Principles of Practice, Volume V
Customer Success Operations
Six Months, and the Decision Already Made
A renewal date tells you what already happened. The customer decision was made much earlier, frequently before any money changed hands, and it degraded through every touch point in between.
Pages.
Illustrations drawn for this volume.
Inches, paperback trim.
What Volume V covers
A health reading anchored on outcomes rather than on opinions, numbered and consistently defined, taken at every touch point from first awareness through to advocacy.
Two questions that would have prevented the case in chapter one. The author has implemented the reading repeatedly and, across twenty years and businesses from startups to ten figures, has never once found a business already doing it.
And the randomised experiment in which a genuinely helpful phone call moved churn from 6.4 percent to 10.0.
The argument
Retention is not measured at the renewal date. By then it is a recording rather than a measurement.
The decision was made much earlier, frequently before the purchase, and it degraded through every touch point in between. A business that measures only at the end holds one data point about a process that had dozens.
The instrument that would have caught it fails wherever it is not paid for. The number that keeps a customer is the number with nothing attached to it.
What this book is not
It is not a book about NPS, surveys or customer satisfaction scoring.
The subject is when a reading is taken and what is done when it fires.
Chapter 13 presents randomised field evidence that acting on a high risk score is frequently ineffective, and can cause the churn it was meant to prevent. The author concedes it rather than rebutting it, which is the part of the volume most worth reading.
Where it sits
Volume V maps to NBOP-CPS, the Customer Success Operations endorsement. Volume I covers the core practice and maps to NBOP-CP. Volumes II, III and IV map to NBOP-CPI, NBOP-CPM and NBOP-CPR.
Five of the six volumes are written. Volume VI covers AI and Automation Operations and is still to come. All six are written before anything publishes.
Availability
Written, not yet published No price, no purchase link and no ISBN until the listing exists.
Reading this is not a way to pass
Purchase is not required and confers no advantage.
The assessment is built from the published standard, not from this book. It is a way to learn the work. The standard is free to read in full before you pay anything.