Best resources to learnCustomer Success & Retention

Study sheet

Customer success keeps customers getting value after the sale. You will learn onboarding, health scores, renewals and expansion, churn analysis and how CS teams are structured.

6 resources · Reviewed Oct 2026 · How we curate

Level

Language

Type

Sort

📚Books(2)

bookPaid

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.

beginner🇬🇧

bookPaid

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.

intermediate🇬🇧

🌐Websites(3)

website

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.

intermediate🇬🇧

website

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.

beginner🇬🇧

website

Customer Success: Defined

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.

beginner🇬🇧

🎙️Podcasts(1)

podcast

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.

beginner🇬🇧

Share this topic

More in Sales

See all 12 topics in Sales →

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best free resources to learn Customer Success & Retention?

Dantes has curated 6 resources for Customer Success & Retention, including 2 books, 3 websites, 1 podcasts. All resources are hand-picked for quality — no algorithmic filler. Browse the full list above to find the format that works best for you.

Is Customer Success & Retention hard to learn?

Customer Success & Retention is approachable at the beginner level — there are resources here specifically for those starting from scratch. As you progress, intermediate and advanced material is also available to take your skills further.

What types of Customer Success & Retention learning resources are available on Dantes?

For Customer Success & Retention, Dantes has curated 2 books, 3 websites, 1 podcasts. Each resource type serves a different learning style: videos and YouTube for visual learners, books for depth, courses for structured progression, and websites for quick reference.

How does Dantes select Customer Success & Retention resources?

Dantes is an algorithm-free learning directory. Resources are hand-curated based on quality, accuracy, and usefulness — not engagement metrics or paid placements. The goal is to surface the best learning material for Customer Success & Retention, whether it's a free YouTube series, a classic textbook, or an open courseware from a top university.

Go deeper

Test your understanding of Customer Success & Retention

Explain it out loud. An AI tutor listens and asks questions that expose gaps you didn't know you had.