Emily Garza on Scaling Customer Success with AI & Outsourcing
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You’ve built and scaled multiple Customer Success teams. What achievement stands out most in shaping your journey as a CS leader?
Emily Garza: Working primarily in startups, I’ve had the chance to do a lot of building (and rebuilding). While I’ve enjoyed honing in on playbooks, deploying CS tools, running customer events, creating new products, and highlighting customer successes, for me, it all comes down to the people. I’ve had the opportunity to promote 7+ people to first-time people leaders (as well as many in-role growth + cross-functional moves). To me, finding someone passionate about customers and the people who support them, and honing that skill, is enjoyable and essential.
“So often, people focus on executing in their own lane – but in order to scale a business, you need to allow your people to take on new challenges.” Emily Garza, VP, Customer Success, Unit21
How do you balance customer experience, business impact, and talent growth in your leadership approach?
Emily Garza: Each of those factors is important and needs to be considered and balanced in driving an effective organization.
For customer experience: Ultimately, the customer experience is driven by value, not meeting time, not likability of the CSM, and not how many products they’ve adopted. It is critical to understand (and help define) the KPIs they want to impact and how your tool is doing so. This storytelling (and at the right level!) is often missed or not executed well. Customer experience can also mean being the advocate internally – providing visibility, trends and business impact as you share customer feedback. This also requires setting accurate expectations with customers.
For business impact: The Customer Success organization needs to be a key storyteller – sharing customer stories, impacts of potential decisions, and guides on how to replicate success. Most critically, CS needs to align itself with revenue within the organization. This can look different depending on the team setup (ie, owning renewals, upsells, cross-sells), but the ability to tie the team’s effort and time into those factors ensures that CS has a seat at the table.
For talent growth: I often tell my team, “when I put someone up for a promotion, I want the rest of the executive team to think it is a no-brainer”. This often means you are already doing some of the work (or getting close to exposure to it) and showing up in the manner expected. In order to facilitate this, feedback is critical. For each role, I outline the specific competencies for success. Then we use these for interviewing, feedback cycles, and promotions. This consistency allows people to understand where they need to focus and allows for aligned examples from the management team.
“You can’t have a successful program without successful people behind it. Ensuring you’ve set the CS team up for success allows you to be a great internal and external partner.” – Emily Garza, VP, Customer Success, Unit21
What qualities do you believe define a great Customer Success leader, and how do you foster them?
Emily Garza: There are quite a few qualities, and their weighting may depend on the organization’s needs. Here are a few I consider essential:
Balanced Empathy: You have to understand the customer’s view while also balancing it with an internal company view. This requires giving the team visibility into contract structures and implications, tradeoffs in product prioritization, and escalation paths available.
Lead by Example: A CS leader needs to get in the trenches with the team – whether attending customer calls to support talking points or potentially providing temporary account coverage. This must start at the top to drive as part of the culture.
Innovative Thinker: The world is changing fast, and a CS leader needs to be able to adapt. This means evaluating and implementing tools, enabling the team, and ensuring they constantly scan for ways to become more efficient while also driving for customer value. While some are self-starters here, leadership can create a culture of experimentation and sharing (think AI hack-a-thons or team meeting topics).
Organizational Focus: As the ‘keeper of customer information’, a CS leader needs to create consistent visibility for the company. This may mean creating processes and systems for the team to ensure information is documented and updated. While it can be learned or improved, this is often a skill that seems to be more innate to certain people.
When facing complex challenges, what’s your method for creating efficient, scalable solutions?
Emily Garza:
First, you need to decide if the challenge needs to be solved urgently, potentially in a less scalable way, based on certain needs or timelines. Once you can move forward in building more thoughtfully, you want to define a few factors:
- Tooling: Is there already a tool in your environment that can support this new solution?
- Ownership: Who is involved in this new process? What are their roles? Has everyone impacted had a chance to weigh in on the new approach?
- Quantity: How often does this happen? Does this need to be a robust build out, or a checklist to follow if/when it happens again?
In your view, how can outsourcing complement in-house CS teams to drive customer success at scale?
Emily Garza:
“Similar to how Partnerships can help extrapolate the impact of a sales organization, outsourcing can complement in-house CS teams – depending on a few factors.” – Emily Garza, VP, Customer Success, Unit21
- Strong enablement: If you will have outside teams interacting with your customers and representing your brand, you want to make sure they are well-trained.
- Visibility: Ideally, everyone works out of one system (or data funnels to one system) for a comprehensive view and accurate reporting.
This works well in a few scenarios:
- If you have big swings in seasonality and cannot fully justify the in-house headcount
- If you have tested playbooks and automation that help along the customer journey
- If your customer ACV doesn’t support or require a localized high-touch approach
Looking ahead, how can AI and outsourcing together create more future-ready customer experiences?
Emily Garza: Oftentimes, the customer doesn’t care “how” you do something, only that their goal was accomplished. That means allowing technology or outsourcing to do items that were traditionally owned by in-house CSMs. This requires rethinking how you allocate organizational funds in a way that drives the business forward without losing key aspects of the customer experience.
Summary
With Emily Garza shares how strong leadership, data-driven decisions, and a people-first mindset can elevate customer success in today’s fast-paced world. She sheds light on how AI-driven automation and outsourced customer support help businesses scale efficiently without the cost of hiring in-house and without compromising on customer experience and satisfaction.
Emily’s insights highlight the future of customer success operations, where technology and outsourcing work together to deliver smarter, more personalized experiences.
About Emily Garza
Emily Garza is the VP of Customer Success and Operations at Unit21, where she combines strategic leadership with a deep passion for delivering impactful customer experiences. With years of experience building and scaling high-performing CS teams from the ground up, Emily focuses on developing talent, optimizing processes, and aligning business goals with customer value.
As the creator of #ValueCSwithEmily, she actively shares insights on customer success, leadership, and operations through talks, meetups, and podcasts, empowering teams to create future-ready, value-driven customer interactions.