ketteCrew Spotlight: The New Era of Customer Success with Jennie Vandegrift

When companies talk about customer success, the conversation often gravitates toward retention, renewals, and support. But the strongest customer organizations think bigger. They focus on outcomes, build trust early, and recognize that delivering lasting value is a responsibility shared across the entire company.

That perspective is especially relevant today as ketteQ welcomes Jennie Vandegrift as our new Chief Customer Officer. Jennie joins ketteQ to lead global customer delivery, success, support, and services as the company enters its next stage of growth, building on a track record of 100% successful customer deployments and growing momentum behind Quintus™, ketteQ’s Free-Range AI™. Fully governed.

With more than 19 years of leadership across retail, CPG, supply chain technology, and customer experience, Jennie brings a unique perspective on how companies drive adoption, build trust, and turn successful deployments into lasting partnerships.

For the latest edition of our ketteCrew Spotlight series, I sat down with Jennie to discuss why customer outcomes must remain the North Star, how AI is creating a new challenge around trust, and why the best customer relationships begin before a deal is signed.

Here is our conversation:

Q: What excited you most about the opportunity to join ketteQ?

What initially stood out to me was how strong ketteQ’s customer retention already was without having a formal customer motion or strategy behind it. That is really rare.

Usually, healthy retention numbers mean someone has already built the machine underneath them. Here, the results were strong even though that structure had not been fully built yet.

That told me the product is genuinely delivering value and there is tremendous opportunity to build the infrastructure that protects and compounds those results.

The other piece was the team. I was incredibly impressed by everyone I met throughout the process, and that has only continued since joining.

Q: What do the best customer organizations have in common?

The most important thing is that they optimize for customer outcomes. Retention should follow as a byproduct of those outcomes, not the other way around.

When you manage directly toward a retention number, you risk protecting the metric instead of the relationship. The customer always needs to be the North Star.

Strong organizations also understand that customer success is not owned by one department. Product, engineering, sales, implementation, and customer service all influence the relationship. The best companies break down those silos and create the conditions for growth through adoption, trust, and value.

Q: Supply chains have become significantly more volatile. How have you seen the role of supply chain leaders evolve?

Supply chain has always dealt with disruption. What has changed is the tooling available to respond to it.

AI has fundamentally shifted what is possible. Work that once required highly technical skills can increasingly be accomplished by someone who understands the problem and knows how to ask the right questions.

But that introduces a new challenge: trust.

Some people worry about what AI means for their jobs. Others are not yet confident they can trust what the technology tells them. Both concerns are legitimate.

The companies that succeed with AI will be the ones that help customers change how they work because of it. That means building the trust layer alongside the technology layer through change management, transparency, and human judgment.

Q: Why is the post-sale experience so important?

I actually think the post-sale experience needs to begin before the sale.

By the time a deal closes, many decisions that determine customer success have already been made. Scope, timelines, expectations, and commitments have been established.

If customer success enters after the signature, the team inherits those decisions without having had an opportunity to shape them. If reality does not match what was promised, trust can quickly be damaged.

The best time to invest in a customer relationship is before you need to. Customer teams should help shape expectations early and stay engaged throughout the journey.

You cannot wait until there is a fire to build trust.

Q: What has impressed you most since joining ketteQ, and what are you most excited to accomplish?

I have been impressed by how much the team had already built before I arrived. People here have strong instincts and naturally step into ownership when something needs to get done. That says a lot about the culture.

What excites me now is turning those instincts into infrastructure and building processes that scale without depending on knowledge living in one person’s head.

That means health scoring that identifies renewal risk early and a customer journey mapped from presales through implementation, adoption, renewal, and expansion with clear ownership at every stage.

I view customer organizations as growth centers, not cost centers. The opportunity is to protect customer outcomes while building a meaningful growth engine for the business.

Q: Outside of work, how do you like to spend your time?

My family loves to travel. I have two boys, and we try to use travel as more than a vacation. It is an opportunity to experience different cultures, learn history, try unfamiliar things, and develop skills they cannot necessarily learn in a classroom.

We are also very outdoorsy, so between sports, hiking, and skiing, there is always something happening.

I am also a builder at heart. I love woodworking and have built everything from decorative walls to closets around our house. I even used to run an Etsy shop selling things I made.

There is something incredibly satisfying about physically building something that is different from what I build professionally every day.

Q: What is something your teammates might be surprised to learn about you?

My career ended up somewhere completely different from where I expected.

I originally went to school for fashion merchandising and was deciding between that and law school. My family joked that I was like a real-life Legally Blonde because I loved the creative side of fashion but also loved arguing my point.

I started my career in apparel at Target, but somewhere along the way became fascinated by data and how it could be used to solve problems. I followed that curiosity, and eventually it led me here.

Réflexions finales

Talking with Jennie is a reminder that customer success is not something that begins after implementation or appears at renewal. It is built throughout the entire customer journey.

That becomes even more important as AI changes how supply chain teams work. Powerful technology creates new possibilities, but lasting adoption depends on trust, transparency, change management, and human judgment.

Jennie’s perspective also reinforces that customer outcomes are not the responsibility of one team. They come from sales, product, engineering, delivery, and customer teams working together around a shared North Star.

That is what makes her arrival at ketteQ particularly exciting. As Chief Customer Officer, Jennie will lead global delivery, success, support, and services while building on the strong customer foundation already in place. Her goal is not simply to protect retention, but to drive adoption, create long-term value, and build a meaningful growth engine for the business.

We are excited to officially welcome Jennie to the ketteCrew and have her helping turn the possibilities of Free-Range AI™ and Quintus™ into lasting customer outcomes. Read the press release to learn more about how Jennie is building customer success around trust, adoption, and lasting business outcomes.

Curious about the principles that shape how we build, deploy, and support supply chain orchestration? Visit our About Page to learn more about ketteQ’s mission, core values, and the team behind the technology.