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On this episode, we ask big questions about how customer loyalty is formed — and how AI can be leveraged to build stronger connections with customers.

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What does customer loyalty look like in the age of AI?

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Explore the transformative potential of Contact Center-as-a-Service (CCaaS) solutions and learn how to navigate the evolving landscape of AI-driven customer interactions with this executive brief from Frost & Sullivan.

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The CCaaS breakthrough: Redefining customer interactions with AI

Join Ajinkya Malasane, senior director, product strategy and marketing for TELUS Digital (formerly TELUS International), and Vikram Chatterji, co-founder and CEO of Galileo, a generative AI (GenAI) evaluation company, as they provide efficient and effective ways to solve key GenAI project blockers for easier deployments.

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Crafting production-grade GenAI applications

Discover how TELUS Digital helped a world-leading communications and technology company streamline workflows and enhance its quality standards by leveraging a cloud-native development strategy and advanced automation solutions, including AI-powered test-driven development (TDD).

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Optimizing app development with cloud-native solutions and automation

Optimizing application development with cloud-native solutions and automation

Watch this recorded webinar from Everest Group and TELUS Digital (formerly TELUS International) for new insights to help you skillfully transform your digital customer experience.

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Webinar: How to supercharge your CX with AI-fueled digital transformation

How to supercharge your CX with AI-fueled digital transformation

Discover how TELUS Digital used our proven field operations testing (FOT) experience to create a high-quality dataset for training advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) and autonomous vehicles (AV).

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Curating high-quality data for the training and validation of ADAS and AV models

On this episode, we explore how eco-friendly apparel brand Frank And Oak evolved its business model to adapt to customer expectations — and how data, feedback and technology are used to optimize its CX strategy.

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What is the Frank And Oak secret for adapting to changing customer preferences?

Join industry experts from TELUS Digital and Everest Group as they explore how leading technologies, such as generative AI, automation, analytics and more, are delivering value for organizations without compromising service quality.

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Efficient CX delivery: A tech-driven approach

Discover how TELUS Digital assisted a leading U.S. autonomous vehicle (AV) developer in refining the scenario comprehension and motion planning capabilities of their AV bot.

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Enhancing an autonomous vehicle bot’s scenario understanding with tailored fine-tuning datasets

Discover how TELUS International successfully deployed a robotic process automation (RPA) solution for a leading waste management company to minimize time-consuming tasks and reduce the errors associated with manual data entry.

Implementing robotic process automation to streamline critical procurement processes

Discover how TELUS Digital successfully deployed a robotic process automation (RPA) solution for a leading waste management company to minimize time-consuming tasks and reduce the errors associated with manual data entry.

On this episode, we explore strategies for building a compelling business case for customer experience (CX) investment — and how to optimize the budget you’ve secured.

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How can leaders win and optimize investment in CX?

Forrester Budget Planning Guide 2025: Customer Experience Hero

To succeed, customer experience (CX) leaders must invest in strengthening core capabilities that enable their organizations to turn customer-centric strategies into real, impactful experiences. This guide from Forrester offers data-driven insights to help you determine where to increase, decrease or experiment with your CX budgets for 2025.

Forrester’s Budget Planning Guide 2025: Customer Experience

TELUS Digital recently conducted a survey that explored the customer service preferences of consumers today. Explore the results.

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2024 customer service preferences 

Infographic: 2024 customer service preferences

See the results our global, disruptive client achieved after they transitioned to Contact Center Outsourcing Solutions from TELUS Digital.

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Bringing efficiency to a leading food delivery platform's overwhelmed contact center

On this episode, we ask big questions to debunk prominent myths and misconceptions surrounding automation in customer experience.

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What do people get wrong about automation?

Architect your generative AI strategy for success in CX. Learn to identify manageable use cases, navigate build vs. buy decisions and leverage partnerships.

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A blueprint for GenAI use case identification in CX

Discover some notable contact center trends driving innovation in CX, from AI-powered automation to cloud adoption, with research from Frost & Sullivan.

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Five key contact center trends you should know for 2025

By showing that you understand your customers, you create the right circumstances to win customer loyalty. Learn how to embed empathy into your CX.

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How to win customer loyalty with empathy in your customer experience

Discover key insights from an Everest Group survey combined with perspectives from leaders and analysts on CX trends, investment priorities and more.

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2024 digital transformation pulse check: A snapshot of trends, challenges and opportunities from CX leaders

Learn to safeguard AI training data from fraud with proven security frameworks. Read about threats in crowdsourcing and effective defense strategies.

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Fraud prevention best practices when crowdsourcing AI data

Innovation tends to begin with a question.

Asking is easy. Answering is hard. And so, I'll leave that to the experts.

I’m Robert Zirk, host of Questions for now, a brand new podcast from TELUS Digital that shares compelling insights about digital customer experience — straight from thought leaders.

On each episode, we'll explore the context and considerations behind some of the biggest questions facing digital CX leaders today.

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Subscribe to Questions for now — Compelling perspectives on digital CX on your podcast player of choice. That’s all — for now.

Who, what, when, where, why and how. Introducing Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital sharing compelling perspectives on the digital customer experience.

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Who, what, when, where, why and how. Introducing Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital sharing compelling perspectives on the digital customer experience (CX).

Join host Robert Zirk as he asks big thinkers today's big questions. Featuring thought leaders from beloved brands and influential institutions, Questions for now is packed full of actionable insights that listeners can apply in their organizations today.

Subscribe and listen to Questions for now on your podcast player of choice.

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A trailer for now: Questions for now — Compelling perspectives on digital CX

Robert Zirk: What's your organization's number one business priority?

62% of CEOs in an annual Gartner survey identified growth as their primary focus — the highest this percentage has been in the past decade.

Traditionally B2B businesses rely on sales as their primary growth engine. It's a means of increasing revenue and expanding their customer base.

But the reality is that sustainable growth doesn't just rely on acquiring new customers. You also have to keep your existing ones — the practice of customer retention.

It's not a given that the customers you have today will remain your customers tomorrow, or for years to come. Your competitors are also looking to grow by winning over the customers you currently serve.

B2B companies that only focus on short-term results tend to view retention as a defensive strategy and customer experience as a cost center. And far too often, brands focus on net new customers at the expense of, instead of alongside, their existing customers. The same Gartner study that identified growth as the number one priority among CEOs indicates that only 10% of CEOs consider the customer — as in, the one they already serve — to be their top priority.

There's an opportunity here. What if you look beyond the defensive strategy of customer retention?

Customer success is a proactive approach centered on delivering value to the customer, ensuring they meet their desired outcomes. In B2B, it encompasses fostering relationships, driving retention and aligning your own growth with that of your customers.

On this episode, we'll learn how customer success can be a powerful growth driver that works alongside sales to propel your B2B business forward. Daphne Costa Lopes, global director of customer success, strategic accounts and solution architecture at HubSpot, joins me today on Questions for now where we'll ask: How can brands turn customer success into their second growth engine?

Welcome to Questions for now, a podcast from TELUS Digital, where we ask today's big questions in digital customer experience. I'm Robert Zirk.

Daphne Costa Lopes: Hi, I'm so happy to be here in the podcast and talking about my favorite thing, customer success.

Robert Zirk: In her role at HubSpot, Daphne leads teams that manage HubSpot's largest accounts, ranging from small businesses to industry giants. HubSpot is client relationship management software with an array of tools that help businesses connect with their customers.

Daphne Costa Lopes: We started as a marketing automation tool and now we offer that end to end solution that actually includes customer success as well.

Robert Zirk: Customer success is at the heart of HubSpot's business. And Daphne's own interest in customer success-driven growth extends well beyond her work with HubSpot.

Daphne Costa Lopes: I host a podcast called This is Growth, where I talk to the CS experts, the leaders, people who are doing the work and how they're doing it. And then I also write a weekly newsletter to 12,000 CS professionals, it goes out every Friday, on how to build and scale your CS team. So basically my whole life is customer success.

Robert Zirk: Throughout her more than 12 year career in customer success, Daphne has seen an evolution of what the term means, noting that it used to be synonymous with happiness.

Daphne Costa Lopes: I remember seeing an article from Forbes in, I think, around 2012 and it was the rise of the Chief Happiness Officer. Everything was about making customers happy. NPS, CSAT, those were the kinds of things that customer success teams were responsible for. And then we saw a change in that. We started understanding the importance of customer success for a land and expand strategy, how important it is to deliver results for your customers so that you can renew and grow them.

Robert Zirk: A land and expand strategy begins with “landing” a small piece of business, building a relationship by consistently delivering a great experience, and then “expanding” by upselling and cross-selling to win more business from the same organization.

Daphne Costa Lopes: And we went into this journey of moving more towards a defensive team, so taking care of churn, preventing churn. And then, during COVID, we saw a boom of customers coming online and wanting to do more with software companies. And what happened was that we started to see the potential of customer success for growth, so as a second growth engine for the business.

And that's when a lot of businesses started bringing net revenue retention into the fold as a North Star metric. That was, let's say, short-lived because the boom of COVID was followed by difficult macro environmental situations. And now we're getting back at a point where we're talking about sustainable growth. We still want customer success to drive growth, but how do we do that sustainably? How do we do that in a way that's anchored in customer value?

Robert Zirk: These fundamental questions are asked daily by customer success leaders who have cultivated a growth mindset. Daphne shared insights from a previous role illustrating a shift in focus from preventing customer churn to viewing customer value as a catalyst for growth.

Daphne Costa Lopes: I worked in a startup that we were partners to many technology businesses and our job was to help them retain their customers.

I knew that if you bought a product and you failed to implement it, that it was harder to get that implementation back on track. I knew that you weren't going to be able to achieve your goal if you didn't get that implementation right or the adoption right. I was really focused on that churn number, right? And how do we prevent churn? How do we get better at retaining our customers?

At that time, what I started seeing was that during the onboarding process, during the retainers that we had, that we always spotted opportunities for customers to do more. And that happened with our most successful customers. So a customer that bought maybe a starter package for a product, we helped them implement it, they saw a lot of success, they saw results and suddenly, they had new needs and we were able to upsell them to the next year or cross-sell to a different product. And at the time we were sending all these opportunities back, but we weren't really tracking.

And it dawned on me where we had to go back to them every quarter, every six months and talk about the results that we were delivering, the quality, the capacity we had, et cetera. One of the things that I wanted to do was, “Okay, I know we're creating all these opportunities, I don't know are they closing? Are they not closing? Are they valuable? Are sales reps happy?”

So let's start documenting. Let's build a mechanism to track how many of these opportunities we're sending back and how much these customers are growing. How much revenue are we generating? And the numbers were impressive and actually much more compelling than just the revenue we're saving was the revenue that we were creating for those businesses.

Robert Zirk: All of this led to what she describes as a eureka moment: that customer success can serve as a second growth engine for the organization.

Daphne Costa Lopes: I was like, “Ah! When a customer is successful, they grow!”

And I know land and expand’s the strategy and it sounds obvious, but when you're in customer success and your only job is to prevent churn and the sales job is to create opportunities, you might not have connected those dots. And I can tell you that those dots were not connected. Customer success qualified leads, as we call them today, just weren't a thing.

And we started doing that very early on in 2011. And to this day, like literally 13 years later, my teams still track success qualified leads, how much money we make from them, the conversion rate. And I've been tracking this now for a very long time, and I can tell you in every single team I've had: startup, scale up, Fortune 500 business — CSQLs work and they're really valuable.

Robert Zirk: Throughout her career, Daphne has hired hundreds of managers who are tasked with ensuring customer success drives sustainable growth. She noted that the most effective CSMs develop a deep understanding of what success means to their customers and then create a practical step-by-step roadmap to ensure they reach their goals.

Daphne Costa Lopes: So discovery-type skills, asking great questions, curiosity. Then the next thing is the ability to do strategic planning. “Okay, I've heard what you want. How do I connect that to the product and the steps? How do we get there from a perspective of implementation or rollout?” A CSM has to always be able to do that.

If they can't connect what the customer wants with how to execute on it, then they're missing the trick. The job is to do that. You do all of this through being an effective communicator.

You also need to be able to communicate the value that you're delivering back to your customers, right? You need to be able to not just take in the information, but be able to pass it back and say “In six months down the line, here's what you told me you wanted. Here's what you've achieved.” You need to be able to wrap up a story around it when things go south and they usually do at some point with a customer, you disappoint them, they don't achieve a goal or an implementation doesn't go the way that it’s supposed to be. You need a CSM that's even keeled and to be able to communicate to the right stakeholders in the way that's needed.

And then ensuring accountability. So a customer very often will tell you that they want to do all these things and they go away and they do not very much because they have other priorities, because they're overwhelmed, they don't know what to do or maybe that just fell between the cracks of what they needed to do, they forgot. So a CSM needs to be able to drive accountability with that customer to say, “You said you're going to do this. Where is it at? Is this going to delay our project? This is the impact.”

Robert Zirk: And when serving your top customers, as Daphne does in her role with HubSpot’s strategic accounts, she notes that the importance of each of those four skills — developing an understanding of customers, strategic planning, communication and accountability — becomes even greater.

Daphne Costa Lopes: The bigger the customer gets, the more complex the organization becomes. And you are going to need to navigate across multiple departments. You're going to have to navigate politics. You're going to have to understand procurement, legal. I think what happens is it's less that a brand new set of skills opens up for a CSM when they get to that enterprise level and it's more like every single one of the core skills becomes even more important and you're expected to do at a even higher level.

Robert Zirk: While the discipline of customer success experiences an ongoing evolution, it remains grounded in the idea that it's meant to ensure, quite simply, that customers achieve their desired outcomes. retention

Daphne Costa Lopes: I think customers’ expectations are that we are able to deliver value to them in the way that they expect to see value. But now with AI self-service technologies, multiple channels, I think customers expect that this isn't just going to be a one on one relationship, me and my CSM or me and my professional services person. They expect this to be nearly omnipresent, right? It's inside the product. I can do this myself. I can talk to a chatbot in your website that's going to give me good answers, not a bot that's just going to get me to click through a hundred things just so that I can get to talk to a person. No, it's like a companion and co-pilot.

Robert Zirk: Daphne described three levels of customer success relationships: reactive, proactive and predictive. She emphasized that brands should look to advance through each level progressively to reach the state where customer success becomes a second growth engine.

Daphne Costa Lopes: Every customer success business starts from like a jack of all trades place. We're trying to do everything for everyone. At the very baseline, you are detting the foundations to what's going to be your CS department. So you're really focused on that reactive level.

And then once you can get your bearings, you can put processes in place, you can learn more about your customers and you have the right data that's accessible where you can make good decisions, you can start being proactive, right? And being proactive is all about being able to anticipate your customer's needs, is observing their interactions with your product and seeing where they could be using more help, for example, and using that to prioritize outreach or content automation.

So once you are proactive and you're able to get ahead of the customer need, the next thing is being predictive, which, to me, is the highest level that you can get in customer success. So now you're, again, you're not just being proactive about the customer's needs, but you can identify what they're going to need next based on where they are. And by the time that you get to predictive, and I tell you, not many people are doing predictive customer success is nearly something that is aspirational. Once you get to predictive, you can then start shaping the journey, right? You are actually driving your customer through the levels. You can speed it up, you can accelerate, you can help them see value faster.

Robert Zirk: But there's no way to skip stages.

Daphne Costa Lopes: You have to start somewhere and you always start being reactive because you don't have data. Can you reduce the amount of time you stay in reactive? Absolutely.

Robert Zirk: And the insights you gain from understanding existing customers can help you progress through the stages faster with newer customers.

Daphne Costa Lopes: It's what we call the network effect is when you learn enough about what works for customers, when a new customer comes through the door and they look like those other customers, you can actually guide their journey and make them successful faster because now you know what it takes to be successful.

So I think that network effect is such an important strategic advantage for companies. And I think it's definitely something that customer success teams and product teams should be really acutely aware and trying to create for themselves.

Robert Zirk: Daphne spoke to how customer success has served as the second growth engine for HubSpot, and shared what metrics help to track that success.

Daphne Costa Lopes: Growth and retention are two north star metrics that every single SaaS business should have. The retention is important because it will tell you whether you have a leakage problem, right? So if you have a churn problem or a downgrade problem, it would indicate that you are having trouble delivering value for customers.

Now, there are many reasons why you'd have problems with that and some of them could be product-led, sales-led, go to market-led. There's a ton of reasons why you could, but that metric will tell you how efficient you are at retaining the business that you acquire. And we know acquiring business is expensive.

Robert Zirk: A HubSpot study suggests that the cost of a new customer is five to 25 times more expensive than retaining an existing one.

Daphne Costa Lopes: So it's important to have a handle on that metric. And I think that's like table stakes. You can't get to growth if you don't have retention fixed because if you don't have retention fixed and you're focused on growth, you're filling a bucket that's filled with holes, right?

You're trying to grow and grow, but it's unsustainable because you keep losing and losing. So you have to get retention right as a baseline. And that has always been a metric that we had at HubSpot from when I started, retention was the metric we used as a north star metric.

Then the next level is the growth metrics, and some companies will combine, they will have a net revenue retention number, which is a combination of the retention and the growth metric. Some companies will have the expansion rate metric or a quota for dollars where, you know, there's a quota for the team to hit, so that might be in different ways, shapes or form.

At HubSpot, we've had net revenue retention as a north star metric for the CS team. We've also had more leading indicators of net revenue retention like success qualified leads. So the expectation is that the customer success team will identify the opportunity, pass it on to sales and sales will close it.

So that's the metric that we use for growth. Of course, this is like for the individual CSM, but as a business, we track net revenue, retention, expansion rate, cross sell rates. Like, we track all of those because I think it's important to have the finger on the pulse on your business, right?

Just like, what is working? Why is it working? Where are things not working? What do we need to do to improve there? So we monitor all those metrics, both for retention and growth, but for the CSM, we measure them in retention. And then we have leading indicators, including the success qualified lead.

Robert Zirk: These success metrics are fueled by delivering exceptional experiences that create value for customers. Daphne shared how HubSpot achieves this, starting with a deep understanding of customers and their goals.

A trailer for now: Questions for now — Compelling perspectives on digital CX

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