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 seven guiding principles
The beliefs that shape every recommendation, metric, and benchmark in the framework.
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.
Customer Success Is a Culture, Not a Department
CS fails in a silo. Embed it across every team that touches the customer.
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