Customer Success has long struggled with identity. Too often, it’s seen as a reactive support layer, a check-in engine, or worse, an extension of sales. Yet the value of Customer Success lies not in chasing renewals but in driving innovation on behalf of the customer and, more critically, their customers.

CS leaders must adopt a fundamentally different mindset to unlock this potential. It must move beyond KPIs and playbooks, begin with empathy, end with transformation, and stay grounded in Design Thinking.

Design Thinking isn’t a methodology for designers. It’s a strategic framework for problem-solving. It reframes challenges around human needs, breaks linear thinking patterns, and fosters creativity across every function. When applied to Customer Success, it can revolutionize how teams co-create value with customers and design experiences that drive adoption, outcomes, and loyalty.

The Shift from Fixing Problems to Solving for People

At its core, Design Thinking begins with empathy. It means truly understanding how people feel, think, behave, and struggle in context.

Traditional CS frameworks often start with the customer’s business goals. But those are often abstractions: retention targets, product adoption, and revenue growth. They rarely capture the why behind those goals and don’t address the real end users—the customers’ customers.

A Design Thinking approach begins with questions like:

• What unmet needs do your customers face in their daily work?
• What frictions do their users experience when using your product?
• What emotional triggers influence their behaviors or decisions?
• How do current solutions fall short of expectations?

By answering these, Customer Success can move upstream from support to strategy. The work becomes about discovery and design, not delivery and escalation.

Designing for the Customer’s Customer

Too many Customer Success strategies stop at the first layer. They serve the buyer, the admin, or the procurement contact but rarely design for the ripple effect. In reality, success doesn’t happen until the end user experiences value and passes that value forward.

A product used by teachers isn’t successful unless students benefit. A platform built for logistics managers doesn’t win unless drivers and dispatchers gain efficiency. A marketing tool doesn’t deliver outcomes unless the campaign’s consumer responds. True Customer Success includes second-order impact. It requires looking beyond the account to the broader ecosystem that surrounds it.

Design Thinking pushes CS teams to expand their lens and ask deeper questions. Who is this ultimately for? What value chain reaction must occur for our customer to meet their goals? How do we help their users succeed?

Often, I hear the argument, “But CS is responsible for upsells, cross-sells, and renewals. That’s where we focus.” I get the same reaction whenever I push back and suggest that Customer Success should not be responsible for sales. I’m looked at as if I don’t understand the function.

The truth is more straightforward than most want to admit. When you focus on your customer’s customers and design for their success, the outcomes you’re targeting, such as renewals, expansion, and loyalty, tend to follow naturally. Growth happens organically when value is delivered.

This isn’t a rejection of growth. It’s a reframing of how that growth is earned. Rather than asking for more, you become indispensable by creating more. Every renewal, every upsell, and every word-of-mouth referral stems from someone else’s success story.

More simply, if your customer wins, you win.

Applying the Five Stages of Design Thinking to Customer Success

The traditional Design Thinking process includes five stages: Empathy, Definition, Ideation, Prototyping, and Testing. Each stage can be adapted to the Customer Success function to build better strategies, partnerships, and outcomes.

1. Empathize: See Through Their Eyes

Customer interviews and QBRs are often superficial because they focus on usage stats or metrics. A Design Thinking lens challenges Success teams to go deeper: shadow users, map emotional journeys, and observe pain points in action.

For example, a CSM working with a healthcare platform might sit with nurses using the tool during a patient intake flow. Rather than simply reviewing ticket counts or login rates, they learn how interface delays affect patient care and emotional stress. That kind of insight can’t be found in a dashboard.

Empathy transforms conversations from check-ins into shared investigations.

2. Define: Reframe the Problem

Once insights are gathered, the goal is to define the real problem. Not just “low usage,” but “nurses avoid using the platform because they feel it adds cognitive burden during high-stress moments.”

Reframing problems into human-centric statements unlocks clarity, sets the stage for innovation, and reveals whether the root problem lies in the product, the process, the perception, or a combination of these.

Customer Success becomes the translation layer between product design and human experience.

3. Ideate: Co-Create, Don’t Prescribe

Most Customer Success plans are written in isolation and presented as recommendations, which we call prescriptions. The ideation phase invites co-creation.

CSMs can involve customers in the innovation process using brainstorming sessions, journey mapping, or even rapid sketching. This leads to better ideas and builds trust, ownership, and energy.

Customers want partners who create with them, not for them. This step activates that relationship.

4. Prototype: Build to Learn, Not to Launch

Rather than overengineering a success plan or a process improvement, prototype it. That could be as simple as a redesigned onboarding email, a new way to present data in a review, or a playbook that targets a specific friction point.

The key is to test ideas in low-fidelity formats. See what sticks and what doesn’t, and learn fast.

In Customer Success, prototyping helps remove the pressure of “getting it right” and replaces it with “getting it useful.”

5. Test: Measure Experience, Not Just Output

Testing shouldn’t focus on whether the customer adopted the feature. It should focus on whether they felt it solved their problem. The metrics change from usage to utility. From activity to impact.

Was the new onboarding journey easier to follow? Did their end users require fewer support interactions? Did the team feel more confident in using the platform?

You’re not measuring completion. You’re measuring transformation.

The Power of “Yes, and…” in Customer Conversations

Delphine P. recently shared a post about using “So, what?” as a Customer Success prompt to focus, “even if, at times, it felt uncomfortable,” on outcomes rather than outputs. I shared the ideas below and my opinion that a “so, what” question, if done right, should always have the answer “for the customer.”

Design Thinking thrives on open exploration and co-creation. One of the most powerful tools to enable that mindset is a concept borrowed from improv theater: “Yes, and…”

In improvisation, “Yes, and…” is used to accept what a partner has said and build upon it. It keeps the momentum flowing and encourages collaboration without shutting down ideas.

In Customer Success, this principle becomes a strategic approach to partnership and ideation.

Too often, customer feedback is met with some version of “Yes, but…” a subtle denial disguised as a response. “Yes, but that’s not on the roadmap.” “Yes, but we can’t do that right now.” Each one is a missed opportunity to explore what’s possible.

“Yes, and…” doesn’t mean promising everything. It means acknowledging the input, validating the need, and expanding the conversation. For example:

• “Yes, and I’d love to understand what’s driving that request.”
• “Yes, and what impact would solving this have for your users?”
• “Yes, and what if we added AI to this concept?”

This mindset reframes conversations around possibility rather than limitations. Customers feel heard, respected, and involved; both teams are included in the process.

Adopting a “Yes, and…” approach helps CS shift from being the voice of policy to the voice of potential. It’s a slight linguistic shift with a massive cultural impact. When used consistently, it builds psychological safety, unlocks innovation, and reinforces that you support the customer and are available to design with them.

Embedding Design Thinking into the CS Organization

To activate this approach, Customer Success teams need to build new muscles:

• Hire for curiosity, not just relationship management. Empathizers, not just executors.
• Train in design methods. The core capabilities should be journey mapping, facilitation, ideation, and problem reframing.
• Redesign your CS playbooks. Center them around learning loops, not lifecycle stages.
• Align with Product and Design. Share insights from the field in a format they can use to inform future innovation.
• Incentivize innovation, not just outcomes. Reward experimentation, not just renewals.
• New Metrics such as an Innovation Contribution Score – Measures how your team has contributed to the customer’s innovation roadmap, whether through ideas implemented, features adopted, or strategic pivots influenced by your partnership.

Above all, create space for design. Strategy requires time to think, and innovation doesn’t happen inside a renewal countdown clock.

The Future Is Designed, Not Forecasted

Great Customer Success isn’t about hitting a number. It’s about creating new possibilities. That only happens when we step outside the limits of status reports and into the design world.

Design Thinking offers a repeatable, human-centered way to reimagine how we engage, support, and evolve with our customers. It lets us go beyond surface solutions and address the root problems that prevent success. It helps us build solutions that shape honest value.

And perhaps most importantly, it repositions Customer Success as a driver of innovation, not just adoption. The future of customer partnerships is one that is intentionally designed for success.

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Chris Hood is a customer-centric strategist and author of the #1 Amazon Best Sellers “Infailible” and “Customer Transformation,” and has been recognized as one of the Top 40 Global Gurus for Customer Experience.

To learn more about building customer-centric organizations or improving your customer experience, please contact Chris at chrishood.com/contact.