The Customer Success glossary
Clear, practical definitions of the vocabulary Customer Success teams actually use — the formulas, the distinctions that trip people up, and how each idea gets operationalized. Written to be useful whether or not you ever use Velsano.
- At-risk account — A customer showing credible signals that it may churn — declining usage, disengaged stakeholders, unresolved problems — early enough that action can still change the outcome.
- Churn prediction — Estimating the probability that a specific customer will churn, using behavioral and commercial signals — distinct from a health score, which describes current condition rather than forecasting an outcome.
- Churn rate — The percentage of customers (logo churn) or recurring revenue (revenue churn) lost over a period — the single most-watched measure of retention failure.
- CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) — A transactional survey metric: satisfaction with a specific recent experience, usually "How satisfied were you with X?" on a 1-5 scale, reported as the percentage of positive responses.
- CSM ratio (book of business) — The size of the book of business each CSM carries, expressed as accounts per CSM or ARR per CSM — the core capacity-planning number of a CS org.
- Customer Effort Score (CES) — A survey metric asking how easy it was to accomplish something ("The company made it easy to resolve my issue" — agree/disagree). High effort is one of the strongest predictors of disloyalty.
- Customer health dimensions — The signal families a composite health score blends: product usage, relationship engagement, support experience, sentiment, and commercial signals like contract and payment behavior.
- Customer journey map — A structured picture of the stages a customer moves through — purchase, onboarding, adoption, value realization, renewal, expansion — and the touchpoints, owners, and success criteria at each.
- Customer lifecycle — The sequence of relationship stages every customer moves through — new, onboarding, adopting, established, renewing, expanding (or at risk) — each of which calls for a different CS motion.
- Customer onboarding — The phase between signed contract and first realized value, in which the customer sets up, learns, and reaches the outcome they bought the product for — the stretch where much future churn is decided.
- Customer Success Manager (CSM) — The post-sale owner of customer outcomes: responsible for adoption, value realization, and retention across a book of accounts — proactive where support is reactive.
- Digital customer success — A CS motion that serves accounts through automation, lifecycle email, surveys, self-service, and pooled human escalation instead of a named CSM per account — how the long tail gets real coverage.
- Escalation management — The defined process for accounts needing urgent or senior attention: clear triggers, a named owner, an action plan with dates, executive visibility, and explicit exit criteria.
- Executive Business Review (EBR) — A periodic executive-level meeting — usually annual or semi-annual — where vendor and customer leadership review realized value against goals and align on the strategic road ahead.
- Expansion revenue — New recurring revenue from existing customers — upgrades, added products, seat or usage growth — the component that can push net revenue retention above 100%.
- Gross Revenue Retention (GRR) — The percentage of recurring revenue retained from existing customers over a period, counting churn and downgrades but excluding expansion — capped at 100%, it measures pure durability.
- Customer health score — A composite indicator of the state of a customer relationship, blending weighted signals — usage, engagement, support, sentiment, commercial — into a single early-warning readout.
- Logo churn vs revenue churn — Two views of the same loss: logo churn counts how many customers left, revenue churn counts how much recurring revenue left. Each can look fine while the other signals trouble.
- Net Revenue Retention (NRR) — The percentage of recurring revenue retained from an existing customer cohort after netting expansion against churn and downgrades — above 100%, the base grows without any new sales.
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) — A loyalty metric from one question — "How likely are you to recommend us?" (0-10) — scored as the percentage of promoters (9-10) minus the percentage of detractors (0-6).
- Playbook — A predefined, reusable sequence of steps for a recurring CS situation — trigger, actions, owners, timing — so the team's best response happens every time, not just when the best CSM is free.
- Pooled CSM model — A coverage model where a team of CSMs works a shared, prioritized queue of accounts and tasks instead of each owning a named book — trading personal continuity for capacity and responsiveness.
- Quarterly Business Review (QBR) — A recurring (traditionally quarterly) strategic meeting between vendor and customer to review outcomes against goals, surface blockers, and align on the next period's plan.
- Renewal management — The proactive discipline of treating every renewal as owned pipeline — tracked from months out, forecast with health context, and worked before the date rather than discovered at it.
- Success plan — A documented, ideally customer-visible plan of the outcomes an account wants to achieve, broken into objectives with owners, target dates, and measurable progress.
- Time to value (TTV) — The elapsed time from purchase (or kickoff) to the customer's first realized outcome — the headline measure of onboarding effectiveness and an early predictor of retention.
- Upsell vs cross-sell — Upselling increases spend on what the customer already uses (tier, seats, usage); cross-selling adds a different product or module. Both are expansion, but the sale works differently.
- Voice of the Customer (VoC) — The systematic practice of collecting customer feedback across channels — surveys, conversations, support, reviews — synthesizing the themes, and routing them to the teams that can act.