“Nobody owns the customer relationship. Everybody does.”
That’s how Jared Collins, Senior Director of Customer Success at Dell Technologies, put it on his episode of [Un]Churned with host, Josh Schachter.
His statement is a no-brainer for large companies with complex relationships and multiple internal and external stakeholders. But the same holds true for a Customer Success (CS) team of any size: cultivating successful customer relationships is a team effort.
In his episode, “What Consumption-Based CS Looks Like Inside a $100B Company,” Jared shares his strategies for building well-rounded teams and practical playbooks that are applicable whether you’re supporting a customer base of 50 or 5,000.
The CSM: Orchestrator, Not Owner
In high-performing Customer Success teams, CSMs wear lots of hats. They’re generalists who know how to ask the right questions and involve the right people. They understand the customer’s business, the contract, the technical setup, and how the product is used. They don’t have to be experts in every area, but they need to know when to bring in a subject matter expert.
Because CSMs sit at the center of so many touchpoints, they’re positioned to orchestrate the broader organization. If everybody owns the relationship, then the CSM coordinates that ownership. That means creating strong relationships internally as much as externally. The best CSMs align executives on the customer side while developing trust with Product, Support, Sales, and Finance internally.
As Jared puts it, “The most successful CSMs are the ones that spend time and prioritize building really strategic relationships, not just with the customer, obviously first and foremost the customer, but with the account teams, with the other specialists.”
Balancing Relationship Management with Data Strategy
Jared also expects his CSMs to be comfortable with data. Today’s CS teams have access to a lot of information, including product usage, support trends, stakeholder involvement, contract details, and NPS scores.
Being able to translate signals into insight is a skill worth investing in. A health score that flashes red, yellow, or green without context doesn’t drive action. Being able to parse out and define the impact of utilization, sentiment shifts, delivery performance, and customer-defined success milestones is a strategic asset.
When CSMs can turn this data into a narrative about risk and opportunity, renewal conversations stop being reactive, and expansion discussions stop being accidental. The role evolves from relationship manager to data strategist.
The Data: Customers Experience Companies, Not Products
Customers don’t see your company as separate parts; they see the whole business. If they use several products or services, their decision to renew depends on the overall value, not just one product. Problems in one area can affect the whole relationship. For example, growth in one product might rely on how well another is used.
That reality forces CS teams to think beyond product-level dashboards and aim for signals that span the full relationship. Getting there requires aligning systems, definitions, and incentives across teams that don’t always operate in sync. It’s time-consuming work, but without it, visibility remains fragmented and renewal risk surfaces too late.
Data → Triggers → Action
Jared puts it simply: “The data’s only good if it tells you something.”
Data only matters if it helps spot risks or opportunities and leads to action. Dashboards alone don’t make a difference, but taking action together does.
Jared’s team focuses on data, triggers, and playbooks. For example, if a customer is about to use up their plan, that’s a sign to talk about expanding. If it’s taking longer to set things up, that should prompt the team to work with Sales or Operations sooner.
But playbooks shouldn’t be too complicated. Jared shares, “I like to think of a playbook as a practical checklist… it gives plenty of room for the CSM to breathe and kind of bring their own expertise into it.” Often, a simple checklist linked to clear signals works better than a long process document. The aim isn’t to be perfect, but to take reliable action.
Using AI to Deliver a Seamless Experience
AI is a big topic among executives, but it’s often seen as a quick fix. However, AI can’t solve problems if you don’t first get the right data in the right place. If your signals aren’t consistent and your definitions differ across teams, AI will just make things more confusing.
Jared narrowed in on building a strong foundation: use consistent data models, set clear health criteria, and define triggers. Once you have this in place, AI can help you do even more.
It can analyze dense contracts, summarize meetings, detect sentiment shifts in communications, and flag disengaged stakeholders earlier than a manual review would. It can identify patterns across hundreds of accounts that no single CSM could track on their own. In practical terms, it lowers administrative load and sharpens prioritization.
But AI can’t replace good judgment or leadership. It helps teams spot important signals faster and focus on key accounts and moments. When used well, it helps teams get things done. If used poorly, it just adds another dashboard that looks good but doesn’t make a real difference.
It’s Never Too Early to Start
At its core, the best CS teams focus on balance and efficiency. Managing customer relationships while deciphering data. Creating playbooks that enable, not inundate. You don’t need enterprise scale to operate this way. You need clarity about what Customer Success is meant to deliver, and the discipline to build a system that supports it.
For more insights into how post-sales executives are thinking about Customer Success, subscribe to the [Un]Churned podcast and [Un]Churned Substack. Every week, we share lessons and learnings from customer-obsessed people who are exploring how to navigate today’s constantly changing market.
