My Experience

Customer Success Partnership

Turning a feature-awareness gap into a strategic, Design-led partnership

I built Design's partnership with Customer Success at Ozmo out of two very practical needs: my team needed direct, regular time with CSR users, and that access ran through Customer Success. At the same time, feature awareness among CSR users was a persistent, real problem — customers weren't getting full value from what our software could already do. I approached both by strategically forming a cross-departmental relationship.

- 🤝 CS Partnership
  
  formalized in team charters
- 🎥 Education content
  
  videos & emails driving adoption
- 🧩 Componentization
  
  prioritized for Verizon, AT&T, Rogers

Mutually beneficial relationship

Design's access to CSR users for research wasn't something I had by default, my team and I had to go through Customer Success. Rather than treating that as a gatekeeping problem to route around, I looked for where our goals actually overlapped. Customer Success cared about the same underlying issue I did: CSR users weren't discovering everything our software could already do for them, a persistent awareness gap that showed up again and again in how customers used, and under-used, our products. That shared problem became the foundation for a real partnership, not just a research-access request.

Here's an example of how the partnership changed both research access and product adoption:

💼 Case:

At Ozmo, feature awareness was a recurring, unresolved problem: CSR users regularly weren't discovering the full range of what our software could already do for them, and Design's ability to research this directly with CSR users depended on time gated through Customer Success.

⚠️ The problem:

I needed two things that both ran through the same door: consistent, direct access to CSR users for research, and real influence over how new customers were onboarded and trained, since that's where the awareness gap took root.

🛠️ Process:

I approached Customer Success with a partnership built around mutual benefit rather than a research-access ask alone. My team took on new-customer onboarding and training activities directly, sitting in on initial and onboarding meetings, and demonstrating products to stakeholders and the end users responsible for internal training. In exchange, we gained the direct, ongoing access to CSR users that had previously been gated.

We produced education-focused videos and emails aimed at closing the feature-awareness gap at its source, and the relationship expanded further to include Sales, where Design demonstrated Ozmo's products to prospective customers and advised on how our solutions could be embedded into their specific support ecosystems. Insights gathered directly from these touchpoints also built the case for componentizing our self-support product for enterprise customers including Verizon, AT&T, and Rogers, until the prioritization case was undeniable.

✅ Results:

Design became both a product and a commercial function at Ozmo woven directly into enterprise demos, customer onboarding, integration analysis, and consultancy-style support for customers embedding Ozmo's solutions into their own support ecosystems. That direct customer and end-user access was won through strategic partnership and became one of several threads contributing to $14.7M in ARR across Ozmo's portfolio.

View how this connected to our CSR journey mapping work ⇨