The document outlines a Customer Success Action Plan template aimed at optimizing customer usage, loyalty, and renewal through strategic activities. It emphasizes the importance of measuring long-term metrics to assess performance, focusing on onboarding, engagement, and renewal processes tailored to distinct customer personas. Key tactics include launching a customer blog, proactive outreach, and monitoring customer health to support renewals and upgrades effectively.

1. CUSTOMER SUCCESS
ACTION PLAN
CUSTOMER SUCCESS
ACTION PLAN
Your Company
Name, Title
Today’s Date

2. HOW TO USE THIS TEMPLATE
Now that you’ve developed your strategy to optimize
customer usage, loyalty and renewal, use this Customer
Success Action Plan template to outline the activities you
and your team will implement in order to reach your goals.

3. CUSTOMER SUCCESS STRATEGY
Maximize CLV
Segment & treat
customers by lifecycle
and persona
Reiterate your strategy and goals to keep them front-and-center with your team. All activities in your
action plan should roll up to these.TIP:
Identify and improve
problem areas

4. Long-term metrics we’ll report on quarterly
STRATEGIC METRICS
Identify the long-term metrics that will demonstrate performance against your key strategies. These
metrics should be of upmost interest to your CEO and broader executive team.TIP:
$16K
13% 78% 83%
$18K
CLV % Annual Churn % Successfully On-boarded
15%
Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual

5. PROBLEM AREAS (LEVERS)
Our efforts are focused on improving onboarding,
ongoing engagement and renewal processes.
Onboarding
Engagement
Adoption
Customer
Feedback
Renewal
Expansion
Target
Customer
Acquisition
Free Trial
Pipeline
Influence Direct Impact
In addition to reviewing the strategy, visually remind your team what the levers you’ll focus on for
driving improvement.TIP:
Q3 FOCUS

6. CUSTOMER SEGMENTATION
Low-touch High-touch
Early life-stage Late life-stage
Low health score
Low #of seats
<3
5
TIP:
We will identify, name, and focus on 3 key customer segments
“Larry
Long-Tail”
Not all customers are created equal! Focus on the customer segments that align with your identified
initiatives and that provide the best opportunity for improvement.
28
High health score
High # of seats
<6
0
40
“Perry
Pro Plan”
<7
0
>100
“Enterprise
Eve”

7. PERSONAS – LARRY LONG TAIL
His Overall Business
Challenges
• Difficulty continually increasing
the engagement of posts
• Lacking supply of interesting
content to share
• Hard to prove ROI
Where He Gets
Information
• Reads email of trusted vendors
• Social media thought leaders
via their social channels
• Doesn’t read publications
His Challenge With
Your Software
• Doesn’t “get” how to customize
the dashboard
• Doesn’t use the out-of-the-box
reporting templates
• Only periodic use of scheduling
feature
His Title &
Responsibilities
• Social Media Manager
• Increase social engagement with
brand (social sharing and clicks)
• Converts clicks into leads
Metrics He tracks
• Cost Per Click
• Cost Per Lead
• Total Clicks
• Total Leads
Content He Finds
Compelling
• Templates for presenting
results and goals
• How-to guides for creating
“clickable” content
• Data on social media trends
TIP: Create one for each persona/segment. Develop detailed “picture” for each priority persona. Use the
persona to tailor your customer nurture streams and your content.

8. To monitor the success of our onboarding strategy, we’ll measure
these 3 tactical metrics
ONBOARDING METRICS (TACTICAL)
Identify specific metrics that will demonstrate performance improvement for onboarding. For example,
if one of your strategies is minimizing churn and you’ve recognized that onboarding plays a significant
role, regularly measuring and reporting the performance trend will tell you if your efforts are working.
TIP:
Days To Onboard Avg. Engagement Score % Healthy Customers
33 31 50 59 85 90
Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual

9. ONBOARDING TACTICS
We will focus on 3 primary drivers to improve onboarding.
Reduce Customer Onboarding Delays. Review existing
process for technical customer onboarding (e.g.,
integrations) to identify areas where customers get
bogged down with their internal partners.
Revamp Business Requirements Kickoff. Revise the initial
business meeting – build trust by including deep dive into
their business goals above and beyond usage of our
product.
Begin Engagement Onboarding. Intro concept of
engagement onboarding – measure customer interaction
with our email, blog and self-help content during
onboarding.
TIP: Identify the 3 key things your team can focus on to improve onboarding. Goal is to drive the adoption
metrics (e.g., Days to Onboard), which then roll up to drive the strategic metrics (e.g., churn %)

10. We’ll evaluate adoption by measuring Usage, Features Usage,
and NPS.
ADOPTION METRICS (TACTICAL)
Identify specific metrics that will demonstrate performance against your focus areas. For example, if
one of your strategies is maximizing CLV and you’ve recognized that adoption plays a significant role,
regularly measuring and reporting the performance trend will tell you if your efforts are working.
TIP:
Usage Score % Sticky Features Used Avg. NPS
77 63 70 7.2 7.888
Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual

11. ADOPTION TACTICS
We believe 3 tactics will improve adoption of our application across
all target users.
TIP: Highlight how you plan to drive achievement of your near-term tactical goals for this focus area.
Customer Blog. We will launch a customer blog to grow
engagement by highlighting unique customer use cases,
and showcase new feature announcements.
Proactive Outreach. Rather than rely on reactive
outreach, we will now monitor customer health and reach
out to key accounts when their health drops.
Usage Appreciation Contests. We will present customers
with quarterly usage prizes. Those who boost their
adoption of a new (or existing) feature will win a symbolic
prize.

12. While customer success won’t drive renewal/upgrade signing, it
will be responsible for driving the “renewal pipeline”.
RENEWAL METRICS (TACTICAL)
Renewal/Upgrade Renewal Win Rate
$1.2M 80% 90%$1.3M
Q3 Goal Q3 Actual Q3 Goal Q3 Actual
Pipeline Generated

13. RENEWAL TACTICS
We will support the Sales team in maximizing the revenue protected
via renewals, and the new revenue generated from upsells.
Scoring for Upgrades. Customer success will help focus
Sales’ efforts by monitoring customer health and rank
ordering customers by likelihood to upgrade.
Key Contacts. We will ensure proper relationship-building
(and documentation of the relationships) so sales can
execute a smooth renewal process.
Business Case. Customer success will maintain clear
records of the business case built for customers across
QBRs (and the initial business meeting kick-off) in order to
maximize renewal/upsell rates.

14. NEEDS ANALYSIS – PROFESSIONAL EDITIONCONDUCT QBR
The CSM team’s progress will be presented each month
REVIEW: Outline what’s been completed from last review session,
outstanding items, and new items
REVIEW: Strategic Metrics
REVIEW: Overall tactical metrics for each focus area.
REVIEW: Remind team of strategy, goals, metrics
SET: Adjust tactics as necessary. Propose strategy adjustments.
MONTHLY CSM REVIEW
TIP: Monthly review meetings are key to maintaining a nimble team. They ensure the exchange of ideas on
how to improve stubborn metrics, and to generate creative solutions to challenges that arise.