Customer success sits at the centre of any SaaS company that lasts, and it's still the function most likely to be under-resourced when budgets tighten.

On a recent episode of the SaaS Stories podcast, I spoke with Rachael McBrearty, Chief Customer Officer at Evisort, about how she builds a customer-centric operation that drives growth rather than merely defending it. Her career runs through Cisco and LeanData, so she's watched the role change as AI and data reshaped what customer success can actually do.

Listen to the full episode of SaaS Stories with Rachael McBrearty

Here's what I took from the conversation.

Customer success is a revenue function

Rachael's framing cuts through most of what gets written about retention.

"It isn't about just having happy customers who stay; it's about customers that stay and grow."

That distinction changes how you resource the team. A retention function is a cost centre defending a number. A growth function is a revenue line with its own targets — and Gartner's finding that 80% of a company's future revenue comes from 20% of existing customers tells you which framing matches reality.

Design for growth. The first 90 to 180 days decide the relationship, and very little that happens afterwards fully corrects a bad start. Use that window to establish trust, educate properly, and get customers adopting the features that actually matter to them.

Identify your power features — the ones customers use most and derive most value from — and build onboarding around those rather than around your feature list. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is why so much onboarding fails. A tour of everything the product does is a tour designed for the vendor. A path to the two things this customer bought it for is designed for them.

Overcoming resistance to change

The biggest barrier to adoption isn't competition. It's comfort. Plenty of companies stay on spreadsheets and outdated systems purely because they're familiar, and inefficiency loses to familiarity more often than anyone admits.

Rachael uses a Lego Movie analogy that stuck with me. Early adopters are master builders who enjoy creating from scratch. Everyone else needs a clear, step-by-step guide, and most SaaS onboarding is written for the master builders.

Simplify adoption. Build starter kits — simple, prescriptive paths that get someone to a visible result quickly, without requiring them to make design decisions about a product they have used for four days.

And let customers start small. Implementing incrementally means confidence builds before scope does, which sounds slower and is usually faster, because a narrow deployment that works produces internal advocates who then push for the wider one.

Trust is the currency

Customers buy from companies they trust to help them reach their goals, and in enterprise deals that trust has to survive several stakeholders who've never met you.

Map stakeholder needs. Understand what each decision-maker actually cares about, from legal operations through to the executive team, and tailor content and engagement for each.

Keep the human connection. Digital touchpoints don't build relationships on their own. Connecting your executives with theirs creates alignment that survives a difficult quarter.

Where AI genuinely helps

AI is changing customer success by automating process, surfacing insight and giving people their time back. Rachael's examples are practical — AI-generated meeting notes, predictive analytics that anticipate customer needs, chatbots handling standard enquiries so human agents can take the complex ones.

Her framing of why it matters is the part worth keeping.

"AI allows us to spend more time with clients, which is what we should be doing."

Automate the repetitive. Note-taking, scheduling, data entry — the work that consumes hours and creates no relationship.

Predict churn. Use AI to read behavioural signals and flag risk early enough that you can still do something about it. The value is entirely in the timing — by the time a customer tells you they are leaving, the decision was usually made weeks earlier, and the intervention that would have worked is no longer available to you.

Customer success is a team sport

Retention isn't one team's job. Marketing, sales and customer success all have to be aligned on the same goal, or your customer experiences your org chart.

Run alignment sessions. Get every customer-facing team into the strategy conversation rather than briefing them afterwards.

Build 360-degree profiles. One source of truth with customer history, usage patterns and engagement data, accessible to everyone. Without it, alignment is a meeting rather than a capability.

Why retention actually fails

Retention problems usually come from a lack of intentionality rather than a lack of effort. Rachael's warning is about onboarding — neglect it and everything downstream gets harder — and about acting on product feedback early, while it's still cheap to act on.

Invest in onboarding. It establishes trust and drives early adoption of the features that make the product sticky.

Gather feedback continuously. Replace the long annual survey with shorter, more frequent loops. Something as simple as red-yellow-green sentiment tracking gives you signal without exhausting the person answering.

An annual survey tells you how a customer felt on one particular day, filtered through whatever happened that week. Continuous light-touch feedback tells you about a trajectory, and a trajectory is something you can act on.

Looking ahead

Rachael expects more sophisticated use of AI to optimise workflow and anticipate need, with one caution: don't get overwhelmed by the possibilities.

"Start with your current processes and identify areas for improvement."

Automate the low-hanging fruit first — meeting scheduling, email follow-ups — then move to using AI for behavioural pattern analysis that informs strategy.

Customer success as a leadership path

As the CCO role gains prominence, Rachael encourages people to treat customer success as a route to executive leadership rather than a service function.

"The sky's the limit for those who understand how to build systems that serve customers and drive revenue growth."

Whether you're starting out or aiming at the C-suite, the job is aligning customer experience with business outcomes. Start with onboarding — it's the highest-leverage thing on this list, and the one most companies have never properly designed.