Quick Summary: Customer success in 2025 is about operational discipline, not market luck. Teams can win by stabilizing retention, defining customer growth roles, aligning goals to revenue outcomes, and advancing AI from tactical productivity to strategic execution.
2025 has become a baseline year. After a run of market volatility and revenue uncertainty, NRR and GRR have stabilized. Now, success is about how you run your post-sales engine, rather than being contingent on all that external noise.
The sixth annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study highlights what’s stable and what’s on the upswing, solidifying the current CS climate as one for foundational growth.
Based on this year’s findings, we see four areas for building on that baseline:
- Keep your NRR and GRR stabilized.
- Establish your essential customer growth roles.
- Select goals that track directly to revenue.
- Push your AI adoption from tactical exploration to core operations.
Download the 2025 Customer Revenue Leadership Study in full here.
1: Keep your NRR and GRR stabilized.
After a consistent decline across 2022-2024, net revenue retention (NRR) and gross revenue retention (GRR) have stabilized.
Whereas the previous, more turbulent market may have reflected big swings in NRR and GRR that distracted from day-to-day operations, now stability brings transparency. Shifts in revenue retention more clearly reflect team choices.
And those teams agree that these success metrics need to remain a top priority. Survey participants ranked NRR (51%), churn rate (48%), and GRR (40%) as their top three metrics.
Action item: Calibrate your team, tools, and processes. Assess the structure, gaps, and strengths in your current CS team. Take stock of current technology and how those tools can streamline operations. Reevaluate that post-sales engine and how the customer journey plays out cross-functionally.
2: Establish your essential customer growth roles.
Certain customer-facing roles seem to have a measurable impact on NRR. Based on this year’s responses, roles in support, account management, CSMs, and enablement correlate with NRR between 98–99%, versus 90–94% without those roles.
Action item: Strike a balance between setting up your growth-focused CS team and providing guidance and clear goals when it comes to team structure, operations, technology, and training.
3: Select goals that track to revenue.
Consistency comes from prioritizing revenue opportunities across the customer lifecycle. And revenue looks different depending on where your team and customers are at any given point. It means shortening time to value and deepening use for retention, scaling the experience with automation to prevent early risk and churn, or mobilizing advocates and communicating upgrades for expansion. Each step keeps revenue top of mind.
According to this year’s responses from leaders, these were some of their top goals:
Acquisition + Onboarding: top goals are time-to-value (60%) and growth within ICP (45%), reflecting a focus on speed and fit.
Adoption + Expansion: top goals are expansion opportunities (67%) and deeper adoption (62%).
Relationship + Retention: top goals are early risk detection (62%) and lifecycle management at scale (39%).
Strategy + Operations: top goals are tying customer team work to GRR and NRR (41%) and optimizing CSM capacity (29%)
Action item: With an integrated lifecycle and clear revenue goals, it’s time to track GRR to see what to protect, track churn to reveal weak spots, and track NRR to confirm whether those revenue opportunities are leading to baseline growth.
4: Move AI from tactical exploration to core operations.
AI is widespread, accessible, and not even optional anymore – but is your team using it as a competitive advantage? Most customer teams seem caught in the weeds of exploration and tactical use. A shift to revenue-driving automation would set you apart.
This year’s study finds most AI use cases are still productivity-focused:
- Call summarization (73%)
- Account research/customer intelligence (50%)
- Content/communications (45%)
- Training/coaching (33%)
The teams shifting to revenue-focused AI use cases are in the minority. Their use cases include customer segmentation (16%), predictive expansion signals (15%), intent-based outreach (14%), and journey orchestration (11%).
Action item: Set your path for AI maturity by defining what the shift from tactical to strategic looks like. Then, build a foundation with your CSP as the system of execution, establishing data processes and governance. Finally, make sure your humans are trained up (playbooks, prompts, QA checklists, etc.) to use AI for strategic good.
Jumping forward from baseline to growth.
ChurnZero CEO and co-founder You Mon Tsang says it best in this year’s report: right now, results are more about the choices we make, rather than being dragged along by outside forces.
To take advantage of current, stable retention, it’s time to focus on our teams, our revenue goals, and our strategic operations.
