Alan David Rudolph, a SaaS operations and customer success executive, diagnoses that the gap between what gets sold and delivered causes SaaS ROI to disappear, as missteps during onboarding are difficult to recover from. He states, “The team isn’t thinking adequately about how to drive the full customer journey.” At his previous company, Cendyn, support operations struggled with slow response times and limited visibility into customer sentiment, costing significant revenue. Implementing an AI-based solution from Zendesk improved response and resolution times by 25% over nine months, while providing real-time tracking of customer sentiment. Rudolph notes that private equity-backed SaaS companies treat customer success as a company-wide operating system, where business outcomes, not ticket counts, are the organizing principle. He emphasizes, “It’s really important to sit down with a customer on a periodic basis and understand where their business is going in the future,” to drive continued upsell and cross-sell.