Our Head of Customer Success left last week. On her way out, she handed us a gift during the exit interview

Our Head of Customer Success left last week. On her way out, she handed us a gift during the exit interview.

She said, very calmly, that our biggest problem was that we were doing too much work for our customers.

She was absolutely right.

So we’re retiring the term Customer Success and we’re rebranding the team as Customer Coaches.

Because real success isn’t about helping customers get work done. It’s about helping them learn how to get work done.

There’s nothing more successful than a customer who is autonomous.

Think about how you raise kids. If you really care about them, you don’t tie their shoes forever. You teach them how to tie their shoes. You accept that it takes longer at first and that they’ll do it “wrong” a few times. But there is a big payoff: independence.

Customers deserve the same level of respect and care from us.

When we coach instead of do, something happens: customers start building their own workflows and dashboards. They custom-build parts of the UI and interfaces between Walcu and other products.

This is when the sense of ownership kicks in:

“This is our tool.” “Look what we built.”

That feeling matters.

That emotional ownership directly translates into kick-ass retention rates. People don’t churn from tools they create or shape.

The opposite approach—doing everything for customers—has catastrophic consequences.

Customers never become autonomous. They can’t move without you.

Your Customer Success team has to scale linearly with your customer count because you’re effectively an outsourced operations team. Users feel detached from the product, and your team becomes an under-appreciated extension of theirs.

Everyone loses.

So we’re making a cultural shift:

We don’t do the work for customers. We teach customers how to do the work themselves.

Coaches, not crutches.