Customer Success Framework

Customer success is the lifeblood of any organization, nurturing customer relationships and driving sustainable growth. This discipline requires a deep understanding of many interconnected elements, which can be daunting to navigate!

Each level of the Customer Success Framework is dedicated to finessing a specific facet of the customer success function: build, onboard, engage, monitor, and grow.

There are a lot of moving parts in customer success and it can often feel impossible to get all of these elements straight in your head. This is why we've curated a comprehensive collection of resources that'll help guide you through this labyrinth.

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Dive into our Customer Success Framework, a carefully crafted roadmap that unravels the complexities of this domain, empowering you to unlock lasting customer loyalty and embark on a journey to create truly remarkable customer experiences.

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Build

Laying the groundwork is essential for customer success. Thoughtfully setting goals, getting to know your different customer groups, and choosing the right technologies – these strategies establish conditions for great experiences. Guide customers with care as you design processes to educate and support them. 

When you build a solid foundation, you pave the way for positive outcomes. Excelling in this area has a knock-on effect on every other aspect of your role because, without solid foundations, you can’t create a customer success strategy that drives revenue and customer satisfaction. 

What is a customer education program – and do I need one?
It’s wise to invest time and resources into developing a customer education program to ensure your customers are getting the absolute maximum value out of your product. Here are some key reasons why a customer education program is important for your business.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
Your guide to customer success OKRs
It can be challenging to know which goals to set for your customer success team. Where do you start, for one? Secondly, how should you implement OKRs?
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
What are customer and market research?
Customer and market research are fundamental in helping customer success teams gain an invaluable understanding of the customers they serve, their needs and challenges, while also gaining essential feedback to improve the product or service experience.
Customer Success CollectiveBryony Pearce
What is a case study?
It’s nice when people sing our praises, right? Case studies are an opportunity for your customers to pay a testament to your work and help drive advocacy.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
How to deliver an effective product demo
Product demonstrations, AKA product demos, are live demonstrations of how your product works... so show, don’t just tell! Product demos are one of the best opportunities you have as a Customer Success Manager to showcase your product’s capabilities. Here are a few ways you can make the most of it.
Customer Success CollectiveDeepthi Nagarajan
Customer success: The ultimate sales enablement strategy
Historically siloed as a post-sales function, CSMs possess deep wells of knowledge about their existing customers that can move the needle for sales teams and help secure new deals. In many ways, customer success is the ultimate sales enablement strategy.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
The importance of vetted educational content
Ensure customer education content is accurate and up-to-date by implementing a structured approach for content creation, review, and maintenance aligned with product best practices.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
A guide to customer segmentation
Just as you wouldn’t start building a bridge without a blueprint, a customer success team shouldn’t start their work without a clear understanding of their customer base.
Customer Success CollectiveJoĂŁo Pereira

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Onboard

For a CSM, it all hangs in the balance of the first impression you give. It’s vital to introduce your customer to your product in a clear and engaging way, employing interactive tools and customized guides so each person feels valued from day one. An onboarding experience that leaves customers feeling understood and supported sets the tone for a trusting relationship where they know you have their back at each step ahead.

11 steps to a seamless sales handoff
Embarking on the journey of refining sales and customer success handoffs is a pivotal aspect of a CSM’s career. It’s not just about transferring information, it’s about creating a seamless, collaborative process that sets the stage for long-term customer relationships.
Customer Success CollectiveRob Zambito
What are product tours?
Discover the power of interactive product tours that go way beyond customer onboarding. Say “hello” to sustained engagement and feature adoption!
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
Why how-to guides lead to better product adoption
Companies are clocking on to the change in consumer behavior and the need for self providing an exceptional customer experience is vital. One powerful tool that organizations often overlook is the humble “how-to guide.”
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
11 steps to building a flawless customer onboarding checklist
An onboarding checklist is your dream ticket to ensuring a consistent, smooth, and standardized process that doesn’t miss a beat.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
Live onboarding sessions
Nothing beats real-time conversation for connecting with new customers during onboarding. Sure, self-serve documentation and training materials play an important role in onboarding, but live sessions? Now they’re a real game-changer.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
The use of email in customer communications
As a Customer Success Manager, effective communication is the lifeblood of driving engagement and building strong relationships with your customers. And while in-person meetings are ideal, in our increasingly virtual world, email remains a pivotal communication channel.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
What is in-app messaging?
When executed properly, in-app messaging can significantly improve the user’s experience; messaging that’s contextual and personalized. This increases your customer retention rate.
Customer Success CollectiveLawrence Chapman
How to gamify customer success
You’ll know firsthand the constant challenge of keeping customers engaged and motivated throughout their journey with your product or service. Gamification presents a powerful solution to this problem.
Customer Success CollectiveCharley Gale

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Engage

Ongoing engagement is the lifeblood of customer success. 

Make each interaction feel tailored and exceptional to build loyalty. Keep conversations flowing with active listening and feedback loops. When you make a personal connection at every touchpoint, you make moments meaningful.

The importance of a multichannel communication strategy
Gone are the days when you could rely on just email or phone calls to deliver your customer communications. You’ve got to bring them all together.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
How to integrate AI personalization and recommendation systems into your business
With the power of artificial intelligence (AI) harnessed to crunch data on customer behavior, sentiment, and needs, businesses can craft tailored, value-driven interactions that captivate and engage customers like never before.
Customer Success CollectiveHannah Wesson
How customer advocacy drives long-lasting customer success
Customer advocacy is when your customers become your biggest fans and promote your brand to friends, family, and strangers. It’s like having your marketing squad, but it’s better because it’s authentic and trustworthy. And who doesn’t love free word-of-mouth advertising, right?
Customer Success CollectiveChinelo Diejomaoh
How community marketing and customer success teams can work together
When you think about the goals of community marketing and customer success teams, it can be difficult to pick apart exactly how they differ. After all, they’re both trying to make the customer as happy as possible, right?
Customer Success CollectiveJade Warne
Why customer success teams rely on value-led content
Content plays a vital role in the customer success strategy. Not only does it answer key questions your users may have about your product, but it also helps you establish trust, build stronger relationships, boost engagement and retention rates, and nurture advocates for expansion and referrals.
Customer Success CollectiveLawrence Chapman
How to turn happy customers into loyal brand advocates
Any customer success professional will tell you that a large part of their role entails making their customers happy. Although professionals in sales, support, and management will say the same, customer success is focused on helping your clients reach their goals. Ultimately, this leads to loyalty.
Customer Success CollectiveCristy Rahman
What are Customer Advisory Boards (CABs)?
While launching a product is a significant milestone, continually improving and enhancing it is equally crucial. One powerful approach to achieve this is by leveraging Customer Advisory Boards (CABs) and customer feedback loops.
Customer Success CollectiveMax Duce
Your guide to customer retention
Increasing retention by just 5% could drive your profits from 25% to 95%. It seems silly to dismiss a potential profit increase like that, right? That’s why customer retention strategies are such an important factor when it comes to customer success.
Customer Success CollectiveCustomer Success Collective
The complete guide to customer support, customer success and product development
How do customer success, customer support and product development work together? Where do they overlap?
Customer Success CollectiveLJ Barnum
The power of digital customer education
If your customers aren’t continuously uncovering new ways to get value from your products or services, you’re missing a vital opportunity to captivate them properly. And if they don’t know how to use your product, well, there’s only one thing for it: they’ve got to learn how to use it.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
AI and automation in customer success
When applied correctly, automation, automation, and AI-enabled customer success will open up additional prospects in the future to transform the CS landscape completely.
Customer Success CollectiveLaura Lakhwara

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Monitor

Monitoring provides visibility into the customer experience. By tracking usage trends, you’ll gauge satisfaction, and gather feedback, you’ll be on your way to truly understand needs and fine-tune your approach accordingly. Stay perceptive so you can proactively advance success.

8 essential product usage metrics to track
A higher product adoption equals a larger user base. Find out if your product fits perfectly to your customer needs with the top product adoption metrics.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
Strategies for customer engagement at scale
Finding the time and resources to fully engage with every customer at every stage can be a real struggle. As a CSM at Intercom, I understand the challenges that come with keeping customers engaged and satisfied, especially for startups and companies with limited resources.
Customer Success CollectiveMatt O’Boyle
Your guide on customer feedback
Customer feedback is one of the most essential parts of a customer success strategy, letting you understand and improve the customer experience.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
Why customer success depends on support tickets
To create a seamless experience, it is crucial to integrate customer success with tech support through a unified ticketing system. This integration ensures that support issues feed into long-term customer profiles, improving ongoing service and customer satisfaction.
Customer Success CollectiveHolly Stewart
How to leverage NPS data to make decisions
Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a powerful metric for any customer success team to spark implementation, drive growth, and secure retention.
Customer Success CollectiveSandeep Singh Bhara
Your guide to the customer health score
A customer health score is a predictive metric used by SaaS businesses to indicate the likelihood of your customer leaving (churn), staying (retention), or growing (renewals) in your organization.
Customer Success CollectiveGrace Gupta
Customer satisfaction vs. customer loyalty
As long as your customers are happy it doesn’t matter whether you use the term customer satisfaction or customer loyalty to explain how they feel about your company, right? Not necessarily.
Customer Success CollectiveLisa Masiello

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Grow

Customer success is a continual journey of positive change. Explore new opportunities together by upselling, cross-selling, and cultivating advocacy. Keep taking relationships to the next level through constant innovation. Focus on enabling growth, one step at a time. When customers accomplish more, your partnerships deepen.

How customer referrals can drive loyalty and growth
Customer referrals are fundamentally different from generic lead sources or marketing campaigns. A customer referral is when an existing, satisfied customer recommends your product or service to someone they know.
Customer Success CollectiveStevie Langford
What is cross-selling?
Cross-selling is a strategy that encourages customers to purchase additional, related products or services alongside their initial purchase.
Customer Success CollectiveAmie Stephens
10 upselling best practices every CSM needs to know
Your customers can be a lucrative revenue source, and it’s easier to sell to them than sourcing new customers. The trick? Upsell and cross-sell.
Customer Success CollectiveGözde Görce
A step-by-step guide to expansion
Unlock the secrets to boosting customer lifetime value and discover proven strategies for skyrocketing retention, renewals, and expansion rates.
Customer Success CollectiveNick Chang
Understanding the customer feedback loop – and why we need to close it
This guide covers the core stages of an effective feedback loop and why it’s critical to close it.
Customer Success CollectiveEmma Bilardi

Ready to take your customer success skills to the next level?

Introducing Customer Success Certified: Core – the ultimate training program for mastering the art of customer success.

When you enroll in this course, you'll dive deep into every critical aspect of the customer success role, from onboarding and activation to advocacy and beyond.

Gain cutting-edge strategies and practical tools to tackle churn, optimize expansion, and ace customer success metrics like a pro.

With real-world case studies, tried-and-tested frameworks, and action-led insights, you'll be equipped with the confidence, practical skills, and competitive edge you need to excel in the field of customer success.

Don't wait any longer to unlock your full potential.

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