The open framework for Customer Success maturity and strategy.
With Distilled CS, you can quickly identify where you are in your customer success journey and get a clear strategy for moving forward.
How it works
The Distilled CS framework follows three steps: understand where you are, execute strategies tailored to your stage, and measure progress to keep improving as your CS team grows.
Assess
Know where you stand
- Answer a few questions across key areas of your CS practice
- Find out your CS maturity stage: Crawl, Walk, or Run
- Get a full report with domain scores and a prioritised action list
Execute
Act on what matters
- Access playbooks built for your exact maturity stage
- Track the metrics that matter most right now
- Work through a checklist of the highest-impact actions
Transform
Measure, level up, repeat
- See what has improved since you started
- Re-take the assessment to measure your growth
- Get a guide for moving up to your next stage
The three stages of CS maturity
In this framework, every CS team sits somewhere on the maturity scale below. The assessment tells you exactly where, and what to focus on from there.
- No formal customer segmentation. Every customer gets a similar experience
- Health is assessed by gut feel, not data
- No documented playbooks or journey maps
- CSMs are reactive, responding to escalations and complaints
- 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
- CSMs have defined books of business with rough coverage ratios
- 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
- CS actively identifies and drives expansion opportunities
Built on seven 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.
Maturity Requires Iteration
Strong CS teams keep evolving as the business, customers, and product change.
Proactive Over Reactive
Intervene before customers disengage, not after they churn.
Segment, Then Scale
Not every customer needs a CSM. Build coverage models that match value.
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.
Data-Informed, Not Data-Paralyzed
Track fewer metrics, but act on them ruthlessly.
Open source. Vendor neutral. Community driven.
Distilled CS is an open source Customer Success framework created for practitioners, by practitioners. The community can openly contribute, refine, and evolve the framework over time, helping establish a shared language for Customer Success teams everywhere.
The framework is vendor neutral and designed to work alongside any tool stack, giving teams a consistent way to assess maturity and measure progress without lock-in or restrictions.
The framework is free to use, adapt, and share with attribution under CC BY 4.0. The codebase is MIT-licensed.
Built by practitioners, for practitioners.
Contribute on GitHub How to contribute →What to read next
Five places to start, depending on what you need.