses that focus on delivering value and prioritizing the customer journey will set themselves apart in a competitive, customer-first economy.