AI is Transforming Customer Success, but Only When We Transform Ourselves First
My career looked like a squiggle until it all made sense, and to me, that's actually what a really good career should look like.
Season 5, Episode 143 of Women in Customer Success
Kelly Turner's career journey reads like a masterclass in strategic pivoting. As the SVP of Global Customer Success at Vitally, she's transformed from a multinational corporation controller on track to become CFO into one of the most insightful voices in customer success today. Her story offers valuable lessons for professionals navigating career transitions, leading teams through the adoption of AI, and building scalable customer experiences.
The "Squiggle" Career Path
"My career looked like a squiggle until it all made sense, and to me, that's actually what a really good career should look like, as you figure out what you're great at, what you really enjoy and where you can make a differential impact based on your skills, experience and just presence in the world."
Turner's transition from finance to customer success wasn't accidental—it was intentional. After years in financial planning and analysis, including closing books with magistrates in India, she realised she was "spending all my time on the outside of the doughnut of a business" when she wanted to be "in the middle where it actually happened."
The bold move to approach her CEO and request a complete career pivot—from controller to frontline Customer Success Manager—might seem risky, but it exemplified the kind of strategic thinking that defines successful CS leaders. Within three years, she had risen to VP of Customer Success, leveraging three critical advantages her finance background provided:
Deep business understanding that enabled authoritative, conviction-driven conversations
Executive-level communication skills developed through operating as a business leader
A genuine investment mindset focused on developing others and building authentic relationships
The Power of Financial Literacy in Customer Success
For CS professionals without extensive financial backgrounds, Turner offers practical advice: trace a dollar through your organisation. Understanding the complete customer lifecycle—from lead generation to revenue recognition—transforms how you approach customer conversations and business cases.
"If you can understand that about your business, then when you say, have a product question or a feedback request or something that you feel like is a place where the business should invest... your business case can be so much richer."
This financial fluency becomes particularly crucial when advocating for customer success initiatives. Turner emphasises the stark economics: acquiring new customers costs significantly more than expanding existing relationships, making the CS team's work in retention and growth essential to business success.
Building Bridges, Not Just Content
One of Turner's most compelling insights centres on what she calls "building bridges" for customers. Rather than overwhelming users with extensive libraries of content, webinars, and documentation, successful CS organisations create guided journeys.
"How do we build more bridges in the product as well as how do we build more bridges in live events, in on-demand events that can help people feel confident and strong so that they then can take in additional information and in a way that they feel like helps them versus sort of puts more onus on them to continue to understand on their own."
This approach recognises that customers don't need more information—they need the right information at the right time, delivered in a way that builds confidence rather than creating overwhelm.
Leading Through AI Transformation
Turner's approach to AI adoption within her team offers a masterclass in change management. Rather than mandating AI usage, she created both "push" and "pull" elements to drive adoption.
The "pull" strategy started playfully—having team members convert profile pictures into Muppets using ChatGPT. This seemingly silly exercise taught prompt engineering fundamentals while making AI feel approachable rather than threatening.
"I want to come in ready and show customers they matter enough that I've done the work." This philosophy extends to her AI usage, where she uses prompts to quickly understand customer financial health, business objectives, and recent stakeholder changes before meetings.
The "push" element involved leadership modelling, with Turner personally conducting the first AI training for her CS team. This demonstrated that learning new technologies—even when you might not get it right the first time—was not just acceptable but expected.
The Future of Scalable Customer Success
Turner's vision for CS evolution centres on moving beyond static information to actionable intelligence. The next generation of AI-powered customer success won't just tell you a customer seems "mad, sad, happy, bad"—it will translate sentiment analysis into specific next actions.
"Much like customers, CSMs always want to get their customers to the perfect promised land we all do. But what that next step is based on where they are today, that can be hard... the more we can say this is the next step, or three-step, let's go and here's everything you need for it."
This agentic approach to AI could transform CS from a reactive discipline to a proactive one, where systems identify patterns and automatically execute appropriate responses, surfacing only the most complex scenarios for human intervention.
Practical AI Prompts for CS Professionals
Turner shared several actionable prompts that CS professionals can use immediately:
Pre-meeting preparation: "Give me a quick summary of this customer's financial health, current business objectives and any recent stakeholder changes in their executive suite that would advise what they're focusing on today, and give it to me in two paragraphs or less."
Industry knowledge building: "Tell me about the top three things facing this industry today that are a challenge, and what are the top three things companies in this industry are tackling to be able to grow?"
These prompts demonstrate how AI can quickly build the business acumen necessary for meaningful customer conversations without overwhelming preparation time.
The CEO Perspective: Defining Success Upfront
When asked what practice she'd eliminate as CEO for a day, Turner focused on building rather than removing. Her vision: every product release should come with predefined success metrics and benchmarks.
"If we're going to build this, this is what we're trying to see in behaviour, this is what we're trying to see in outcome and results, you can get to those benchmarks so much faster."
This approach would eliminate the common scenario where teams invest heavily in product development only to struggle with defining success metrics after launch.
Key Takeaways for CS Leaders
Turner's insights offer several actionable principles for customer success professionals:
Embrace the squiggle: Non-linear career paths often provide unique competitive advantages
Build financial fluency: Understanding business fundamentals transforms customer conversations
Create bridges, not libraries: Guide customers through curated journeys rather than overwhelming them with options
Lead AI adoption through modelling: Show your team that learning new technologies is safe and expected
Focus on actionable intelligence: Move beyond data collection to systems that recommend specific next actions
Define success upfront: Establish clear benchmarks for every initiative before launch
Turner's journey from potential CFO to customer success leader illustrates how diverse backgrounds can strengthen the CS discipline. Her emphasis on building bridges—whether between content and customers, or between team members and new technologies—offers a framework for creating more effective, scalable customer experiences in an increasingly complex business environment.
The customer success field continues to evolve rapidly, but Turner's fundamental insight remains constant: success comes from genuinely investing in others, whether they're team members or customers, and providing them with the tools and confidence they need to achieve their goals.
