how AI transforms the boring 98% into CS excellence

"I'm just not seeing results despite our hard work."

I hear this from CS leaders constantly. Teams run at full capacity, implementing every best practice, yet the needle on retention or expansion barely moves.

The problem often isn't effort. It's focus.

Most CS organizations apply the wrong mental model.

You know the 80/20 rule (Pareto Principle), but in today's complex environment, the 98/2 rule, better known as the Dutcher Principle, often governs success.

Let's explore why this matters now more than ever for customer success...

Beyond Pareto: Understanding the 98/2 Rule

The 98/2 rule, popularized by Shane Parrish, states:

This isn't just a slight tweak to 80/20, it's a fundamental reframing of how CS should operate.

The Invisible Work Driving Outcomes

In customer success, we celebrate the wins, the closed renewals, the expansion deals, and the rescued accounts. These visible outcomes are the 2% that everyone sees.

But the crucial 98%?

That's the unsexy, behind-the-scenes work: meticulous documentation that enables consistent onboarding, regular health audits that catch at-risk customers early, or systematic data cleaning that makes analytics reliable.

The irony is that, as the SaaS industry matured, leadership often fixated on those visible 2% quarterly numbers and significant renewals.

Meanwhile, the 98%the systems, processes, and capabilities driving those outcomes are squeezed into whatever time remains.

This creates the CS Excellence Paradox: the more pressure to deliver immediate results, the less time teams spend on the foundational activities that would produce them.

The 98/2 Rule in Action: Automating Excellence

How do you reorient your team toward the critical 98%?

First, audit your team's time. Track where it goes for two weeks. Most leaders are shocked by how little is spent on high-leverage activities.

Then, identify your "boring basics," those unglamorous but essential tasks (like structured health monitoring, systematic playbook development, or proactive risk mitigation) that guarantee success if done consistently.

Here's the crucial insight most CS leaders miss: You shouldn't just do the boring basics well; you should systematically automate them.

The best CS organizations aren't just assigning the 98% work to their teams; they're relentlessly finding ways to use AI, automation, and technology to ensure consistency at scale:

• Instead of manually tracking customer health signals, they deploy monitoring systems that automatically consolidate usage, support, and engagement data

• Rather than relying on CSMs to remember follow-ups, they build workflow automation that ensures no critical touch point is missed

• In place of ad hoc knowledge sharing, they implement AI-powered systems that extract, organize, and surface best practices

• Instead of repetitive report creation, they build analytics dashboards that refresh automatically

AI is particularly powerful for 98% of the work. The mundane, repetitive tasks that your teams find draining are precisely where AI excels:

• Summarizing customer conversations to extract key insights and action items

• Generating first drafts of customer communications based on account context

• Monitoring customer signals across multiple channels to identify risk patterns

• Creating personalized content and customized onboarding materials at scale

When you systematically automate the boring but crucial 98%, two transformations occur:

1. Consistency improves dramatically. Machines don't get distracted, tired, or pulled into urgent but unimportant tasks.

2. Your team's time is liberated for the human work that AI can't replicate, building relationships, providing strategic guidance, and making complex judgment calls.

With that clarity, focus can be created, often through specialization. Even small teams benefit from clear swim lanes, allowing deep expertise. Critically, you'll need to build systems, not heroes. Don't depend on heroic individuals; ensure the boring basics happen by default.

And finally, measure and reward the right things. If your metrics only capture the visible 2%, you'll never incentivize excellence in the critical 98%. Create leading indicators for foundational work, not just results.

The Compound Effect of Excellence

The power of the 98/2 rule lies in the compound effect over time. Each small investment in unsexy fundamentals adds up, creating an ever-widening gap between your team and the competition.

In a year where economic pressures demand more efficient teams, doubling down on the 98% that drives results isn't just smart, it's essential.

What is the invisible 98% in your CS organization that you need to prioritize now to drive the visible 2% your business demands?

Hit "Reply" and let me know.

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