Every activity in customer success fits into one of five categories: Onboarding, Risk Mitigation, Customer Strategic, Renewal, and Expansion. There are no others.
"I know there's a million things people do in
customer success. In my opinion, there's only five processes.
Everything's going to fit in one of those buckets. And so it's
useful to be able to articulate onboarding, risk mitigation,
customer strategic, renewal, and expansion."
Why it matters
When a CS team can't agree on what they should
be working on, it's because they haven't bucketed their work into
the five processes. Once you have, every activity gets prioritized
against one of these named categories instead of disappearing into
"general customer work."
Examples
The 35 help center articles
At a prior CS role, the product I was running depended on a third-party CRM that had terrible support. Customers would hit cross-product issues that lived 70 percent in the third-party tool and 30 percent in our product. The third-party vendor's support could not solve them. Customers got stuck. My team got blamed. So I logged into the third-party tool, learned its inner workings, and built 35 help center articles for problems in their system, so my team could solve any cross-product issue end-to-end. The lesson: the Customer Success commission is to get the customer all the way to the end of the line, even when 70 percent of the work is outside your own product. The Five Core CS Processes describe what work CS owns. This story shows that ownership often crosses product boundaries, because the customer's outcome does.