Quick Summary: To keep your customer success platform, reposition it as a revenue management platform. Start by showing your finance team how shared forecasting, health scores, and customer insights drive accuracy, alignment, and profitability.
Furkan Kapu is ChurnZero’s senior revenue operations manager.
Losing your customer success platform to budget cuts doesn’t just hurt your CS team: it exposes your entire company to unnecessary risk. So why does it keep happening?
Typically, it’s because the CSP belongs to the CS team, and the CS team only.
When you keep your CSP and its data siloed within CS, other leaders miss the chance to apply its workflows, forecasts, and customer insights to their functions. That’s a big miss, because a CSP can be the most effective revenue management platform your company has.
The insights that drive revenue outcomes in CS almost always have real value in another department like finance, product, or sales. A CSP sits at the intersection of customer engagement, product usage, satisfaction, and contracts. There’s no CRM or financial system that provides the same picture.
Ultimately, your CSP should be viewed as a fundamental piece of the enterprise tech stack: a long-term, business-critical investment that connects customer behavior directly to NRR, GRR and EBITDA—and a line item that you don’t have to justify on your own every year.
Here’s how you can achieve that goal.
To keep your customer success platform, reframe it as a revenue management platform.
In subscription businesses, the most profitable growth comes from renewals, expansions, and advocacy. These are the exact areas where a CSP makes an impact, turning customer data into business intelligence to forecast more accurately, run expansion plays, reduce churn risk, and optimize every touchpoint for revenue outcomes.
The perception that a CSP is “just a CS tool” is wrong. A few proof points:
Holistic customer insights: ChurnZero pulls together satisfaction, usage, goal attainment, and engagement data into a multidimensional view of not just what customers are doing, but why. This is the starting point for more accurate forecasting.
Predictive forecasting: Renewal and Forecast Hub brings data from multiple systems into one place. Forecasting stops being a manual CSM exercise, and becomes dynamic, scalable, and evidence-based. This reduces bias and improves accuracy.
Advanced health scoring: Customizable churn and expansion scores translate customer experience signals into inputs for financial planning. Health scores become not just an operational metric, but a forecasting driver.
Automation and playbooks: With event-based playbooks, you can engage customers at scale, at exactly the right time. Renewals and expansions stop being reactive and become proactive and revenue-focused.
ChurnZero’s Renewal & Forecast Hub provides an intuitive, authoritative way to track and predict key revenue metrics and growth opportunities over time
To prove it, start with your finance team.
If you can convince your finance team to start using ChurnZero, three things happen. Their forecasting becomes more accurate, aligned, and efficient. Your CS team earns more influence because your data drives company-wide decisions. And your CSP becomes an essential, cross-functional platform, not just a CS tool.
I know this firsthand, because I saw it in a prior role at a previous company.
Their finance’s team’s biggest challenge was forecasting alignment. They projected retention based on contract rules, while CS looked at adoption and renewal intent. Multi-year deals could show up completely differently depending on which lens you used.
It wasn’t that either was “wrong.” CS and finance simply had different numbers, definitions, and methodologies, which led to confusion at the top, wasted time and mismatched decisions. But let’s be honest: nothing frustrates a CFO more than two different forecasts for the same revenue.
Our customer leadership worked with finance to solve the challenge by:
1: Embedding health scores into finance’s forecasting.
We knew health scores had predictive power—they’re calculated from usage, satisfaction, milestone achievement, and product engagement—so we built them into finance’s models. By assigning renewal probabilities based on health tiers, we moved forecasting away from subjective judgment and toward data-driven accuracy.
The result: a forecast that everyone trusted.
2: Helping finance eliminate manual work.
Our finance team was also stuck in Excel: chasing updates, reconciling spreadsheets, and dealing with out-of-date numbers. By feeding ChurnZero data directly into their models, we replaced this with real-time updates. Forecasts became accurate, scalable, and easy to maintain.
Impact #1: revenue forecasting became actionable, not a debate.
Once finance and CS were using the same data, forecasting stopped being a debate and became a single source of truth. Manual reconciliations were eliminated, and CS/Finance/CFO leadership aligned around one set of numbers for GRR and NRR.
Then, once leadership gained confidence, conversations began to shift from “whose number is right?” to “what actions should we take?”
Our finance team had new visibility into where resources should go. Health scores and adoption data showed which segments required more support, helping to justify investments in onboarding or customer education. Usage insights revealed which product features delivered the most value, giving our finance team a data-backed lens for pricing decisions to reduce risk and maintain revenue continuity.
Meanwhile, our CS was earning more internal influence because its data drove company-wide decisions.
Impact #2: It’s easier to renew a revenue management platform than a CSP.
Unsurprisingly—because they now relied on it daily—our finance team became one of loudest advocates for renewing ChurnZero.
The top-line metrics proved it. Aligning finance and CS around ChurnZero improved GRR and NRR accuracy, increased predictability, and reduced surprises. Ultimately, we could draw a direct line to EBITDA, where the efficiency of fewer manual reconciliations, better upsell timing, and reduced churn flowed directly into profitability.
With multiple departments depending on the platform, renewal was no longer just a CS decision; it became a company decision.
ChurnZero has always been a customer success platform. But when you broaden the lens, however, you see what a CSP really is: a revenue management platform for the whole business.
