When I first joined Runway, the support team was doing everything manually. No AI, no automation, just a growing backlog and a lot of people working incredibly hard to keep up.

We fixed that. We implemented AI, reduced ticket volume, and built something that actually scaled.

Then came the next question: what happens when your customer success (CS) team asks support to take ownership of enterprise accounts?

That's exactly where we found ourselves in mid-2025. And honestly, it was more complicated than I expected. But it's also more common than you might think – according to the 2026 State of Customer Success Report, 54.3% of CS teams still have no dedicated operations function. The systems and structures that make enterprise support work often simply don't exist yet.

We work with people in the film industry, in robotics, across a range of genuinely complex use cases. That complexity matters for support. Enterprise customers don't always bring straightforward questions, and the stakes are higher when something goes wrong.

So when our head of customer success asked whether we could take on dedicated enterprise support, I said yes, and then quickly realized how much I didn't yet know about that side of the business.

Consumer support and enterprise support are not the same job

The first thing worth saying plainly: moving into enterprise isn't just an operational change. It's a fundamental shift in what customers expect from you.

On the consumer side, speed and breadth are the priorities. Customers want answers fast, AI handles a significant volume, and your team manages what escalates. It's largely reactive, and that's fine, that's the nature of it.

Enterprise is different. The expectations look something like this:

  • Partnership, not transactions: Enterprise customers want a relationship, not a ticket number
  • Deep contextual knowledge: Not just product expertise, but familiarity with their specific workflows and use cases
  • Proactive engagement: Anticipating needs, not just responding to them
  • Consistency: The same quality of experience regardless of who picks up the conversation

Recognizing that gap early would have saved me some time. Instead, I said yes to taking on enterprise accounts and then spent the first few weeks discovering just how wide it was.

Everything was in someone's head and nowhere else

The first practical reality I ran into: all our enterprise customers were being supported through individual Slack channels. 

No Zendesk. No ticketing system. No SLAs being tracked anywhere.

For a team that had spent months building efficient systems inside a proper support platform, this was a problem. Context switching between systems, losing visibility on response times, no reporting…these were foundational gaps.

The second reality was harder to fix quickly: almost all the knowledge about these customers existed only in the heads of a few people on the customer success team. Nothing was documented. When someone left, that context left with them. 

For any given enterprise account, we could be missing years of relationship history, known workarounds, specific preferences – all of it gone.

Before anything else, we had to fix this.

I went directly to the customer success team with a simple question: what do you know that we don't? Then I had the same conversation with product, focused on enterprise use cases specifically. In both cases, the answer was the same: a huge amount of valuable knowledge that had never been written down anywhere.