Q1. You’ve built and led customer success functions from the ground up—could you start by sharing how you turned post-sales operations into a strategic growth engine and what key metrics you used to measure it?

I’ve always tried to position Customer Success as a revenue engine, not a support function. Practically, that meant a few things when building a Customer Success unit from scratch:

• Starting with the installed base: document revenue under management, contract types, and renewal dates across products and services.
• Shift mindset around post-sales from ticket handling into customer lifecycle management: stabilize → adopt → optimize → expand. That’s basically how my Customer Success framework came to life.
• Tie each relevant stage to clear commercial outcomes: renewal probability, cross-sell, or expansion opportunities.

The metrics that mattered most:

• Gross & Net Revenue Retention (GRR/NRR)
• Time-to-First-Value
• Expansion mix: Percentage of growth coming from existing customers vs net-new

Once you show that a small CS team can protect and grow a meaningful book of business without matching headcount growth, the conversation changes. CS stops being a cost and becomes part of the growth story.

Q2. With many SaaS providers realizing the highest growth potential lies in renewals and upsells, how do you prioritise onboarding, value realisation and change management to avoid “feature fatigue” and drive meaningful adoption?

I believe that customers don’t buy features but solutions to 2–3 problems that must work better than today. 

So prioritizing onboarding and change management around outcomes by agreeing on the top 3 use cases, building success plans around those, assigning measurable indicators, and tailoring role-based training that shows relevant scenarios and not every menu item of the platform.

Q3. In the Microsoft stack and Power Platform world, how do you see low-code/no-code solutions changing the role of CS and enabling business users — and how does that shift change your success-management strategy?

Low-code fundamentally requires shifting from support & escalation into coaching & governance. On one side, you have business users who can build small apps, automations, and agents that solve problems quickly. On the other hand, you have real risks from duplication to fragile apps.

My strategy is to treat a Low-code engagement as a platform, not a single project, so success metrics focus on sustainable adoption, not go-live. Bringing reusable templates and patterns instead of fulfilling ask by ask from scratch can also be a winner. Set up CoE practices (governance, environment strategy, app review) are to be used as success levers too.

Q4. Multi-tenant SaaS and recurring revenue models raise questions about customer lifecycle and churn prevention. What signals or leading indicators do you monitor to proactively reduce churn and drive expansion, especially across 100+ clients?

You can’t manage churn from gut feeling. I look at four groups of signals:

1. Usage & Value: MAU (Monthly Active Usage) per SKU, critical tasks still happening outside the system, and modules licensed but with zero or near-zero usage.
2. Relationship & Engagement: Executive sponsorship visibility, changes in top management or champion users, or responsiveness and representation in QBRs.
3. Support & Delivery: Recurrence of repeated or major issues left with unresolved root causes, long-running issues around performance, integrations, or data quality, and project milestones consistently slipping.
4. Commercial & Financial: Customer asking for seat reductions or heavy discounting at renewal, procurement asking for a “full technology review” before renewal, or late payments or reduced term lengths.

Q5. Given you operate across MEA and emerging markets where partner ecosystems and localisation matter, how do you adapt your CS frameworks to deal with diverse readiness levels, infrastructure gaps and cultural adoption challenges?

In MEA and similar markets, the framework stays the same, but the playbook changes as there are few realities we need to work with:

• Readiness is uneven: In one account, you have a modern IT department and a strong project team deployed, but in a parallel one, processes are still paper-driven. Using a maturity model can help adapt while working on elevation and upskilling. 
• Infrastructure isn’t always perfect: offline scenarios and phased cloud adoption should be factored in and studied early. 
• Localization & culture matter: Preferences are bilingual communication, comfortable channels alongside formal ones, and on-site activities.

In short, you don’t avoid the structured approach; you tweak the playbook to work for each customer's readiness level, bandwidth, and culture.

Q6. Looking ahead, with AI-driven insights, predictive usage analytics and voice-driven customer interfaces becoming mainstream, what do you believe will be the next frontier in SaaS customer success evolution?

Let me put it that way: CSM is moving from being the "human sensor" to the "human orchestrator" of an AI-driven system.

That looks like a predictive health notification that actually triggers actions: from "your customer health score is 63/100" to "Power Apps usage spiked in HR over the past month. Here are some use cases from our solution catalogue that can help you capitalize."

Also, it can look like auto-drafted QBRs and success reviews where AI pulls telemetry, support history, and roadmap items, and drafts a first version of the success plan. 

Q7. From an investor perspective, if you were assessing a SaaS business’s post-sales and customer-success maturity, what one question would you ask to decide whether their value-realisation engine is strong and sustainable?

My one question would be: "If I pick five of your top customers at random and ask you, ‘what has actually changed in their business since they invested in this product?’, how would you answer, and can you show where and how you track these outcomes?" If they struggle with that question, it usually means CS is still an afterthought, not a genuine growth engine.