Blockskye Raises $15.8M — What Customer Success Leaders Should Do Next
Quick take: Blockskye closed $15.8M to modernize corporate travel with an end-to-end stack for booking, payments, and expense reporting. For CS, this is a clear path to reduce cost-to-serve, speed reconciliation, and tell a hard-dollar impact story in QBRs.
Funding Snapshot
Amount: $15.8M
What they’re building: A unified platform that connects bookings, real-time payments, and expense reporting, aiming to replace legacy, intermediary-heavy travel workflows.
Why it matters: Travel spend is big, messy, and cross-functional—exactly where CS can drive measurable savings and protect renewals.
Why This Matters for Customer Success
Travel touches adoption timelines, exec sponsor meetings, and field onboarding. When travel workflows are slow or opaque, you feel it in time-to-value, cost-to-serve, and renewal risk.
Finance alignment: Real-time reconciliation gives you numbers you can defend with the CFO.
Cleaner QBRs: You can connect dollar savings to account health and expansion plans.
Faster execution: Less admin drag means more focus on outcomes.
To package these savings into an executive narrative, you can follow the one-slide structure in our QBR playbook here: In my guide on executive reviews, I show how to turn operational wins into board-ready stories in Transform Quarterly Business Reviews.
If your calendar is getting hijacked by last-minute travel asks, set guardrails so your team can protect deep work and still deliver; I break down the system in Customer Success Boundaries: Prevent Burnout.
The 90-Day CS Playbook
Goal: Cut travel cost-to-serve, speed expense cycles, and surface savings in QBRs.
0–7 days: Map the pain
List your top 10 onsite-heavy accounts and note (a) who books, (b) approval steps, (c) expense cycle time, and (d) failure points like unused tickets or off-policy bookings.
If you need a ready outline for the discussion, use my agenda in Customer Success Meeting Preparation System.
7–14 days: Set CFO-friendly KPIs
Track three simple metrics in your Success Plans:
Travel $ per $1M ARR (cost-to-serve proxy)
Expense cycle time (trip → approved)
Unused ticket recovery rate (% value recaptured)
To show the revenue impact, link these to retention math using the models in my Net Revenue Retention Guide.
14–45 days: Run an unused-ticket recovery sprint
Pull the unused-ticket balance with Finance/Travel Ops, set a 40–60% recovery target, and add a monthly update to your exec report.
If you’re building a lightweight plan to keep everyone aligned, grab the layout in my Customer Success Plan.
14–60 days: Tighten the workflow
Standardize a single flow from booking → payment → expense, tie pre-trip approvals to account plans/project codes, and auto-match itinerary ↔ card ↔ receipt.
For simple automation and system hand-offs with your CRM, use the patterns from AI + CRM Integration for CS.
45–90 days: Tell the story in numbers
Report $ saved, cycle-time cuts, and on-policy rates; then connect those wins to renewal probability and expansion velocity.
If you want a full narrative arc for exec audiences, follow the examples in Strategic QBR Frameworks (Gong, Snowflake).
Metrics to Put on Your Dashboard
Travel $ per $1M ARR by account/segment
Expense cycle time (avg and P90)
Unused ticket recovery ($ and %)
On-policy booking rate (%)
Field-meeting CSAT (1–5)
When you’re ready to benchmark core CS metrics alongside NRR, my calculator hub makes it easy in CS Calculators.
Extend the Win: Tie Travel to CX Signals
Travel friction often shows up in support volume, CSAT, and NPS comments; close the loop by measuring it.
To capture feedback without noise, see my current picks and setup advice in Best NPS Survey Tools.
If you’re evaluating the broader data stack that will hold these metrics, compare your options before you commit.
For a quick buyer’s view on where to store CS telemetry and workflow data, read my comparison in Gainsight vs HubSpot vs Salesforce.
Email/Slack template — Launch a 90-day travel cost pilot
Subject: Proposal: 90-day pilot to cut travel cost-to-serve
Body:
I’d like to run a 90-day pilot with Finance and Travel Ops to reduce travel cost-to-serve for our top 10 onsite accounts.
Goals:
Recover 40–60% of unused ticket value
Reduce expense cycle time by 30%
Track “Travel $ per $1M ARR” in QBRs
Outcome: hard dollar savings, cleaner reporting, and stronger renewal narratives. If aligned, I’ll share a one-pager and a simple dashboard by Friday.
—Hakan, Founder, The Customer Success Café Weekly Newsletter