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I help B2B SaaS companies prove customer value and turn it into retention and…
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Articles by Jason
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🚀 Moving Beyond the Hype: How to Make AI Work for Your Customers
🚀 Moving Beyond the Hype: How to Make AI Work for Your Customers
There’s no shortage of noise around AI in customer success and for good reason. The potential is huge and still not…
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Mastering the Pace of Change
Mastering the Pace of Change
And how to keep thriving in the technology fast lane 2024..
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A practical guide to customer centricity
A practical guide to customer centricity
We know the theory and we know we need to be more customer centric. The biggest challenge for many organisations is how…
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Customer operations? Tell me more.
Customer operations? Tell me more.
It's not that long ago that sales operations was a hot new topic, helping companies utilise their sales data better to…
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Who’s looking after your customers’ success?
Who’s looking after your customers’ success?
What a great question to ask. Do you know the answer, and if not, who’s finding it out for you? And even more…
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What is Digital Transformation really about?
What is Digital Transformation really about?
This is part of a blog series I'm doing with The Service Desk & IT Support Show. There’s been a buzz across many…
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Are we ready for real 24×7 connectivity?
Are we ready for real 24×7 connectivity?
We’ve had the keynote and it was impressive – I’ve never had my family members watch one with me, and all be excited by…
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6 great customer success principles to live by…
6 great customer success principles to live by…
… and you learnt them all a long time ago in pre-school far far away. A great article that I read recently that's well…
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Are you delivering excellent service?
Are you delivering excellent service?
I too often hear the phrase service excellence used these days when describing technology delivery services, and in…
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Do digital and online mean the end of the high street?
Do digital and online mean the end of the high street?
I've long been a big fan of digital content - in all its forms - and how it's changing our lives for the better. More…
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Activity
20K followers
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Jason Noble posted thisIf your AI vendor still sells seats, ask who is defining done. This week at HumanX in Amsterdam, Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier said: "Unequivocally: seats are dead." ➡️ Zendesk has priced its AI agents on outcomes since August 2024 ➡️ Sierra charges when an agent resolves an issue or closes a sale ➡️ Ema has just raised a $77m Series B to charge per completed task, not per seat The direction for us is pretty clear but outcome pricing still doesn't remove the commercial problem. It just moves it - vendor and buyer now have to agree what done actually means. But who proves it. And what happens when the agent nearly succeeds. With seats, you could avoid that conversation until renewal. With outcomes, you have it on every invoice. That isn't a soft Customer Success skill. It's commercial execution. So inside the customer, who should own the definition of done? 👉 The business line, Finance or the CCO?
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Jason Noble posted thisFor years, SaaS has treated usage as a proxy for value. ➡️ more logins ➡️ more active users ➡️ more features adopted ➡️ more seats Generally, more usage has meant a healthier customer. Agentic software will break that assumption. Imagine a customer where: ❎ human logins fall ❎ seat numbers fall ❎ time spent in the product falls ... but AI agents are using the platform constantly behind the scenes. The customer gets faster outcomes... ✅ less manual work ✅ lower operating cost ✅ maybe better decisions By most traditional SaaS health measures, that customer could look worse. In reality, they may be getting more value than ever. That creates an interesting problem for Customer Success. If software increasingly becomes invisible infrastructure used by agents rather than people, then we may need to rethink what “adoption” actually means. Because: Human activity is not the same as customer value. And in an agentic world, the gap between the two could get much bigger. The SaaS companies still measuring health mainly through logins, seats and feature usage may not just have the wrong dashboard. They may misunderstand what their customers are actually buying. Maybe the more useful question becomes: If usage falls but the customer outcome improves, is that churn risk or success? #SaaS #CustomerSuccess #AI
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Jason Noble shared thisMost SaaS companies measure the start and end of the customer journey reasonably well. Sales measures bookings, ARR and pipeline. Finance measures renewal, churn and NRR. In between, teams measure go-live, adoption, usage and engagement. But there is one question that often gets lost: Did the customer actually achieve the outcome they bought the product for? That is the gap. Sales can hit its number. Implementation can deliver on time. Customer Success can drive adoption. Product usage can look healthy. And the customer can still struggle to explain the value. I call this the Customer Value Realisation Gap. And I think it explains a lot of SaaS retention problems that get labelled as Customer Success issues. I’ve mapped out where the gap appears and why it is so easy for nobody to really own it in the document below.
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Jason Noble shared thisFound a new use case for AI today.... wok fixing. Yes you heard that right. 🥘🍳🔥 We’d followed the instructions and wiped our wok with oil after using it. Got it out today and the oil had gone sticky. Tried wiping it with kitchen roll. The kitchen roll stuck to it. So now we had a sticky wok with added paper. Dinner was looking less promising. Sent my favourite AI tool a quick photo and explained what had happened (I was home alone so need professional guidance). It suggested a few simple steps to get the paper off without damaging the surface. Tried them and it worked. Not rocket science obviously but a win for me (and dinner). I spend a lot of time talking about AI’s role in business. Today I was just pleased it helped rescue dinner. Anyone else using AI for things that definitely weren’t in the product demo? 😂
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Jason Noble posted thisA lot of churn is visible before you ever sell. Not in the health score. In the buying motion. The customer wants to go live fast. Licences get rolled out. Adoption looks like progress. Then six or twelve months later the product is ripped out because nobody can say what actually changed in the business. That is not a Customer Success failure in month eleven. It is a commercial execution gap that started in the sale. Adoption is not customer value. Going live is a product event. Value is whether the outcome they paid for showed up. If the buying process only tests implementation speed and user counts, you have already accepted a live-then-rip-out deal. CS will inherit it. They will not be able to unwrite it. The flag is simple. If the buyer cannot describe the result they will have to defend internally, you are not closing a customer. You are closing a future churn case that still has a go-live date. Most SaaS companies do not have a CS activity problem here. They have a gap between what was sold and what can be proven. #CustomerSuccess #SaaS #CustomerValue #NRR
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Jason Noble posted thisEvery leadership team should have someone explicitly representing the customer. Not Customer Success. The customer. There’s an important difference. Sales has a revenue target. Product has a roadmap. Services has utilisation and delivery goals. Customer Success has retention. All perfectly reasonable. But every one of those teams can hit its number while the customer still fails to achieve the outcome they bought the product for. Looking back over more than 30 years leading technology teams, that is one of the things I would do differently. I would work much harder to stop functions becoming separate worlds with separate meetings, metrics and definitions of success. I would spend less leadership time reacting to the customer who is shouting or the renewal that has suddenly turned red. By then, you are usually dealing with the symptom. And I would spend far less time asking: What do we need customers to do for our growth? And far more asking: What measurable value are we creating for theirs? Because if the customer cannot see and defend that value, retention eventually becomes harder. And when every function is measured differently, someone still needs to ask whether the customer is actually winning. Who owns that question in your leadership team?
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Jason Noble posted thisAir India Limited has used AI to cut a customer refund process from 14 days to four hours. That’s a much more interesting AI metric than “hours saved”. Most AI business cases still start inside the company. ➡️ How much employee time did we save? ➡️ How many tasks did we automate? ➡️ How many people are using it? All useful measures, but they don’t tell you whether anything actually got better for the customer. Air India’s example starts somewhere else. What changed in the customer experience? ✅ Refunds went from 14 days to four hours ✅ Passenger name changes went from three days to around 30 minutes Now you can start following the value... ▶️ Lower customer effort ▶️ Fewer follow-up contacts ▶️ Lower cost-to-serve ▶️ Potentially higher satisfaction ▶️ Potentially stronger loyalty and retention That’s the difference between proving AI activity and proving AI value. And this is where a lot of companies are going to get caught out. They will be able to show... more AI usage more automation more tasks completed more employee time saved But the harder question from the board should be: What outcome actually improved? Because if the customer cannot see the difference, we may simply be making the existing process cheaper. 👉 The best AI business cases should start with the outcome. Then work backwards into the technology. Not the other way around. #AI #CustomerSuccess #SaaS
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Jason Noble posted thisWho owns fixing the reason your last five customers left? I recently shared a question to ask customers who cancel: “What made you decide to cancel?” But getting an honest answer is only the beginning... Suppose customers repeatedly tell you they never achieved what they bought the product for. Where does that finding go? ➡️ Sales may need to revisit what was promised ➡️ Product may need to investigate a capability gap ➡️ Onboarding may need to change how customers get started ➡️ Customer Success need to check earlier whether the expected outcome is achievable Several teams could have a part to play. Someone still needs to own the response. At your next leadership meeting, bring the last five cancellation conversations. For each one, ask: → What do we know and what are we assuming? → Could we reasonably have changed the outcome? → Who owns the next action? → How will we know whether it helped? Five conversations won’t establish your whole churn picture. They can give you specific issues to investigate. This is a practical part of the work I do with SaaS leadership teams: helping Sales, Product and Customer Success agree what needs to change to keep and grow customers. 👉 When you review churn, do you leave with named owners and decisions, or just an updated report?
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Jason Noble liked thisJason Noble liked thisNothing to see here... just me, casually humiliating myself on the internet in the name of Planhat. Really though - - Pi can do so much for so many of your teams (not just your customer facing ones!!) Pi knows CS, it knows your data, and it knows how to use Planhat. There's not much it can't do.
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Jason Noble liked thisJason Noble liked thisThe hardest promotion in Customer Success is the one where you give up your own accounts Team Lead sounds like the obvious next step after Senior CSM. But it's a change of job, not a bigger version of the one you have. When you take the lead seat, the work moves: → from your accounts to your team's accounts → from running renewals to coaching people through them → from your number to the whole team's number The jump from Customer Success Manager to Team Lead means trading your own book for a team. For some people, that's the right trade. If you get more energy from helping others get better than from working the account yourself, leadership will suit you. But if the part you love is being in the account -> the discovery, the strategy call, the save -> the lead seat can feel like distance from the work that made you good at this. There's a quieter path people skip: growing into a Senior or Strategic CSM. Same craft, harder accounts, more ownership, without managing anyone. A full career in its own right. Leadership isn't the only way up in CS. Before you chase the title, be honest about which work you want to be doing on a Tuesday afternoon. If you had to choose would you rather lead a CS team, or become the go-to CSM for the hardest accounts?
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Jason Noble reacted on thisJason Noble reacted on thisOne thing I'd redesign in #customersuccess: The customer context layer. Not playbooks. Not call scorecards. The thing that tells anyone picking up a conversation what actually happened with this customer before today. For years, a fragmented context layer was just annoying. - Customers repeated themselves. - CSMs pulled up three tools before a call. - Support closed a ticket without knowing renewal was a month away. Annoying, but fixable. Process and goodwill covered the gap. AI in the workflow ends that. The real risk is not just the AI agent giving a bad answer, but giving a confident wrong one. It can't flag a renewal risk it never saw. It can't write a follow-up that lands, missing the last three conversations. It can't escalate what it doesn't know is an escalation. So we need to agree on what a complete customer record actually means. CRM fields and ticket history are table stakes. A real record also holds: - What the sales rep promised before close. - Which onboarding milestones got hit, and which didn't. - Every handoff between people. - Product usage read in context, not as a standalone metric. I've seen this treated as a tooling problem: Buy a platform, consolidate the stack, pick one source of truth. Sometimes that helps. But the harder work sits before the tooling: - Agreeing on what context means for your customers. - Building the habit of capturing it before you need it. Most CS teams built data infrastructure. The context layer is still missing. That's exactly what breaks first when AI enters the workflow.
Publications
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What About The Customer?
TriTuns
See publicationThis guest blog was written by Jason Noble, a UK-based Expert in Customer Success. Jason is also co-host of, "The Jasons Take On..." a monthly webinar and podcast program that covers a wide-range of customer success topics.
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Customer Success Leadership as we move into 2019
KUPR Consulting
See publicationAs we move towards 2019, Jason Noble looks at the challenges and requirements for Customer Success leaders.
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Customer operations - tell me more
Jason Noble blog
See publicationInsights in the new and fast growing field of customer operations and customer data.
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Who's looking after your customers?
Goodlord
See publicationWhat a great question to ask. Do you know the answer, and if not, who’s finding it out for you? And even more importantly, do you know what your customers need to achieve to be successful?
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The many faces of digital transformation
The Service Desk & IT Support Show Blog
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Matt Cooksley
For anyone who is interested in how data, responsible AI and agentic solutions can transform the public sector, from NHS Trusts, to central and local government, to the intelligence services, this white paper provides the answers. And in a time where the public purse is under such strain, these actions could save £billions of tax payers money. #databricks Unifeye #agentbricks #responsibleAI
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CodeBase
From ecosystem collaboration to commercial clarity, The Sunday Times Future of Digital Tech Summit in Aberdeen brought together some of Scotland’s leading voices shaping the next decade of growth. Stephen Coleman OBE (CEO & Co-founder, CodeBase), Jennifer Craw MBE (Chief Executive, Opportunity North East), and Alisdair Gunn (Director, Glasgow City Innovation District) explored how regional ecosystems can scale faster by building trust, unlocking capital, and strengthening founder confidence. In conversations with Chris Herd (Firstbase), Ross McNairn (Wordsmith AI), and Jodie Sinclair (TheoHealth), founders shared what scaling really takes: salesmanship, global validation, and resilience. Yan Zhang (PolyAI) and investors from Octopus Ventures, Ventex Studio, Innovate UK Business Connect, and Scottish National Investment Bank added another layer, calling for clarity, defensibility, and focus on “painkiller” solutions customers cannot live without. Across panels, one message stood out: Scotland’s digital future will be built by the strength of its connections between founders who build, investors who believe, and public institutions that enable. Read our full takeaways from the summit in the comments below. #DigitalInnovation #ScotlandTech #StartupEcosystem #AIFuture PolyAI Innovate UK Business Connect The Scottish National Investment Bank Octopus Ventures Ventex Studio Wordsmith AI Ana Wolsztajn [Volsh-tayn] Theo Health Ailsa Young Ana Stewart Firstbase Edward Keelan Stuart McLeod Antonia Jenkinson
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