How to Build Digital Success Plans That Drive Adoption

Grab your copy of the 2025 Customer Experience Benchmarks Report: everafter.ai/benchmark

For years they sat in dusty slide decks and static docs, created once at onboarding then quietly forgotten. In this episode of The Customer Success Pro Podcast, I sat down with Alana Stoltzfuss from Okta to talk about a very different approach, digital success plans that live inside the customer experience and actively drive adoption, value and renewal.

Alana leads Automation and Scaled Insights within Okta’s digital success organization. Her team powers a cross functional program that combines product data, customer goals, executive insights and automation so customers get the right guidance at the right time, without needing a one to one CSM on every account.

In this recap, I break down how Okta structures digital growth, what their Success Hub actually does, and the tools and data powering it behind the scenes, plus practical lessons you can steal even if you are starting from zero.

From traditional CS to digital growth at Okta

Alana did not start in digital. She came from “traditional” CSM roles at companies like LinkedIn and Atlassian, managing books of business, running trainings and answering the same questions again and again.

Over time, a pattern emerged.

She noticed she was:

• Delivering the same onboarding training multiple times

• Sending the same email narratives to different customers

• Re sharing the same resources because people lost links

Instead of accepting this as part of the job, she started building scalable assets alongside her CSM responsibilities, things like:

• A self service help center for a B2B2C product

• Recurring onboarding webinars that any customer could join

• Basic email journeys to support onboarding and adoption

That twenty percent side project became the part of the job she loved most, so she moved fully into scaled CS at Atlassian, then into digital growth at Okta.

At Okta, digital is not a throwaway segment for low spend customers. The team is literally called Digital Growth, and their remit spans:

• Customers on basic, silver and gold success packages

• Cross functional stakeholders across CS, renewals, TAMs, support and customer AEs

• Both self service experiences and tools that make human CSMs more effective

Digital is for all, it simply shows up differently depending on entitlement and spend.

Inside Okta’s Success Hub and digital success plans

The heart of Okta’s program is the Success Hub, a personalized space customers access through Okta’s help center. It exists because customers repeatedly said, “I know I am not getting full value from Okta, but I do not know where to start.”

Early on, the hub focused on three stages of the journey:

• Onboarding, what you need to do to go live

• Adoption, how to unlock more value and capabilities

• Renewal, what to expect, who to contact and how to prepare

That was better than a static help center, but one key ingredient was missing, business goals.

Okta realised you cannot truly guide a customer if you do not know what they are trying to achieve. Pre sales teams sometimes captured this in Salesforce notes, but it rarely flowed into post sales, and champions often changed after the deal.

So the digital team:

• Analysed around one thousand five hundred human built success plans

• Grouped the most common objectives into nine business goal buckets

• Embedded those goals directly into the Success Hub experience

Now, when a silver or gold customer lands in the hub, they:

1. Select their primary business goal from that curated list

2. Unlock a tailored checklist of actions directly mapped to that goal

3. Work through that list in product, with guidance and resources surfaced in context

4. Choose the next goal once they complete the first set

Instead of dumping every possible outcome on them at once, Okta gives customers “just enough” focus, anchored in what matters to their company right now.

Basic customers see a lighter version of the hub, with access to:

• Digital onboarding communications

• A summary of what they bought, key contacts and training

• Some targeted in app prompts based on a lighter goal capture

Silver and gold customers get the full interactive success plan experience, and gold customers can also collaborate with their CSM directly inside the hub.

On top of that, Okta layers in automated value snapshots, essentially self service QBR style views that:

• Pull in adoption and maturity metrics from product data

• Align metrics to the business goal the customer selected

• Sit inside the Success Hub, surfaced to both admins and exec sponsors

Admins see tactical calls to action, for example “enable FastPass to move to phishing resistant authentication.” Executives see impact framing and research that help them prioritise that work internally. Same account, different view, same story.

Tools, data and lessons from scaling digital CS

Behind this experience is a thoughtful stack and a lot of learning.

The Success Hub frame itself is built on Salesforce Experience Cloud, so it sits naturally alongside Okta’s help center. To make it more dynamic and data rich, Okta layers EverAfter on top as the interactive interface that:

• Connects to Databricks for deep product usage data and benchmarks

• Pulls in Gainsight fields like business goals and health indicators

• Shows maturity scores, trend charts and tailored widgets that customers can actually act on

For value snapshots and QBR decks, they use Matic to mass create thousands of account specific reports that CSMs can also repurpose in live executive conversations.

One of the biggest challenges Alana called out is data.

Early on, Okta tried to power everything off custom objects in Salesforce. That worked for simple segmentation, but it limited how far they could go with recommendations and AI. Moving toward a warehouse first approach with Databricks has unlocked richer storytelling and more precise signals, but it is a long migration, not a quick win.

Her other big lesson, start small and iterate.

Okta did not launch a perfect, all singing digital program in six months. The team:

• Piloted small experiences before rolling out at scale

• Accepted that some use cases would be tailored before others

• Treated the entire digital journey as a living product, not a one time project

Even inside a large organisation with plenty of red tape, they still found ways to experiment, learn and expand.

If you are at the beginning of your own digital success journey, you do not need a full blown Success Hub on day one. You can start by:

• Standardising a single outcome focused checklist for your top use case

• Capturing business goals in a consistent field your team can see and use

• Sending one simple quarterly value snapshot email that ties usage to that goal

Then layer on data, automation and personalisation as you go.

Key takeaways

• Digital success is not just for low spend customers, it can be a premium, paid experience that complements human CSMs across all segments.

• Success plans only work when they live where customers work, inside hubs, in app guides and communications, not trapped in slide decks.

• Business goals are the anchor, start by defining a small set of goal buckets and mapping clear actions and value metrics to each one.

• Different personas need different views of value, admins need tactical next steps, executives need impact and priority framing.

• Your data foundation will make or break your digital program, invest early in clean product data and flexible integrations.

• You do not need to build Okta’s full model on day one, start small, prove impact, then expand your digital footprint over time.

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Grab your copy of the 2025 Customer Experience Benchmarks Report: everafter.ai/benchmark