Customer Success is a promise of progress. Progress defined by advancing business goals, or achieving customer results. A proactive need to increase value, and create long lasting customer relationships. It’s no easy feat, but it’s worth the effort in the end.

How do you go about achieving this progress, or rather Customer Success? With this question in mind we set out to interview 30+ VPs and Heads of Customer Success. We gathered more and more answers to burning questions, such as:

• What are your targets and KPIs? How do you measure success?
• When do you know you’re achieving success in your role and what keeps you up at night?
• What types of questions and requests are coming through to your teams? Do you already facilitate customer self-service?
• Which technology are you using and how scalable is it as you grow? 

We started noticing patterns in challenges towards the ultimate goal of achieving Customer Success, and particular patterns when it came to the technology and tooling requirements that come with the varying stages of Customer Success maturity.

We took these insights and patterns on board to build our Customer Success Maturity Model, which aims to support scaling SaaS businesses who are figuring out what the next step in their CS growth plan should be. 

The model explains 4 very simplified growth stages that Customer Success teams deal with, and cross-references those with the challenges they will face as a team and technological needs that come along with it. 

This is not meant to be the whole truth, rather, simply a guide to help you figure out:

• how mature your Customer Success team is,
• what the likely challenges are that you are facing now and will come up against in the near future,
• and how to leverage technology to solve these challenges.

We created the model to help you make the right choices and plan ahead as you scale your CS team and company overall.

So when we recently had the opportunity to speak about the CS Maturity Model with Customer Success expert Rick Adams on his podcast, Practical CSM, we were delighted. In this episode, we chat in more detail about how the model came into existence, the type of customer and prospect insights we used in order to build it, and how we recommend Customer Success professionals apply the model to help make their own lives easier! Enjoy the listen. 

Customer Success 101: How to Keep and Grow Your Customer Base

Understand and master Customer Success in B2B Saas 

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By Remco de Vries