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Hey {{first_name | CS Pro}},
What if your customers log in every day and your renewal is still at risk?
That is exactly the trap Tom Ronen sees right now. Tom is VP of Customer Success at Harvey, the AI platform working with some of the world's largest law firms, and he arrived there after nine years at Monday.com.
So he has lived both sides, the data heavy product led world and the high touch human led one. This week we got into why the old CS playbook is breaking down, why discovery cannot live on a kickoff call anymore, and why usage on its own will not save your renewal.
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The old playbook was never built for this kind of change
Tom's point is not that customer journeys were wrong. They worked. Get what you need in the kickoff, run implementation sessions, meet at the QBR, push utilization, renew.
That is fine when you are moving someone from Salesforce to HubSpot, or Asana to Monday. You are swapping one tool for another, not changing how anybody works.
AI is a different animal. Tom works with lawyers whose workflow has looked broadly the same for 20 years. Filing cabinet to cloud storage, sure, faster every year, but the steps to the end result never really moved. AI challenges all of it, and that is not a training session, that is enormous change management.
Something most CFOs will not love: if AI is at the core of what you sell, you have to invest more in post sales, not less. Smaller books. Real enablement on change management. CSMs with enough agency to fly out and spend three days with one customer. The lean AI first CS team is mostly a myth.
Discovery is not a kickoff call, it is the whole relationship
This was my favourite part of our chat. At Harvey, discovery never ends, and the reason they ask questions is not to find an upsell.
Tom frames it like this: I need to drive meaningful change inside your business, so here is what I need to know. Who actually has influence. Who are your champions. Who is nervous about what this technology means for their job. You do not learn that over an email thread. You learn it over lunch.
And that framing changes what customers will tell you. More often than not they have no clear objectives for the shiny AI tool that just landed on their desk, and nobody admits that to a vendor they do not trust yet. The questions are how you build the trust, not a tax on it.
They capture all of it. A Slack channel per customer, details in the CRM, what the VP of Product heard when they pitched a beta. Every interaction gets logged so the whole company holds one shared picture of that customer, what they leaned into and what they pulled back from.
Usage is table stakes now, so raise your bar
Harvey sees over 50% DAU over MAU. People open it about as often as Google Maps, which for B2B software is wild.
Utilization still matters, but there's a new bar for what good utilization is.
If you are not seeing deep engagement, something is probably wrong.
High usage is also where teams get comfortable. Tom's customers are past asking about the ROI of Harvey, the same way nobody asks for the ROI of email. What they ask now is: so what? Due diligence is faster, we see the delta, so what do we do with it?
That is the question CS has to answer, and Tom's team answers it with value stories, collected diligently, from the right people, tied to the objectives they are measured on.
Then they do something refreshingly unglamorous. Every renewal above a certain size gets reviewed six months out, sales and CS leadership in the room, account by account. Do we have the right sponsorship. Do we have value stories logged. What happens if our champion leaves tomorrow. No gut feel allowed.
This week's challenge
Pick one renewal landing in the next six months and pressure test it the way Tom would.
Write down the value story you would tell that customer's economic buyer. Not the usage stats, the outcome. Then ask who in that account would confirm it, and what happens to the renewal if your champion resigns on Friday.
If you cannot answer all three, you have found your next customer conversation, and it is not a check in.
That is it for this week. Tom also shared a contrarian take on the self pity problem in CS that I did not expect to agree with.
Have a listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or YouTube, and let me know what you think.
I hope you enjoyed this week’s newsletter.
If you have any questions or suggestions, please feel free to contact us.
Cheers to your CS success,
Anika
