● Customer Success · Model · v1.2
The Engagement Framework
How a strategic account is run — who is in the room, how escalation works, what meets when, how the partnership is scored, what support, services and releases promise in writing, and how adoption is taken to the field. The manual, and the document you hand the customer.
Why it matters
The Operating Model says how a Customer Success organization is built. This model 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 a document a vendor hands a customer, and then both companies live by it and review it together, in person, every quarter. The six dimensions on which it scores the partnership are the origin of the Partnership Maturity Model in The Business Review.
What’s inside
A document you hand the customer. What the framework is, who it is for, and the two things that made it work: transparency about the gap, and being written for the customer rather than about them.
What scales down. Every component in its dedicated, shared and digital form — which survive intact, which collapse, which disappear.
Who is in the room. The customer’s priorities on page two, three rosters, and a named vendor peer for every name on the customer’s side.
The operating executive. The Customer Success Executive at the centre of the vendor organization; the three divisions that report through the CSE — Customer Support, Success Management, Professional Services — with Account Management beside; escalation in three steps.
Standing meetings. Account tracking, the product update, support, the business review — each with its unit; the executive dashboard between them and the steering committee above them.
Six dimensions. Strategic alignment, business impact, roadmap synergy, solution adoption, support quality, program management — the questions that became the maturity model.
Support, promised in writing. Tiers, the severity table, and the six-state ticket vocabulary. Services and releases. The roles, and the rhythm to publish. The adoption program. Charter, structure, usage data, field visits, and wave governance in six steps.
The first ninety days, and the checklist. Written with the customer, not sent to them.
How to use it
Read the manual once. Open the template, name the Customer Success Executive, fill the three rosters with the peer column complete, and write page two with the customer in the room. Publish the real severity numbers and mark the goals. Review the whole document together every quarter and amend it where it was wrong.
Provenance
Devised in January 2016 as Director of Customer Success at a staffing-software company, as the “Operating Framework” for its strategic and enterprise accounts. Rebuilt here as a Juan.co model: the vendor’s product-specific mechanics generalized, the lower tiers written, the first ninety days added, and the template with every name and number in brackets. Version 1.2 generalizes the vocabulary to the Operating Model’s — the Customer Success Executive and the three divisions beneath — so the two models read as one.