The way the best companies are structured is shifting, and it's becoming harder to ignore. The Chief Customer Officer, once seen mainly as a retention function, is moving to the center of commercial strategy.

I've spent my career running customer success, sales, partnerships, channel, and account management: the full bow tie. I've been through five customer transformations, including leading global customer success at Vimeo through a $1.5 billion acquisition. One thing has become clear across all of it: companies win when they listen to their customers and act on what they hear.

The customer org sits closest to that learning. That's why the CCO is positioned to drive commercial outcomes, not just protect the revenue that's already there.

Here's why that's true, and what it looks like in practice.

Revenue models have changed, and CS is at the center of it

Ten years ago, customer success was mostly about adoption metrics. You tracked usage, ran QBRs, and hoped the renewal came through. Go-to-market was linear: marketing generated leads, sales closed them, and CS picked up from there.

That model is gone. Today, revenue is earned continuously. Usage- and adoption-based pricing is becoming standard, especially as AI reshapes how software gets priced and packaged. On a usage-based model, what a customer does after the sale decides whether you retain and grow that account. That puts CS in the middle of the revenue equation.

Every interaction your team has with a customer protects revenue or loses it: a support ticket, a QBR, a renewal call, a casual check-in. Your CS team is the human in the loop between your company and your customer.

Most organizations still measure CS on NPS and CSAT. Those metrics have their place, but they don't tell the full commercial story. Here’s what speaks the business's language:

  • Resources saved
  • Dollars gained
  • Value earned
  • Risk avoided

The customer sits at the center now

The old bow tie model put the customer at the end: marketing feeds sales, sales closes, CS retains. Clean, linear.

The modern version looks different. The customer sits in the center, with sales, marketing, product, finance, and operations orbiting around them. AI increasingly connects those functions, surfacing friction points and making it easier to assign accountability across the business.

For CS leaders, that means your function is central. The intelligence your team generates from customer conversations flows into product decisions, pricing strategy, sales messaging, and executive planning. That's a different seat at the table than CS has traditionally had.