Crafting a truly effective customer success function demands an ability to read human behavior, anticipate needs across complex global accounts, and translate insight into action at scale. “I believe Customer Success is more than retention. It’s the engine of sustainable growth,” says Keyonna LaGrone Taylor, CEO and Founder of Key Focus Group, a consultancy that builds scalable customer success strategy and client experience models.
With more than twenty years leading customer success and client experience organizations across Atlassian, Teleperformance, Rackspace, and SolarWinds, LaGrone Taylor has shaped strategies that link customer value directly to business outcomes. Today, she partners with global enterprises and early stage companies to design customer journeys that improve adoption, reduce attrition, and strengthen executive alignment.
Understanding Behavior Before Building Process
Enterprise relationships are long, layered, and largely shaped by how customers actually behave. Before constructing any playbook, she begins by identifying the patterns. This involves interviewing top accounts, reviewing renewal cycles, and analyzing breakpoints that contributed to losses. “Enterprise clients move differently. Don’t guess. Study,” she says.
During her time at Atlassian, her team restructured its entire enterprise playbook after mapping authentic engagement behaviors. The shift was significant. “That alone helped us increase strategic product adoption by 20%,” she says. Data does more than reveal metrics. It exposes what clients value, where they stumble, and what friction the business may be unintentionally creating. Only then can a repeatable model be built with confidence.
Designing the Stages of a Predictable Journey
In many cases, customer success teams are overextended. They are asked to be everywhere at once, responding to needs across onboarding, support, renewal, and expansion without a clear structure. Although common, it remains a fully solvable obstacle. “A playbook should follow the rhythm of the client,” she explains. Her framework removes the ambiguity by breaking the journey into clearly owned stages: onboarding, value realization, maturity, and renewal. Each stage includes defined actions, success indicators, and methods for elevating strategic risk. The result is a unified rhythm that keeps teams aligned on purpose rather than activity.
For example, at Teleperformance her team introduced a stage-based model across ten enterprise accounts, which contributed to twelve percent year-over-year account growth. Every interaction became intentional, not reactive. By bringing this consistency to global teams across multiple regions, she strengthened both predictability and customer confidence.
Ensuring Playbooks Evolve with the Business
One of LaGrone Taylor’s core beliefs is that a playbook must stay alive, which is why real-time adaptability is key to her approach. Stagnant documentation loses relevance quickly in a dynamic organization. “Your playbook should evolve with the business, not get buried in SharePoint,” she says. At SolarWinds, she aligned playbook actions with CRM triggers and voice-of-customer data, enabling teams to adjust their engagement based on early indicators. The outcome was measurable. The organization reduced churn by 30% and increased its ability to intervene proactively.
This adaptability turns a playbook from a checklist into what she describes as a “living part of your CX engine.” When teams can adjust based on signals rather than fire drills, customer success becomes a strategic asset rather than a reactive function.
Leading with Intention and Building Trust at Scale
Whether designing leadership pipelines, supporting executive alignment, or structuring global renewal strategies, LaGrone Taylor always returns to intentionality. She believes the best enterprise playbooks don’t just align internal processes. They strengthen relationships.
“A strong enterprise success playbook doesn’t just align your team, it transforms your customer relationships,” she says. “It ensures consistency without sacrificing customization.”
It’s an approach grounded in results from two decades of work. She has overseen global organizations managing more than 100 million dollars in revenue, built leadership programs that increased efficiency across regions, and shaped customer success models that consistently lift adoption and renewal rates.
At the heart of all these achievements is human connection. “When businesses design customer journeys that deliver measurable value, they unlock higher revenue, stronger loyalty, and scalable impact.”
As organizations face increasing complexity across customer portfolios, LaGrone Taylor’s approach offers a grounded path forward: Build from real behaviors, create structure that empowers rather than overwhelms; and ensure your playbook evolves with every signal the business receives. The outcome is a model that scales trust.
Connect with Keyonna LaGrone Taylor on LinkedIn or visit her website.
