Customer Success — practice guides (index)

These project-agnostic guides support proactive customer management: instrumenting journeys, scoring risk before renewal crises, and running retention and win-back with clear metrics. They extend the conceptual body of…

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Where practices sit in the customer lifecycle

Customer success practice lanes

How proactive practice guides advance customers toward outcomes while inspect-and-adapt loops keep retention governed and traceable.

  1. Where practices sit in the customer lifecycleFrames how the practice guides map across the customer lifecycle on this index.
  2. Lane APrimary work stream from first value through sustained customer outcomes.
  3. handoffPasses governed context between lifecycle stages and practice guides.
  4. shared outcomeObservable customer value both lifecycles and teams align on.
  5. Lane BParallel stream for risk inspection and governed course correction.
  6. inspect / adaptReviews journey signals and adjusts coverage or playbooks.
  7. feedbackReturns measured results and customer voice to upstream practices.
  8. Note: OnboardingFirst practice anchor where proactive customer management begins.

Deep dives: Onboarding, Health scoring, Churn prevention. Expansion and advocacy remain in Customer Success — body of knowledge.

Practice guide index

Practice guide Focus
Onboarding design Time-to-value, guided setup and progressive disclosure, persona-based journeys, milestone definition, in-product vs. human-led onboarding, completion and activation metrics, handoff from sales/marketing.
Health scoring Signal selection (product usage, support, billing, sentiment), model design (rules vs. ML), tiering and thresholds, data contracts with engineering/analytics, alert routing, governance and false-positive management.
Support operations setup Tiered support (L1/L2/L3), channel mix, SLA policy and measurement, ticket taxonomy, escalation paths, shift and capacity planning, knowledge base IA, deflection strategy, tooling integrations.
Feedback program design NPS / CSAT / CES program architecture, sampling and timing, survey fatigue controls, linking responses to accounts and journeys, VoC synthesis, routing insights to roadmap and closing the loop with respondents.
Churn prevention Risk signals by segment, tiered interventions (digital, CSM, executive), save offers and commercial levers, win-back and exit interviews, involuntary churn (dunning, payments), experiment design for retention initiatives.

For lifecycle mapping across SDLC/PDLC, see Customer Success ↔ SDLC ↔ PDLC bridge.

Keep project-specific customer success documentation in docs/product/customer-success/ and support playbooks in docs/operations/, not in this file.