An open framework to assess your Customer Success organization's maturity and focus on what matters.
Distilled CS provides a structured approach to customer success — with a maturity assessment, stage-specific playbooks, benchmarks, and an execution checklist. Open source and vendor neutral.
The Strategy Loop
A continuous cycle of improvement — assess your current state, execute stage-appropriate actions, and transform your CS organisation over time.
Assess
Know where you stand
Score your CS maturity across 7 domains. Understand your strengths, gaps, and stage.
Execute
Act on what matters
Follow stage-specific playbooks. Focus on the highest-leverage moves for your current maturity.
Transform
Measure, level up, repeat
Track your progress. Re-assess to validate growth. Cross into your next maturity stage.
Four stages of CS maturity
A progression model from reactive operations to predictive, data-led customer success. The assessment determines where your team currently sits.
- No formal customer segmentation — every customer gets a similar experience
- Health is assessed by gut feel, not data
- No documented playbooks or journey maps
- Customer base is segmented by ARR or tier, engagement models differ by segment
- Basic health scores exist but may be inconsistently maintained
- Some playbooks documented, especially for onboarding and renewal
- Multi-dimensional health scores with automated alerts and triggers
- Comprehensive playbooks for all lifecycle stages
- Customer journey fully mapped with defined milestones and success criteria
- Predictive health scoring with machine learning models
- CS influences product roadmap based on customer outcome data
- Expansion revenue is a primary CS metric with shared ownership
Built on six guiding principles
The beliefs that shape every recommendation, metric, and benchmark in the framework.
Customer Success Is a Culture, Not Just a Department
CS fails in a silo. Embed it across every team that touches the customer.
Outcomes Over Activities
Measure what customers achieve, not what your team does.
Context Drives Strategy
What works at $5M ARR breaks at $100M. Tailor everything.
Proactive Over Reactive
Intervene before customers disengage, not after they churn.
Data-Informed, Not Data-Paralyzed
Track fewer metrics, but act on them ruthlessly.
Segment, Then Scale
Not every customer needs a CSM. Build coverage models that match value.
Open source. Vendor neutral. Community driven.
Distilled CS is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. No vendor lock-in, no paywall, no hidden agenda. The framework is built to give Customer Success teams a shared language and measurement standard — regardless of the tools they use.
Built by practitioners, for practitioners.
Contribute on GitHub (Coming soon!)