Ready to churn less and win more? 🏆 Subscribe for a simple, once-a-month rundown of the episodes at gainsight.com/unchurned
What happens when you bring consumption-based customer success into a company?
In this episode of Unchurned, Jared Collins, Senior Director of Customer Success at Dell Technologies, shares how the Apex team is building a modern CS engine inside a $100B infrastructure giant.
Unlike SaaS companies that can deploy value instantly, Dell Apex operates in a world of physical logistics, supply chain constraints, and long hardware lead times. That means customer success isn’t just about adoption — it’s about anticipation.
Jared breaks down how his team connects data sources across the enterprise, builds trigger-based playbooks, partners deeply with sales, and prepares for an AI-driven future where customer signals surface before customers even recognize the need.
---
Timestamps
0:00 - Preview & Introduction
1:25 - Meet Jared Collins & Overview of Dell Apex
3:55 - The operational reality of shipping infrastructure
5:52 - Why CS must anticipate months ahead (lead times + forecasting)
8:20 - Working inside a $100B company: complexity vs opportunity
9:53 - Enabling CSMs for success to build strategic relationships
11:20 - Becoming data strategists: Building health scores across multiple business units
13:15 - Data → Triggers → Playbooks: the operational CS framework
16:46 - AI in CS: why foundations matter more than hype
19:20 - What success looks like for Apex CS in the next 1–2 years
21:55 - What Jared loves about Dell
---
What You’ll Learn
* Why hardware logistics fundamentally changes how CS operates
* How to build proactive CS using data triggers and standardized playbooks
* How to integrate CS inside a massive enterprise organization
* The difference between CapEx and consumption-based thinking
* Why AI only works if your data foundations are clean
* How to free CSMs to focus on strategic relationship-building
* What “good” looks like for CS inside infrastructure businesses
---
Want the playbook, not just the conversation? Subscribe for deep-dive, actionable breakdowns from every episode at unchurned.substack.com.
---
Where to Find Jared Collins
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredrcollins/
---
Where to Find Josh:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jschachter/
Unchurned Substack: https://unchurned.substack.com/
![[Un]Churned – The No. 1 Podcast for Customer Retention cover image](https://wsrv.nl/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fd3t3ozftmdmh3i.cloudfront.net%2Fstaging%2Fpodcast_uploaded_episode%2F40344000%2F40344000-1771598526793-05706584cd3b4.jpg&w=320&h=320)
