Customer Success: Defined
by Lincoln Murphy · Sixteen Ventures
Lincoln Murphy's glossary of the core ideas in customer success. It defines Desired Outcome (goal plus appropriate experience), customer success management, coverage models, progress milestones, orchestration and joint accountability. It then links out to longer essays on each idea.
More resources on Customer Success & Retention
The Modern Customer
Weekly interview podcast hosted by customer-experience author Blake Morgan, featuring executives from companies such as Canva and Alaska Airlines. Episodes cover CX strategy, customer service, AI in customer support and loyalty, showing listeners how customer-centric organisations design and improve the experience they deliver.
What Is Good Retention
A benchmark study of user retention at six months and net revenue retention at twelve months. Thresholds are split by business model, including SMB, mid-market and enterprise SaaS. They were drawn from about 20 growth leaders and checked against public-company data.
The Secret to Successful Customer Onboarding
A long essay arguing that onboarding should be built around the customer's own success milestones, not product setup steps. It shows how to map those milestones and replace time-based email sequences with messages triggered by each milestone, using a worked example. It dates from 2014, but the ideas are still in current use.
Customer Success: How Innovative Companies Are Reducing Churn and Growing Recurring Revenue
The book that defined customer success as a business function. It explains why subscription businesses depend on retention, sets out ten principles for reducing churn and growing accounts, and shows how companies have built CS teams around these ideas.
The Customer Success Professional's Handbook
A practitioner's reference for the customer success manager role. The most complete how-to text on day-to-day CSM work and on building a CS team. It covers onboarding, success plans, health scores, executive business reviews, handling at-risk accounts, renewals and expansion, and how CS teams are organized and measured as the function grows.