Quick summary: *A strong customer experience philosophy gives your team clarity, consistency, and alignment. Define a clear identity, build measurable pillars, and communicate outcomes in business terms to reduce ambiguity and make a bigger impact.
When your CS team lives in a perpetual cycle of building, scaling, and repairing processes, it’s easy to lose the feeling of having a core identity—and when this happens, it’s hard to stay true to your mission.
Jennifer Courchaine, CX leader at vehicle service technology platform Vehlo, calls this existence a “world of maybes”. The antidote to the ambiguity, she says, is a clearly defined and championed customer experience philosophy.
We’re not talking about a single, shining North Star or the perfect set of metrics, but rather a “moral code” that dictates how your team consistently shows up and makes decisions. Let’s dive into this simple, thoughtful, and potentially transformative idea.
Why invest the time to develop a customer experience philosophy?
At ZERO-IN in Chicago, Jennifer used a simple analogy to explain. If you find a lost wallet, your core character already knows whether you’re the type of person to return it. The specific steps you take next simply depend on where you found it. For any CS team, therefore, a philosophy acts as a value check that guides the decisions you make, large and small. Take the time to develop one and you’ll find that it:
Cuts through noise. Provides a reference point to determine an organization’s identity, especially during times of immense change (acquisitions, rapid scaling).
Drives consistent behavior. Because CSMs often work externally without direct supervision, a philosophy acts as a value check for how they represent the company.
Nurtures alignment and fit. It’s a useful tool for both leaders and team members to identify if they are a “good fit” for the specific business model.
Ensures strategic clarity. A set philosophy eliminates the “world of maybes” by allowing teams to be ruthless in prioritization, similar to stack-ranking in product management.
Here’s how to develop your customer experience philosophy.
Step 1: Find your team’s philosophy and its pillars.
Because every organization is different, every team’s CX philosophy should differ. To find yours, start with identity. Rather than a goal or a mission statement, your CX philosophy should answer one question: who are we?
You cannot be everything. Support-led, commercially driven, implementation-heavy, product-centric… they’re all valid, but you have to choose. If your philosophy doesn’t exclude something, it’s too vague to guide behavior.
Before defining pillars, Jennifer suggests you pressure-test your foundation instead.
- What do you believe customer success is responsible for?
- What habits do you want to embody?
- What friction are you trying to eliminate?
- What does “good” actually look like in this business?
Now, articulate your core belief in one sentence. For example: “Customer success exists to understand what success means to the customer, align the product to that outcome, and drive adoption that achieves it.”
Only now do you extract your pillars. Here are Jennifer’s pillars, which she uses to drive a strong CS team at Vehlo:
1: Customer focus. This is “job zero”, requiring a deep understanding of why a customer buys and continues to use the software.
2: Team players. Jennifer rejects silos, viewing CS as the “heartbeat” of the organization. She believes that “everybody is in customer success, because we’re not in business if we don’t keep the customer”.
3: Trusted advisors. Real value is provided when a CSM knows the product intimately. This trust should extend internally, where CSMs become advisors to their peers, sales reps, and even leadership.
4: Go-to-market minded. CS is not just “support-plus”. It is a vital GTM function because keeping and expanding current customers is more critical than ever, given the difficult market for new business.
Step 2: Build your “3 Cs” framework to measure the intangible.
Your new philosophy means nothing if you can’t implement it, so let’s move from words on a page to a driver of results.
Jennifer uses a “3 C’s Framework” to measure success on both quantitative and qualitative scales:
Clarity: Measure by the reduction of “maybes”. When a team is empowered to say no to a customer or a project that doesn’t fit the philosophy, they provide immediate clarity and build trust.
Consistency: Drive consistent behavior across internal boundaries. Measure this by looking at team health: are CSMs more energized because they can focus on what matters?
Communication: Measure success by how well the philosophy is socialized. Jennifer suggests making the philosophy the first slide of every internal deck.
“You’ve got to share it and you can’t be shy about it,” Jennifer says, “Share this with your peer group, share it up to the executive level. Let your customers know who you are and what you’re doing.”
Step 3: Communicate your CS philosophy in the right language.
To gain buy-in and gauge success, communicate your CX philosophy and its outcomes in a language your audience values.
For executives and the board: Focus on the business impact in terms of Gross Retention Rate (GRR) and Net Retention Rate (NRR). Here, Jennifer offered an interesting observation for success: “The more time you get in a board meeting, the worse it’s going to go for you”. In other words, if you only get a few minutes, it means things are running smoothly.
For internal peers: Focus on cross-departmental collaboration. Measure how much friction is reduced when CS is brought into the sales cycle early, or how implementation CSAT improves when requirements are set correctly from day one.
Jennifer’s ultimate advice when rolling out a CX philosophy? Repetition and patience.
“Talk about it until you’re really sick of it,” she says. “And then, keep talking.”
