NBOP National Board of Operations Professionals

The free course · Volume V

Customer Success Operations

Six Months, and the Decision Already Made

The renewal is not when they decide. It is when you find out.

Start with The Retention Reading Or read from the beginning

14 lessons, free, no account and no email field. Each one teaches a single instrument: not an idea, a thing you can do this week and afterwards be able to tell whether it worked.

Take the Operator's Diagnostic first. It spans all eight domains, so it will tell you whether this is the volume you need. The lessons are answers, and answers are hard to hear before you have the question in your own words.

Before you start

What this is, and the sentence the rest of it hangs from.

  1. Start here What this course is, what it is not, and why retention is usually a measurement problem in disguise.
  2. The decision already made By the time a customer tells you they are leaving, they are informing you of a decision, not making one.

Part one. The Reading

Measuring how an account is actually doing, rather than how it says it is doing.

  1. Zero and ten A score is meaningless unless both ends are anchored to something a person can picture.
  2. The two questions What did you expect, and what happened? Everything else is commentary.
  3. The holdout To know whether your intervention works, some accounts must not receive it.

Part two. The Expectation

Satisfaction is a comparison, and you set one side of it before they bought.

  1. Satisfaction is a subtraction Perceived performance minus expectation. You control both terms, and you usually only manage one.
  2. Four lines, plus one A needs assessment that fits on one page and is read, rather than one that is thorough and is not.
  3. From awareness to advocacy The stages after purchase are as distinct as the ones before, and are usually unowned.

Part three. The Signal

What churn looks like months before it happens, in data you already have.

  1. Half the time to churn Whatever your average time to churn is, your detection has to sit at half of it.
  2. The reason mix report Not how many churned. Which reasons, in what proportion, and how that proportion is moving.
  3. Three patterns of the unowned touch point Every account has moments that belong to nobody. They are where the relationship quietly ends.

Part four. The Response

What to do when the signal arrives, and who is allowed to do it.

  1. Five and under An escalation path with more than five steps is a queue. Every step needs a name and an exit condition.
  2. Four-line written authority What a person may do for a customer without asking, in four lines, written down.
  3. On method: the retention multiple The most quoted numbers in customer success, and why this volume does not use them.

Common questions

Does this course cost anything?

No. All 14 lessons, the videos, the transcripts and the diagnostic are free. There is no account, and no email address is asked for until after the diagnostic has already shown you your reading.

Do I have to take it to sit the NBOP assessment?

No. It is not required, and it confers no advantage. The assessment is built from the published standard, not from this course, and the people who write the questions are not the people who wrote these lessons.

How long does it take?

About two hours to read all 14 lessons, and about ten minutes for the diagnostic. Most operators do not need all of them: the diagnostic points at the three or four that address what it found.

Who is it for?

People who already hold accountability for how work gets done. It assumes you run something. It is not an introduction to operations and it will not qualify anyone to enter the field.

What is the Operator’s Diagnostic?

A nine question instrument from Volume I. You rank the eight domains by how accountable you are for them, say what share of last month each one actually took, and name the external standard you would be judged against for each. The disagreements between those three columns are the findings. It is the front door to every course here, because it spans all eight domains rather than one endorsement worth of them.

Two things worth doing, neither of which costs anything

One Help decide what a competent operator is expected to know The eight domains carry equal provisional weighting until practising operators say what the work actually is. Takes about eight minutes. Two Check whether you are eligible About a minute. No account, no email field, and nothing you enter is kept.

Read the standard in full, free and in the open, before you pay anything or give anyone an address.