I want to tell you something that took me 15 years to say out loud.
Customer Success, as a discipline, was built on a broken assumption. Not a flawed one. Not one that needs iteration. A fundamentally broken one.
We built entire organizations around getting customers to do things they didn't want to do, couldn't do, or were structurally never going to do. And when they couldn't do it, we called it a churn problem.
At ListKit, we pulled the recordings and actually measured where the time went. 60% of every customer interaction was spent re-managing expectations. Not delivering value. Not solving problems. Re-managing expectations.
In some cases it took 15 minutes to just do the work for the customer. We were spending 45 minutes trying to get them to do it themselves. Then they churned anyway.
This is not a ListKit problem. Pull your own recordings. Measure your own time. You will find a version of the same number.
We didn't have a customer problem. We had a model problem. And we spent 15 years building more sophisticated systems to prop up a model that was never going to work.
AI didn't create this problem. It just made it impossible to ignore.
