What Customer Success Teams Are Prioritizing In 2026 and What the Data Shows Is Working

Customer Success (CS) teams are operating in a far more demanding environment than even a few years ago. Customer bases continue to grow. Products are more complex. And, expectations around retention and expansion are higher than ever.

As a result, CS leaders are under pressure to support more customers, adopt AI in search of scale, and demonstrate measurable revenue impact, all without expanding budgets at the same pace.

Gainsight’s 2025 Customer Success Index, which draws on insights from more than 400 companies, CS leaders, and practitioners, offers a clear view into how teams are navigating this shift—where they’re investing, how they’re scaling with digital and AI, and the ways they’re connecting day-to-day work to business outcomes.

Scaling Customer Success With More Efficient Operating Models

Scaling impact without scaling cost is no longer a theoretical challenge. As customer volumes increase, Customer Success teams that rely heavily on manual processes and one-to-one effort quickly hit their limits. Efficiency has become a core operating requirement, not just a finance exercise.

As Brent Krempges, Chief Customer Officer at Gainsight, put it during our recent CS Index webinar, “As leaders, we’ve got to get smarter in terms of how we’re leveraging technology. You’re seeing more decrease than increase in overall headcount, and so the correlation is doing more with less while servicing your customers and improving outcomes.”

The CS Index data shows a clear divide. Some organizations are able to run CS programs with significantly lower spend as a percentage of revenue while still maintaining accountability for retention, adoption, and outcomes. Others continue to invest more heavily but struggle to achieve the same level of consistency and scale.

When the data is segmented further, the difference becomes even clearer. Gainsight customers in the study report a median CS spend of roughly 3% of revenue, compared to approximately 8% for non customers. This lower spend does not come at the expense of outcomes, though. Instead, it reflects more mature operating models that reduce manual work and focus human effort where it matters most.

The takeaway for CS leaders is straightforward: Efficiency is not about doing less. It is about designing Customer Success to work better at scale.

AI Has Moved From Experiment to Expectation

AI is no longer a future concept in CS. It’s becoming an expected part of how teams operate.

While CS teams have been slower to standardize use of AI than their go-to-market counterparts in marketing and sales, CS leaders are under pressure to catch up in order to more effectively manage their books of business. That requires clearer signals, more consistent inputs, and less reliance on intuition alone. AI fits naturally into this need when applied to repeatable workflows where signal quality matters.

The CS Index shows that teams further along in CS maturity are more likely to adopt AI for outcome-driven use cases such as churn risk identification, sentiment analysis, and renewal preparation. These teams are not experimenting randomly. They are embedding AI into day-to-day work.

Gainsight customers stand out clearly here. They are 13% more likely to adopt AI overall and significantly more likely to apply it in high impact use cases like churn prediction and sentiment analysis. This pattern suggests AI is being used as infrastructure to support consistent decision making rather than as a standalone tool.

As teams plan for the future, the question is no longer whether AI belongs in CS. It is about where AI and agentic solutions should be consistently applied, and where human judgment remains essential.

Improve CSM Account Ratios While Avoiding Burnout

Account coverage is one of the most visible pressure points in modern CS. As customer bases grow, simply adding more CSMs is not a sustainable way to scale teams that rely on effort alone to increase coverage tend to see diminishing returns, rising burnout, and uneven customer experiences.

The CS Index data shows that high-performing teams are addressing this challenge through intelligent systems and workflow design rather than manual effort. These teams support meaningfully more accounts per CSM across segments while maintaining consistent engagement. Importantly, account ratios vary by licensing model, with different expectations for SMB, commercial, and enterprise customers based on contract structure, complexity, and depth of engagement.

When the data is segmented to view Gainsight customers vs. non-customers, customers consistently support higher coverage within each category. In commercial and enterprise segments, Gainsight customers support roughly 25% more accounts per CSM than non customers. In SMB, where scale pressure is highest, coverage is nearly 70% higher.

For CS teams heading into 2026, scalable coverage will depend on how well engagement models are designed within each licensing type, not how hard individuals are pushed.