The New Compass for Customer Success

Based on research by André Wagner (Drexel University), Daan van Knippenberg and Lauren D’Innocenzo (Drexel University) 

Key findings:

• When companies add “customer-oriented boundary spanners” to their team, product adoption increases.
• The effect is even stronger when teams include employees with diverse functional backgrounds.
• The strategy delivers measurable results, boosting customer usage and driving investment.

If customers don’t fully use the products they purchase, companies can sell a lot and still fail. When the problem customers want to solve persists, the product often gets blamed — leading to cancellations and lost contracts.

A new study from Rice Business tested a simple fix: give customers a dedicated team liaison — a compass within the team, someone whose job is to keep everyone pointed toward the customer’s true north. 

Published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior and co-authored by Daan van Knippenberg, the Houston Endowed Professor of Management, the research found that a “customer-oriented boundary spanning” approach increases the likelihood that customers will fully adopt products — especially if company teams are made up of people from different professional backgrounds.

“Subscription customers can turn off products very easily if they’re not happy,” says van Knippenberg. “So, customer adoption is critical for business success. Looking through the lens of the customer helps to bring the team together in pursuing a shared vision and objective.”

Embedding a “Customer-Oriented Boundary Spanner”

The authors ran a large-scale field experiment — one of the most rigorous methods in organizational research — and their findings reveal a powerful way for businesses to boost customer adoption.

The field experiment took place at a global company that provides customized IT solutions — a business that’s prone to “churn,” wherein customers fail to renew their subscriptions, in part because they haven’t fully adopted their purchased products.

The researchers added a team member trained in customer engagement — what they call a “customer-oriented boundary spanner” — to around half of the 144 teams they followed over a six-month period. These team members actively gathered customer feedback through an interactive assessment, and then they brought customer concerns to meetings to make sure their needs were represented in team discussions.

The assessment covered 10 core areas (e.g., how helpful solutions are, how the client gets service and support, etc.) from level 1 — not a significant factor — to level 6 — having a strategic relationship based on trust.

Teams were also measured for their professional diversity, allowing the researchers to see whether a mix of perspectives can make the boundary spanner role even more effective.

“You need to get into this ongoing mode of operation of how you work with the customer, whether it’s a weekly or monthly customer business review. It’s about developing an ongoing dialogue.”

Customer Liaisons Boost Adoption and Drive Investment

The study found that teams with a dedicated liaison who championed the customer’s perspective worked more effectively and delivered solutions that customers were more likely to adopt — especially when the teams brought together people from different professional backgrounds.

At the IT company where the experiment took place, customer usage rose by 12% after the role was introduced (from 44% to 56%), while teams without a customer liaison saw a slight decline in product adoption (-1%, down from 45% to 44%). In response to these data, the company invested more than $50 million in the approach and hired over 200 boundary spanners worldwide.

Like a compass guiding a group of travelers, the liaison kept diverse experts oriented toward the same destination: solving the customer’s problem. By breaking down silos and ensuring that varied expertise was integrated into practical solutions, the compass role made it far more likely that customers would fully adopt the product.

“We saw much better customer adoption of team outcomes with those that had that role in place versus those that didn’t,” van Knippenberg says. “And background diversity of team roles then worked as an accelerator. It’s this interaction of diversity combined with boundary spanning that’s the real catalyst.”

It’s Alignment, Not Just Adoption

The study offers practical takeaways for companies across industries looking to increase product adoption. To begin with, businesses should structure teams to stay connected to the customer from the start.

Firms can create a designated role within their customer engagement teams to advocate for the customer’s perspective. And to accelerate adoption, managers can work to make their customer engagement teams more functionally diverse.

Critical, however, adds van Knippenberg, is for teams to weave this customer focus into the very core of how they operate. A compass doesn’t just get checked once at the start of a journey — it’s a constant point of reference. In the same way, customer liaisons ensure the team keeps recalibrating to the customer’s needs over time.

“You need to get into this ongoing mode of operation of how you work with the customer, whether it’s a weekly or monthly customer business review. It’s about developing an ongoing dialogue.”

Not all teams are customer-facing, the researchers acknowledge. However, the study’s implications extend far beyond teams that primarily interact with customers.

Their findings suggest any force that can better align teams around a shared goal can help them put their collective knowledge to work, leading to stronger outcomes.

When companies embed the voice of the customer into the heart of teams, they’re far more likely to create solutions that customers will adopt.

Written by Deborah Lynn Blumberg

Wagner, van Knippenberg, and D’Innocenzo. “Customer-Oriented Boundary Spanning, Functional Diversity, and Customer Adoption.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 46.6 (2025): 906-922. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2884