Rachel Debeck runs Flexischools, a school payments platform used by one million Australian parents. Her growth strategy: put customer service next to engineering and actually listen.
The company used to run two Sydney offices 15 kilometres apart. Customer-facing teams in one location, product and engineering in another. Feedback took weeks to reach the people who could fix it, if it reached them at all.
Debeck consolidated. Now when a parent hits a workflow issue, the support rep talks to an engineer at lunch. Complaints become sprint items. Workarounds become features.
The catalyst was personal. A doctor Debeck saw for a medical appointment sent her a detailed email about the platform after learning she was CEO. The medical notes were one paragraph. The product feedback was pages. That is what happens when you build something people use daily: they invest time if they think you will listen.
What this means for sales and CS alignment
Most B2B companies treat customer service as a cost centre. Support tickets go into a queue, product reviews them quarterly, sales complains about churn six months later.
Flexischools flipped it. Customer service informs product roadmap in real time. That means sales reps pitch features customers actually asked for, not what product thought they wanted.
The math works. Forrester data shows companies with strong customer experience programmes grow revenue 5x faster than competitors. PwC found 32% of customers leave after one bad experience. When your support team sits next to your product team, that second cohort shrinks fast.
For ANZ sales teams selling into education or high-volume B2C markets, the lesson is clear: proximity to feedback changes velocity. If your CS team is logging tickets into a void, you are losing pipeline to whoever is actually shipping fixes.
Debeck did not hire 20 more engineers. She moved desks. Revenue impact followed.