Transforming customer success teams into proactive intelligence units

Customer-facing teams are being pulled in two directions. On one hand, leadership wants rapid deployment of new tools promising big productivity gains, while day-to-day reality is a patchwork of CRMs, chat platforms, and disparate point solutions that leaves data siloed and insights buried.

We spoke with Shantell Payne, Manager of Healthcare Customer Success at Zoom, who argues that AI's true power lies in pairing technology with human insight to raise the bar on customer relationships. She lays out a framework for shifting from reactive problem-solving to a proactive intelligence model that builds lasting, defensible value.

• Thinking caps on: For Payne, the goal is to forge a cognitive collaboration where AI acts as a thinking partner. I use AI to enhance my workflows and processes," she explains. “The prompts I use are to help me enhance what I'm already thinking, which helps me think bigger." That shift from a tool that simply executes tasks to one that improves decision-making—is, in her view, the foundation for transforming a traditional customer success team into a proactive intelligence unit. But getting there takes a disciplined, step-by-step approach.

The journey begins with a challenge familiar to many leaders. "You can't build good intelligence off bad data," Payne cautions. "I've been in the industry for nine years, and the question has always been: Is this accurate data?" This isn't a problem customer success can solve alone. It requires a foundational investment in a "really good data science team" and a commitment to auditing the entire data pipeline to ensure it's trustworthy.

• On the clock: Only then can AI begin to create its most valuable asset: time. With a solid data foundation, AI's primary role is to "ease up your time to focus on engagement." Payne uses AI to draft internal newsletters that aid change management and consolidate information for leadership discussions. But this efficiency isn't the end goal; it’s the enabler for irreplaceable human skills.

• Shovel required: "AI just brings awareness, but it's never going to replace the human touch," she asserts. "AI isn't going to be the one reaching out to the customer to figure out why utilization has dropped. It's going to be the CSM who needs to do the digging to actually know what's going on." That "digging" is the new value proposition. While AI can flag a problem, it takes a human to understand the nuance, context, and politics behind the data. Who is going to do that? "It's not going to be the AI tool," Payne says.

This mastery culminates in solving what Payne calls a "huge gap" in the industry: providing customers with meaningful benchmarks. "A lot of customers want to know where do they stack up against other customers," she says. "What are customers like them doing now? Using AI to tell that customer success story and then plug it in with another customer has been very insightful."

• Speaking the language: The final stage of the transformation is reinvesting that reclaimed time into strategic dialogue. This means mastering the skill of "speaking the language that's important to each persona," whether in law, education, or healthcare. The central question a CI professional must answer is, "How does your product connect to what's important within that space?"

When a team can reliably deliver this level of insight, it builds a powerful competitive economic moat around the business. In an era of product parity, the deep, trust-based relationships forged through AI-powered, human-led intelligence become a uniquely defensible asset. This advantage isn't abstract; it's tied directly to business outcomes and tangible value.

• Into the numbers: "Now the conversation is, what is the ROI behind that?" Payne explains. "We saved them time and money, but how much? Let's get into the numbers."

• Toward better engagement: "AI is just the baseline," Payne concludes. "It helps you understand what's going on and frees up time to help you get to the real endpoint, which is having those meaningful conversations and better engagement with your customers."