Bridge the Gap: Mapping Current vs. Ideal State Customer Processes

This session looked at where customer handoffs actually break down between sales, onboarding, customer success, and support, and what it costs in time to value. The panel included Jamie McDermott, Kristine Kukich, Alison Bukowski, Erin Felton, Anderson Campbell, Angela Sutton, Diana Gabroveanu, and Rachel Bland.

Erin Felton opened with the idea that context simply does not travel between teams. Sales spends time understanding a customer's goals, and then that understanding never reaches onboarding or support. She said the failure points are not concentrated in one handoff, they can happen anywhere along the chain, and the customer ends up feeling like they are dealing with four separate companies rather than one.

Diana Gabroveanu pushed back on the idea that AI fixes this. She argued the disconnect between departments predates AI by years, and that giving each team its own AI tool without shared data or shared KPIs just adds another layer of disconnection. Her view was that companies need a common data warehouse or shared dashboard before layering in any automation, and that AI works well for narrow tasks like summarizing calls into a shared, searchable history so a new CSM does not need to reopen a discovery call. Angela Sutton added a note of caution here, pointing to a Gartner 2025 finding that a large share of underperforming AI projects fail because of bad data preparation, and warned against trusting AI sentiment scores or health scores without reading the underlying data.

Erin Felton also argued that before any process change, leadership across sales, onboarding, and CS needs to agree on one overarching goal, otherwise any fix downstream gets undone. Angela Sutton suggested building a short case study around a real customer at a specific stage, showing exactly where the disconnect happened and what it cost, as a way to get that leadership alignment.

One practical thing to try: pick one handoff, such as sales to onboarding, and run a small pilot with a real customer where the two teams share the same KPIs and the same account history before you add any tooling on top.