Handbook
Customer Success
Reusable, **project-agnostic** blueprint for **Customer Success (CS)** — the discipline of helping users and customers realize value from a product after adoption, sustaining engagement, and reducing
Customer Success
Reusable, project-agnostic blueprint for Customer Success (CS) — the discipline of helping users and customers realize value from a product after adoption, sustaining engagement, and reducing preventable churn through proactive orchestration, support excellence, and feedback-driven improvement.
Customer Success answers "How do we help users achieve their goals and reduce churn?" — a question that is strongest in PDLC P4–P6 (launch through growth, renewal, and transition) and depends on SDLC for the systems that scale onboarding, guidance, health telemetry, and support.
| Document | Purpose |
|---|---|
| CUSTOMER-SUCCESS.md | Principles, onboarding, health scoring, support ops, self-service, feedback loops, churn prevention, expansion, success planning, competencies, references |
| Customer Success ↔ SDLC ↔ PDLC bridge | How CS maps across PDLC P1–P6 and SDLC A–F — lifecycle emphasis, roles, artifacts, calibration by business model, anti-patterns |
| practices/ | Index of practice-guide topics (onboarding design, health scoring, support ops, feedback programs, churn playbooks) |
Relationship to other packages
| Package | How Customer Success relates |
|---|---|
| Marketing | Marketing acquires and often activates demand; Customer Success retains and expands relationships. Handoffs (MQL/SQL to closed-won, launch messaging vs. onboarding truth) must align so promises match the post-sale experience. |
| UX / UI Design | UX makes the product usable; CS ensures users adopt capabilities that matter — through onboarding, in-product guidance, help content, and support pathways. Poor UX inflates support cost; strong CS surfaces friction signals back to product and design. |
| Business Analysis | BA clarifies needs and requirements; CS validates outcomes in production — whether capabilities translate to customer results. Solution evaluation and VoC feed the same evidence loop. |
| PDLC | P4 onboarding and launch readiness; P5 retention, expansion, and health; P6 migration, sunset, and offboarding — CS is a primary execution lens for post-launch lifecycle management. See Customer Success ↔ SDLC ↔ PDLC bridge. |
| SDLC | CS depends on delivery of support tooling (ticketing, CRM, success platform integrations), in-app guidance (tooltips, tours, contextual help), and analytics instrumentation for health scores and funnel metrics. |
| Data / Data Science | Health scoring, churn prediction, propensity models, and segmentation require clean event data, labeled outcomes, and governed analytics. CS consumes models; data teams own feature stores and validation. |
| Engineering | Implements integrations, customer data pipelines, admin consoles, billing hooks, and in-product experiences that CS programs rely on at scale. |
| Security / Compliance | Customer data in CS systems (contracts, communications, surveys) must respect access control, retention, and regulatory boundaries (e.g. GDPR, sector rules). |
| Governance | Executive sponsorship, target operating model, and cross-functional forums (e.g. QBR cadence with sales/product) align CS with company strategy. |
Scope
This package covers Customer Success as a discipline — not a single tool vendor or job title. It includes:
- Principles — proactive vs. reactive service, customer-centricity, data-informed prioritization, cross-functional orchestration, outcome focus
- Onboarding and time-to-value — guided setup, progressive disclosure, persona-based journeys, milestones, completion metrics
- Customer health — composite scores, risk tiers, alerting, feedback between CS and product/data
- Support operations — tiering, SLAs, workflows, knowledge base, automation and community support models
- Self-service — help centers, in-app guidance, FAQs, multimedia learning, developer docs as frontline support
- Feedback systems — NPS, CSAT, CES, VoC, feature intake, closing the loop
- Churn prevention and recovery — early warning, playbooks, save offers, win-back, exit learning, payment failure handling
- Expansion and advocacy — growth plays within accounts, CABs, referrals, case studies, champions programs
- Success planning — QBRs, success plans, outcome tracking, renewal management
Reference bodies of knowledge and industry frameworks: TSIA (technology services research and benchmarks), Gainsight and similar Customer Success platform methodology (e.g. outcomes hierarchy, success planning patterns), SuccessHACKER (playbooks and operating model content), Customer Success Association and adjacent communities (standards of practice, competency development). Use vendor-neutral patterns here; map tools to your stack locally.
Keep project-specific customer success documentation in docs/product/customer-success/ and support playbooks in docs/operations/, not in this file.
Canonical source
Edit https://github.com/autowww/blueprints/blob/main/disciplines/product/customer-success/README.md first; regenerate with docs/build-handbook.py.