A Document You Hand the Customer

In 2016 I ran Customer Success for a software company whose largest customers were larger than most of its departments. Each of them had a dozen people on our side touching the account, and nobody on their side knew who any of them were, who to call when something broke, or what we had actually promised. So I wrote it down — who was on the account on both sides and who each person's peer was, who the one operating executive was and how escalation reached them, which meetings stood and how often, the six dimensions on which we would score the partnership every quarter, what support promised by severity, how releases would be announced, and how we would take adoption to their offices in waves — and I handed it to them. Then both companies lived by it. It is on the shelf today as The Engagement Framework: a manual, and the document itself with every name and number in brackets.

A model for one account

The Operating Model says how a Customer Success organization is built. This says how a single strategic account is built — the dedicated tier, one manager to seven accounts, where the relationship is large enough to deserve its own written constitution. It is the third model in the Customer Success section, and I had said two was the right number; I was wrong, because this is the Operating Model's natural counterpart, and the shelf is stronger with the pair.

Two things made the original work, and both were in its opening paragraph. The first was transparency about the gap: the framework described service levels we were still in the process of achieving, said so, and gave the goal and the timeline, so that the customer could hold us to them — which is the only way a promise becomes a relationship. The second was that it was written for the customer, not about them. No internal process appears in it unless the customer can see it, call it, or escalate through it.

What scales down

I would not pretend it is a universal engagement model. It was written for strategic accounts, and parts of it — a named Customer Success Executive, a steering committee, field visits — do not survive below that tier. But every component has a shared-tier and a digital-tier form, and the manual gives all of them in one table, because knowing which parts collapse and which disappear is most of what it means to design the lower tiers well. Three rows survive intact all the way down: escalation, the severity table, and the release rhythm. Those are the vendor's promises, and they should be identical for every customer. The framework only makes them personal.

Where the maturity model came from

The six dimensions the framework scores every quarter — strategic alignment, business impact, roadmap synergy, solution adoption, support quality, program management — are the origin of the Partnership Maturity Model that The Business Review scores on five levels. In 2016 they were questions; by 2022 each had a scale and a radar chart, and the gap between the vendor's score and the customer's had become the agenda of the review. The questions came first, and they are still the right ones to ask before anyone scores anything.

Thirteen pages, free to use with attribution, with a Word template beside it that a Customer Success leader can fill in with the customer in the room. The company, its colleagues and its product mechanics are gone from both; the way of working is intact.