“ESG didn’t just advise – they executed alongside us. They anchored our focus on what actually moves the needle: customer needs, team alignment, and prioritized action. The result was a materially faster transformation from legacy technology company to modern SaaS operating model.”— Carlos Quezada, VP of CX Strategy, Automation & Enablement, Hewlett Packard Enterprise
Overview
HPE was in the middle of a fundamental shift.
The business was evolving toward cloud and subscription-based revenue, but the post-sales organization was still operating with legacy, hardware-era assumptions. Years of growth through acquisition created fragmentation across teams, tools, and customer experiences.
Customer Success existed, but it wasn’t yet a system. It wasn’t consistently measurable, scalable, or aligned to revenue outcomes.
Over a multi-year engagement, ESG partnered with HPE to design, operationalize, and scale Customer Success as an enterprise capability. This was not a single initiative. It was a transformation of the underlying infrastructure required to support retention, expansion, and long-term enterprise value.
The Challenge
HPE’s challenges were not isolated. They were systemic:
- Disconnected customer journeys across business units and acquired companies
- Limited visibility into customer health, renewal risk, and expansion opportunity
- High cost-to-serve driven by a predominantly high-touch model
- No scalable way to support long-tail customers
- Partner channels operating without alignment to Customer Success outcomes
At the same time, the business needed to support a recurring revenue model without increasing structural cost.
The issue was not effort or talent.
It was the absence of a unified Customer Success infrastructure.
The Approach
ESG worked alongside HPE as an embedded partner, building the system required to support Customer Success at scale.
The work evolved over time, but the impact can be understood across three connected layers: foundation, scale, and growth.
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Building the Foundation:Establishinga Unified Customer Success System
The first step was creating alignment across the organization.
ESG partnered with HPE to define and operationalize a unified customer lifecycle framework that could span business units, products, and acquisitions. This included:
- End-to-end customer journey design from onboarding through expansion
- Standardized Customer Success processes and governance
- A global Customer Success operating model and Center of Excellence
- Implementation and evolution of CS platforms (Totango → Gainsight → custom CS application)
- Development of analytics, dashboards, and predictive health scoring
This work replaced fragmented execution with a shared system for how Customer Success is delivered, measured, and improved.
It also introduced something HPE previously lacked: consistent lifecycle visibility across the customer base.
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Scaling the Model: Expanding Customer Success Without Linear Headcount Growth
Once the foundation was in place, the next challenge was scale.
HPE needed to extend Customer Success coverage beyond high-touch accounts without increasing cost proportionally.
ESG designed and deployed a digital-first Customer Success model to support the long tail of the business. This included:
- Automated onboarding, adoption, and lifecycle engagement programs
- Segmentation and tiering models aligned to customer value
- Digital MBRs and scalable communication frameworks
- Low-touch and hybrid engagement models
This approach expanded Customer Success coverage to approximately 4,000 previously underserved accounts while reducing cost-to-serve.
Customer Success shifted from a resource-constrained function to a scalable operating system.
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Driving Growth: Turning the Partner Ecosystem into a Customer Success Lever
With internal systems and scale in place, the next opportunity was growth.
For HPE, a significant portion of the customer base was managed through partners. However, partners were not consistently equipped to drive onboarding, adoption, and renewal outcomes.
ESG designed and launched the Partner Customer Success Center, extending Customer Success into the partner ecosystem.
The model included:
- Partner CS maturity assessments and benchmarking
- Structured onboarding, adoption, and renewal playbooks
- Training, certification, and enablement programs
- Access to customer lifecycle data, health scores, and analytics
- Incentives aligned to adoption, retention, and expansion
The program scaled from a pilot of 7 partners managing 128 accounts to 60+ partners managing ~4,000 accounts .
The impact was material:
- 240% average ACV increase post partner enrollment
- 103% ACV growth year-over-year within the program
- ~6-point improvement in Net Revenue Retention associated with structured partner CS programs
- $190M+ in TCV supported through the Partner CS Center
Customer Success became a growth multiplier, not just a post-sales function.
The Outcome
Over the course of the engagement, HPE transformed Customer Success from a fragmented capability into a scalable, measurable system aligned to enterprise outcomes.
Key results included:
- Standardized Customer Success operations across a complex, acquired organization
- Scaled coverage to ~4,000 accounts through digital Customer Success
- Reduced cost-to-serve in long-tail segments
- Built a partner ecosystem aligned to retention and expansion outcomes
- Established real-time visibility into customer health, risk, and growth opportunity
- Enabled Customer Success to support a recurring revenue operating model
Perhaps most importantly, HPE made a fundamental shift:
From managing customers in isolated workflows
To operating with a unified, lifecycle-driven system designed for retention and growth
The Takeaway
For organizations moving to subscription and recurring revenue models, Customer Success cannot remain fragmented.
It must be built as infrastructure.
At HPE, the impact did not come from a single initiative. It came from building the system, scaling it, and extending it across the business over time.
The result is a Customer Success model that drives retention, expansion, and enterprise value at scale.
Customer Success is often treated as a function, at HPE it became a system for growth.