This is the question that changes how CS leaders think about their operation.
Not "how do we make our process more efficient?" Not "how do we reduce churn?" Not "how do we scale our CS motion?"
What complexity are you currently forcing onto your customer that you could eat?
It sounds simple. The implications are significant.
The Assumption We Never Question
Customer Success has always operated on an implicit assumption: customers have to do certain things to get value. They have to complete onboarding. They have to train their users. They have to configure the integrations. They have to do the work.
Our job, as CS professionals, is to help them do that work. Guide them through it. Train them. Encourage them. Follow up when they don't. Build playbooks for when they stall.
We've built entire methodologies around getting customers to do things they don't particularly want to do. And we've called it Customer Success.
But what if we've been asking the wrong question?
Instead of "how do we get the customer to do this?" — what if we asked "why does the customer have to do this at all?"
The 15% Story
I worked with a company that had a specific technical setup step that had to be completed before a customer could actually use the product. It wasn't glamorous. It wasn't complex from a technical standpoint. But it required action from the customer, and customers consistently didn't do it.
The company had tried everything. Emails. In-app prompts. Dedicated onboarding calls. Training videos. None of it moved the needle enough.
So they started offering a 15% discount to customers who completed the step. Essentially paying customers to do the thing that unlocked the value they'd already bought.
When I posed the question — what complexity are you forcing onto your customer that you could eat? — everyone in the room immediately said the same thing. We could just do that step for them.
It turned out to be relatively simple to build an agent that handled the technical setup automatically when a customer signed up. The step got done. The customer didn't have to think about it. They went straight to onboarding with momentum instead of stalling at a setup screen.
And the company added 15% back to their top line.
That discount was pure bleed. Every customer who took it represented 15% of a contract that went away because the company was asking customers to do something they could have done themselves. Once they stopped asking and started doing, the discount became unnecessary.
The Complexity Audit
Every CS operation has complexity it's currently forcing onto customers that it could, with the right systems, eat.
The technical setup step is an obvious one. But it shows up in more subtle ways too.
The intake form customers have to fill out before an onboarding call — when you already have most of that information in your CRM and the rest could be gathered through an agent that reviews what you know and asks only about what you don't.
The training module customers have to complete before they can access certain features — when an agent could guide them through the relevant capabilities in context, as they're trying to use them.
The quarterly business review prep customers are asked to do — providing data, pulling reports, documenting their goals — when you could show up to that conversation having already done the work and just ask them to react.
Every one of these is a friction point. Every friction point is a place where momentum stalls. Every place where momentum stalls is a place where the seeds of churn get planted.
The LTV Math
Every piece of complexity you remove from the customer's path is one fewer reason to disengage. Disengagement is the precursor to shallow adoption. Shallow adoption leads to contraction at renewal. Contraction is LTV destruction.
The inverse is also true. Every piece of complexity you eat accelerates the customer's path to value. Faster time to value means deeper engagement. Deeper engagement means expansion eligibility earlier in the lifecycle. Earlier expansion means higher ACV. Higher ACV means higher LTV.
The math compounds quickly.
A company that systematically identifies the complexity it's forcing onto customers and builds agents to eat that complexity doesn't just reduce churn. It fundamentally changes the LTV trajectory of every customer in its book.
Starting the Audit
The audit starts with one question, asked about every step in your customer lifecycle: why does the customer have to do this?
Some steps genuinely require customer action — decisions only they can make, configurations only they understand, commitments only they can authorize. Those stay.
Everything else is a candidate.
Go as far out as you can with the thought experiment. If you could do everything for the customer, what would that look like? Then throttle back to what's actually achievable. You'll end up somewhere dramatically further down the road than if you'd started from "how do we make what we already do slightly more efficient."
That's the question. What complexity are you forcing onto your customer that you could eat?
Start there.
Lincoln Murphy formally named and popularized Customer Success starting in 2010 and has spent 15 years connecting it to expansion revenue and commercial outcomes. Read The Premise.