Let’s face it: many B2B Customer Success initiatives are missing the mark. In an era dominated by subscription models and a sharp focus on metrics like Net Revenue Retention (NRR), effective Customer Success (CS) is essential, not optional. Yet, while some leaders champion CS as a vital, cross-departmental effort, they still find themselves struggling to gain traction.
What’s often holding them back? An operational structure that is built around the organization’s needs, not the customer’s. This nearly always leads to a disjointed experience, where customers can keenly feel the internal structure: separate departments guarding their own data, using different tools, and lacking a unified playbook for customer engagement.
Furthermore, when there isn’t a shared definition of success across the entire customer lifecycle, progress inevitably slows. Valuable customer insights get lost between disconnected systems — a fragmentation that directly impacts growth potential.
The High Cost of Disconnected Customer Success
Customers today anticipate proactive engagement and measurable value. When CS efforts are hampered by internal friction and data silos (CRM for sales, a standalone PSA or spreadsheets for services, and separate support systems), the consequences ripple across the business:
- Inconsistent Experiences: Frustrating customers and eroding trust
- Reactive Firefighting: Consuming valuable resources across the business (not just CS) on preventable issues, often pulling in teams ill-suited to the task instead of enabling strategic guidance.
- Missed Growth Opportunities: Making it difficult to spot and act on expansion potential or renewal risks, directly impacting NRR.
- Operational Inefficiency: Driving up the cost-to-serve through manual processes and duplicated effort.
- Difficulty Proving Value: Undermining the strategic importance of CS due to scattered, incomplete data
This operational chaos isn’t sustainable, especially when recurring revenue and customer lifetime value are so critical. To deliver consistent value and operate efficiently, you need a structured path to diagnose your current state and mature your approach.
This is where a maturity model becomes invaluable.
The Five-Stage Customer Success Maturity Model, developed partly from Certinia’s own experiences and collaborations, offers a practical roadmap. It provides actionable steps to shift from disconnected efforts to a genuinely customer-centric strategy. One that is built for the demands of modern B2B services relationships. Its goal is to create better alignment from the first conversation through renewal, driving improved customer value, revenue growth, and profitability.
Here’s how the stages break down:
Stage 1: Siloed
Characteristics: Symptoms at this stage of maturity are disconnected teams, systems, and data. Customer engagements are often manual and reactive. The Customer Success practice is typically early-stage, staffed by generalists, and relies on anecdotal metrics. Each department often marches to its own beat.
Key Actions: Define the CS charter aligned with company strategy – Who are we? What value do we deliver? How is it measured? Capture initial customer value objectives.
Stage 2: Unified
Characteristics: Efforts begin to unify the customer view, systems, and data, often leveraging platforms built on a common data model. Basic cross-functional collaboration emerges, focusing first on painful handoffs like sales-to-services. Repeatable processes and standardization start to take shape.
Key Actions: Perform a needs analysis for scaling digital, hybrid, and high-touch engagement models. Determine how to conduct value discovery with customers at scale
Stage 3: Connected
Characteristics: A more connected customer lifecycle journey emerges with defined cross-functional interlocks at key transitions. Role specialization within CS (like renewals or value consulting) often appears. Resource management capabilities start to develop. Technology plays a bigger role through connected systems, process automation, and potentially community portals for shared customer visibility (e.g., project plans, success plans).
Key Actions: Implement tools and processes (like community portals) that enable shared visibility and collaboration on customer success plans and project status across internal teams and customers.
Stage 4: Orchestrated
Characteristics: The focus shifts to orchestrated, cross-functional alignment across the entire customer journey. Organizations explore AI, deeper system integration, and automation to optimize resources and processes. The goal is near-elimination of system silos and achieving real-time data availability. Personalization starts happening at scale.
Key Actions: Define a clear AI strategy, identifying where human effort can be augmented. Develop an integrated data strategy in partnership with technology leadership.
Stage 5: Predictive
Characteristics: The destination is a fluid lifecycle driven by prescriptive analytics, where systems predict outcomes and recommend strategies for retention and expansion. It requires mature capabilities, particularly in revenue data science. The CS team’s specialization may combine with digital AI agents. Autonomous actions might be piloted to scale value delivery. Scale efficiencies benefit even high-touch segments.
Key Actions: Build robust revenue data science capabilities. Develop processes for cohort design, experimentation, and feeding insights back into operations and product development.
Moving Beyond Disconnected Efforts
When sales, services, and customer success operate in isolation, it harms the customer experience and hinders growth, something unacceptable in the competitive, service-driven economy in which we live. This 5-stage model illuminates a path toward better results. While the climb might look steep, every step forward delivers value.
Start by building solid operational foundations, defining that crucial CS charter, and focusing on continuous improvement through each phase, enabled by the right processes and technology foundation. Then, you too can chart a sustainable course to a truly customer-centric future.
At Certinia, our mission is to empower all organizations to deliver customer value with certainty. As the trusted partner for over 1,450 services organizations, our suite of solutions, including PS Cloud, CS Cloud, and ERP Cloud, and natively built on the Salesforce platform, powers and connects all aspects of technology and services businesses, from services estimation and delivery to customer success management and financial planning and accounting.
By orchestrating your people and projects around a central account record, Certinia ensures that your entire organization can have the right information at the right time to enable confident decision-making and intelligent delivery across the entire customer journey. Certinia delivers the business certainty you need to mitigate risk and build lasting trust with your customers.
