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The Storm in Customer Success
There’s a storm brewing in Customer Success. Budgets are tightening. Renewal cycles are getting more complex. More people than ever are involved in the buying committee. At the same time, every business is looking to its existing customer base to drive growth to protect Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) and expand Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
In this environment, the traditional model of CS, focused on adoption, satisfaction, or NPS, simply doesn’t cut it anymore. Adoption and NPS do not guarantee renewal in this market. The companies that will win are the ones moving Customer Success from a support function to a revenue-driving function.
NRR Is the New NPS
At Hook, we believe Customer Success should own a revenue number. That doesn’t always mean CSMs negotiate renewals or sign contracts, it means they’re accountable for outcomes that move the needle: GRR and NRR.
Why does that matter? Because no organization can afford to have an entire function working toward a goal that doesn’t tie back to revenue.
Think of it like this: when Customer Success is only measured on adoption or NPS, you can have a perfectly “healthy” customer, great usage, happy feedback, who still churns. Then you’ve got a function in your business celebrating a win that doesn’t align with your revenue targets.
The Mindset and Skill Set Shift
Becoming a revenue-driving CSM isn’t just about changing targets, it’s a complete mindset and skill set shift.
Mindset shift: from “How do I make my customers happy?” to “Where is my biggest revenue risk and how do I close that gap?”
Skill set shift: from platform expertise to commercial acumen, understanding value, telling a clear data-driven story, multi-threading across stakeholders, and confidently engaging executives.
To lead teams through this shift, CS leaders need to coach, hire, and incentivize differently and provide the tools that make this new model scalable.
The Problem: Too Much on the Plate
Here’s the challenge: we’re asking CSMs to take on revenue responsibilities without taking anything off their plate.They’re still expected to:
Be product experts
Run training sessions
Build adoption plans
Gather insights from multiple data sources
Craft bespoke success plans and QBRs
Spot risks and upsell opportunities
No wonder it’s hard to scale. The average CSM is overloaded, and important signals slip through the cracks. Risk gets missed. Expansion gets missed. Revenue gets missed.
The Solution: AI That Works With Context
That’s where AI comes in, not to replace CSMs, but to free them up to focus on the high-value, revenue-driving work. The goal isn’t just to automate busywork. The goal is to use AI to:
Tell you where to focus
Tell you what to do
Help you execute quickly
But AI can only do that effectively if it has context. Generic AI that writes generic emails doesn’t help anyone. To be useful, it needs all the data you can give it - structured, unstructured, and external - to truly understand each customer and their journey.
That’s exactly what Hook was built for. By bringing all customer data into one unified view and layering AI-driven insights and playbooks through Echo, CSMs can see, in real time:
Which accounts are at risk
Where upsell opportunities exist
What actions to take next
How to tell the right story to the right people
The result: AI that doesn’t just automate, it amplifies your CSMs’ ability to drive revenue.
The Future of CS Is Revenue-Driven
The future of Customer Success isn’t softer metrics or sentiment scores, it’s measurable revenue impact. And with the right mindset, skill set, and AI-powered enablement, CSMs can finally do what they’ve always wanted to: drive meaningful, predictable growth across every customer.