Scaled Customer Success, Storytelling, and the Hero’s Journey

Oren Rosenthal 

While assisting Shana Burg as Operations Partner at Shana Burg Digital Marketing, I’ve been reflecting on how the creative process enhances Customer Success.

At last week’s CSS Executive Forum in Austin, I was struck by panelist Deepina (Dee) Kapila‘s declaration: “The Humanities are back, baby!” I couldn’t agree more.

In fact, Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey framework—renowned in storytelling and personal transformation—perfectly maps to customer success.

A CSM’s primary role is helping customers achieve their business goals through a product. When customers internalize this journey, engagement, renewal, and upsell naturally follow. High-touch CSMs intuitively use the framework, but we can use it at scale by standardizing how we document the phases*.

Here’s how the Hero’s Journey applies to Customer Success

• Phase 1 – The Ordinary World. At the beginning of engagement. The pre-existing environment should be documented, inefficiencies and all.
• Phase 2 – Call to Adventure: This is where your customer should feel they take individual ownership of this journey with themselves as the hero. What is it that made them want to make a change? These are the business outcomes measured by KPIs, and they should be captured by sales early on.

• Phase 3 – Refusal of the Call: The selection process the customer underwent to choose your company required evaluation of pros and cons. What are the objections?
• Phase 4 – Meeting the Mentor: What individual helped the customer overcome these objections? Was it the sales representative? A thought leader? An executive sponsor? Now that they have converted, can you as a CSM assume the mentorship role by offering resources, training, and above all – confidence?

• Phase 5 – Crossing the First Threshold: Document the customer’s accomplishments during onboarding.
• Phase 6 – Tests, Allies, Enemies: What are the challenges of product adoption? These could include any of the challenges of change management, such as employee resistance, refinement of processes, or getting buy-in on goals and metrics.
• Phase 7 – Approach to the Inmost Cave: What was presented to the ELT or the Board after implementation?

• Phase 8 – The Ordeal: The toughest challenge yet. Maybe a major feature isn’t working as expected, or leadership questions the investment. As a CSM you know this moment well, because it’s the defining moment when the customer pushes forward or abandons the journey.
• Phase 9 – The Reward: It’s time to measure success. Assess the business outcomes in light of those you defined during the Call to Adventure (Phase 2). Come armed with data, ideally in the form of KPIs.
• Phase 10 – The Road Back: Secure in their success, the hero recognizes opportunities to grow and scale further using your product. Here is where you can identify upsell opportunities.
• Phase 11 – Resurrection: New ordeals arise, hopefully based on the new adventures found while journeying on The Road Back (Phase 10). By now your relationship is solid enough to offer the customer the support and assistance they need.
• Phase 12 – Return with the Elixir: The customer is now an advocate, who truly sees themself as a hero in their business journey thanks to your product. This is the time to create case studies and customer testimonials to champion your brand.

Capturing all these phases can be a challenge, especially with the limited time CSMs have in scaled operations. AI can help by analyzing conversations, documents, and artifacts of the relationship to summarize what’s happened.

More importantly, AI can assist in compiling the phases into a story (or partial story) that coherently frames the narrative of your relationship.

These stories can be quickly generated prior to progress updates and reviews. You may not even be aware how much insight your data already provides.

A Hero’s Journey can point out the value your company’s product delivers. It can also tell where your clients may be getting waylaid, and point the way back to the path. Ultimately, it can help you and your customer take ownership of the journey in which they star as the hero and you co-star as the mentor!

*In this article I am using Christopher Vogler’s simpler 12 step version of the Hero’s Journey, popular in screenwriting.