The CS Orgs That Win Renewals Aren't Focused on Renewals ft. Chael Banks (Okta)

4 June 2026 | EPISODE 188 | 31 MIN | Here’s What Happens When CS Teams Cross the Commercial Line

Jun 04, 2026

Chael Banks gave his Customer Success (CS) team a clear mandate: move customers along a maturity journey, earn their trust, and never touch a commercial conversation. With over 20,000 customers, conviction isn’t enough. There has to be a system.

Chael Banks, SVP of Customer Success at Okta, joins host Josh Schachter on this episode of [Un]Churned, “Here’s What Happens When CS Teams Cross the Commercial Line.” He breaks down how Okta structures CS across its customer base, why separating advisory from commercial produces better outcomes at scale, and how AI is helping his team maintain a consistent conversation from its smallest accounts to its largest.

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🎯 The [Un]Churned Take: The CS Orgs That Own Maturity Don’t Negotiate Renewals

Most CS orgs can tell you which features a customer has adopted. What matters most to Chael’s team is something different: a customer’s identity security maturity. That’s how far along an organization is in controlling who has access to what, and how securely. Where they sit on that spectrum, where their industry peers sit, and what the gap between the two is costing them is the entire basis of the CS relationship at Okta.

Chael has found that when his team focuses on benchmarks rather than product conversations, customers respond differently and more meaningfully.

When Chael talks about his team’s role, he avoids words like “renewal” or “expansion.” Instead, he focuses on “progression.” Their main goal is to guide customers through a maturity journey, using Okta’s customer data points for accuracy. They look at factors such as phishing resistance, National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) compliance, and governance. Each skill links to a result, and every customer is matched to a benchmark. The conversation is about where you are, where your peers are, and what steps you can take next.

The Benchmark Exists Whether They Renew or Not

Chael’s approach works because the benchmark gives customers an important focus that isn’t tied to Okta’s sales cycle. Identity security maturity is a real goal they need to reach, whether they renew or not. Okta’s team is the most credible group to define and track this progress.

That’s the beauty of this approach. If your CS team controls the benchmark, the renewal conversation changes. When customers see you as the most credible guide for their maturity progress, leaving means losing that guidance, not just the software.

Chael shares that his team earns the right to involve a sales rep only after demonstrating that their primary goal is to help customers progress. Trust comes before any commercial opportunity.

You Need the Data to Back It Up

To build a maturity model that’s truly credible, you need scale. Having enough customers across different industries helps define what “good” looks like for a bank, a healthcare provider, or a tech company. Okta’s 20,000-plus customers and billions of daily transactions inform its precise NIST compliance benchmarks for each industry.

This can be a challenge for smaller teams, but the main idea still stands. Focusing CS conversations on outcome benchmarks instead of product features doesn’t require thousands of customers. It just takes defining what “mature” means in your field and creating a way to measure customer progress.

Building AI for Consistency Over Efficiency

The maturity model only works if every conversation lands the same way. A benchmark that a veteran CSM articulates brilliantly, but a newer rep fumbles, is more of a liability than a framework. At Okta, reps range from seasoned industry practitioners to people two years out of school.

Chael’s answer is what he calls “a little thing in your ear”: tools that surface product telemetry and benchmark data in real time, so a rep four years into identity security can have the same conversation as one who has been in it for twenty.

Most AI implementations in CS optimize for efficiency: fewer tasks per rep, faster responses, and automated summaries. That’s a cost question. Instead, Okta is asking, “How do we make sure every customer gets our best rep every time?” If you’re not asking that question, your AI strategy is solving the wrong problem.

🎧 Listen for These Moments

Chael brings a consultant’s specificity to a conversation most CS leaders are having at the philosophical level. Thirty-one minutes, dense with operational detail.

The identity maturity model in practice and how Okta maps customer adoption to outcome benchmarks by industry, anchoring every CS conversation to progression rather than product.
The AI consolidation problem: Chael’s candid take on what happens when everyone on your team can build something with Claude, and how you govern toward consistency without killing the innovation that’s actually useful.
The no-commercials policy explained: not as a philosophical stance but as a structural decision, and the signals from his consulting career that convinced him the trust boundary is worth protecting.