Quick summary: Put your team’s trust, experience and empathy to work in building a human-first, AI-powered customer experience moat to protect retention and revenue.
Your company’s long-time moat—the competitive advantage that your competitors can’t easily copy or cross—is going away, says CX leader and author Jennifer Courchaine.
Your rich feature set? Your first-to-market advantage? In the age of AI, a competitor can vibe-code through those in a month or two.
The good news is that there’s a huge opportunity in filling the gap left by the traditional moat, and customer success is the team positioned to do it.
Jennifer’s forthcoming book: The Moat: Human-Centric Customer Experience in the Age of AI, argues that the competitive differentiator of tomorrow (and today) is a human-led customer experience—ironically, something that’s also becoming an endangered species as the CS function evolves.
In our webinar, Jennifer shared her framework for building a customer experience moat, from early diagnostics to earning C-suite buy-in. It doesn’t require a ton of budget, and you can get started this quarter.
Watch the webinar here, then scroll down for the framework to make it happen.
What do you need to create a customer experience moat?
The ideal end-state isn’t a technology transformation, but a people transformation, enabled by technology, to work in a better, stronger, and faster way.
This technology—chiefly AI—should be deployed in a way that frees your CS team from routine work. This enables you to build your moat on three uniquely human principles.
- Trust—or how you take ownership when things go wrong. AI can resolve a ticket but can’t take accountability. When mistakes or crises happen, your customers need to know that a human is taking care of it.
- Expertise—the consultative layer that AI can’t reach. “AI is really good at answering, ‘ How do I do this?” Jennifer says. “It’s bad at saying why, or how do you actually solve this problem?”
- Empathy—this is something AI can fake but not deliver, because it doesn’t actually care. Your CSMs do care, however, and customers feel it.
While this all sounds very organic, it isn’t the case, however, that you can expect this moat to appear on its own. Instead, you’ll need to diagnose and build very deliberately according to a framework like this one.
Stage 1: Map the gaps in your current customer experience.
Avoid the trap of automating what you know, instead of fixing what’s broken, by automating, building, or reallocating anything just yet.
First, Jennifer says, you need to understand where your customer experience is strong, where there’s friction, and where there’s nothing.
You can do this with a simple customer journey mapping exercise.
“You don’t have to get consultants in,” she says. “You just need a half-day, a whiteboard, and some team members from each group.”
“Capture every stage a customer goes through across their full lifecycle, starting when they’re a prospect. Capture every handoff, figure out what success looks like at each stage, and determine who owns it.”
The areas where you’re already strong? Leave them alone.
“The number one tip I always give is don’t replace what’s working,” she says. “If you have a process on something, don’t start there. Start on the black holes. Start on the things that you know you should do, or the ‘we’re going to get to that’ areas.”
Stage 2: Benchmark how your customers really experience you.
You can’t revamp your customer experience without understanding how your customers experience you. NPS and CSAT won’t get you there, Jennifer says, because they don’t surface customer effort or likely next moves.
“Look to metrics that measure intent, customer effort, cost to service, and trust,” she says. “Those are the leading indicators that tell you not just if somebody’s happy, but how successful they are, and whether they’re likely to stay with you.”
Customer effort is especially important, she says, because “using your software” is not your customer’s actual job. Rather, they have a real job which your software is supposed to help them with. If they’re wrestling with your product instead, they’re not getting it done, and their trust for you is sinking with every minute they can’t reach a human for help.
Stage 3: Design your human foundation.
On the human side of the new moat, you’ll need to make three significant changes.
1. Re-allocate your budget.
Jennifer’s recommended allocation is 60% to people, 20% to customer success systems and tooling, and 20% to experiences.
“You might think that you’re spending 100% on salary so you can’t allocate 40% to systems and tooling and experiences,” Jennifer says. “But somebody at your company has that budget, so try to get it. If you have control over systems and tooling, you can go so much faster.
“The same goes for experiences. Most experiences currently run through marketing. Get some earmarked for the CS team, and not all at director level or above. Put a bunch of it into the actual teams so that it’s not just sales who can send out a fruit basket or a DoorDash gift card.”
2. Give CSMs some real autonomy.
“The exact options you give your team to improve the customer experience are less important than actually having options,” Jennifer says. “When your employees feel trusted, they trust the company back and take better care of your customers.”
“For example, I have a standing rule that any customer, no matter how big or small their contract is, can be escalated to any executive at any time. CSMs almost never use it, but they know it’s there in case of an emergency.”
3. Pull CSMs into implementations earlier.
“It’s really hard to ‘success’ your way out of a bad implementation,” Jennifer says.
Now that a lot of implementation tasks can be automated with AI, there’s less risk of CSMs getting bogged down if they enter the process early. More than ever, it makes sense to get CSMs in early and set customers up with a great experience from day one.
Stage 4: Design your AI foundation.
You’ll need some effective AI tools, says Jennifer. Borrow them first, buy them second, and build them only if you must.
Borrow from the AI features that your current vendors include or offer, so you can start testing faster without waiting for approvals.
“Every SaaS company is trying to figure out their AI product roadmap,” Jennifer says. “There’s a lot of incentive to get you to use their AI, and there’s a lot of pricing concessions available to get you hooked.
Buy deliberately and avoid the temptation to buy tools that solve niche problems. You might solve the issue, but this is how you end up with duplicated systems.
Build only if the outcome is genuinely at the core of your business… and even then, proceed carefully.
“It’s really easy to forget about the maintenance portion,” Jennifer says. “You can make something really elegant in AI that might not actually work in real life, with no way to change it into something architectural that works—and you don’t know that if you’re a non-technical user vibe-coding it.”
Finally, start small.
“If you have this huge project that will be life-changing but will take a month, maybe don’t start with that one,” Jennifer cautions.
“Start with the one that saves everybody five minutes every day. The more value your team sees, the better their adoption, and the easier it is to get your C-levels to continue to say yes.”
Stage 5: Determine what AI handles, and what humans handle.
Here, the question shifts from what to automate to how to use the time it frees up.
“What AI is good at is the sameness,” Jennifer says. “If 80% of your tickets are always the same types of questions, AI is going to be great at that 80%. For the 20% that’s really niche, get it into human hands as quickly as possible so they can solve it.”
That tangled, tricky 20%, she says, is where the moat gets built. Traditionally, this is also the portion that CS teams don’t have the bandwidth for because they’re doing admin.
“So much of a CSM’s time is sifting through bad data,” Jennifer says.
“If you have your AI clean information up, cross-check systems, and bubble up the most important stuff, then the human can do the good humaning.”
Ultimately, this path leads to expansion.
“It’s a natural follow-on to a great product and experience that solves your problems,” Jennifer says. “The more problems we solve, the more you want us to solve. The more value we create, the more you want us to create.”
Stage 6: Sell it to the C-suite.
You can’t build your new moat without funding, which means you’ll need to sell it in.
Jennifer’s advice: tie every CX investment conversation to top-line growth.
“If you invest in customer experience, we are going to improve the cost to acquire a customer, drive down the sales cycle time, improve cross-sell and upsell, and, by the way, we’ll shore up GRR as well,” she demonstrates.
“Tying it to top-line revenue is the best way to get the board to listen up.”
Finally, be sure to enter these conversations with a clear position. “Build your leadership decks with an opinion,” she says, “and don’t ever let that opinion be a complaint. Think about when your sales counterpart misses their number. They don’t go in with a tale of woe. They go in with: these are the numbers, this is what we’re doing about it; this is the cost if we don’t.”
Want to understand more about the demise of the product moat? Read our breakdown of how we got here, and the corresponding trends that make this so urgent.
