As your company shifts toward subscription-based or “as-a-service” revenue models, the role of customer success becomes more critical than ever. It’s not just about reducing churn; it’s about building long-term customer relationships and securing the recurring revenue streams your business depends on.

But here’s the big question: Where does your customer success organization stand today, and what does maturity look like?

To help you answer that, this blog will outline the Customer Success Maturity Model, a framework designed to help you benchmark your organization, identify areas for improvement, and map a clear path forward. Whether you're just starting or scaling a mature success function, this model gives insights to help you grow confidently.

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What Is the Customer Success Maturity Model?

When working towards customer success maturity, it is essential to determine how to grow your customer success capabilities in a way that delivers tangible results for both your customers and your business.

As your team matures, you’ll need to develop key capabilities that help you:

• Define your customer success charter.
• Drive effective technology adoption.
• Build prescriptive playbooks.
• Monitor and act on customer success metrics.
• Identify problems and plan solutions.
• Deliver consistent, measurable outcomes.

However, not every organization needs to build all of these simultaneously. Your priorities will depend on where you are in your customer success maturity journey.

Adapting Tuckman’s Team Development Theory for Customer Success

To create a roadmap that works for any organization, TSIA adapted a well-known team development model by Dr. Bruce Tuckman. Initially introduced in the 1960s, Tuckman’s model outlines four stages of group growth:

1. Forming
2. Storming
3. Norming
4. Performing

We’ve reimagined this concept through the lens of customer success to help you identify your current stage and understand what it takes to reach the next level. That’s the foundation of TSIA’s Customer Success Maturity Model.

This model provides a clear, structured path to help your organization:

• Benchmark your current maturity level.
• Identify capability gaps.
• Prioritize development efforts.
• Plan for scalable success.

Related: The State of Customer Success 2025

Breaking Down the 4 Phases of Customer Success Maturity

TSIA’s Customer Success Maturity Model is built around four core phases: forming, storming, norming, and performing. Each phase represents a distinct level of organizational maturity, capabilities, and alignment, all focused on achieving customer success.

Understanding your stage enables you to make more informed decisions about structuring your team, prioritizing investments, and supporting customer outcomes. Here’s what each phase looks like.

Related: The Value of Customer Success

Phase 1: Forming – Laying the Groundwork

If your company is shifting from a traditional, upfront revenue model to a subscription-based or “as-a-service” model, you’re likely in the forming stage.

In this phase:

• You’re beginning to understand the importance of customer retention and preventing churn.
• Customers are now paying gradually, so value delivery must be continuous and consistent.
• There’s typically little to no formal customer success team in place yet.
• Definitions of adoption plans and success are still being explored.

This is your starting point. You’re learning what customer success should mean for your business and beginning to think about how to support your customers throughout their lifecycle, not just at the point of sale.

Phase 2: Storming – Thematic Customer Success Takes Shape

In the storming phase, customer success becomes more than an idea; it takes form through individual projects or initiatives.

What you’ll typically see:

• Project-based funding for customer success pilots or efforts.
• Introduction of voice of the customer programs like TSIA’s KORE Score, Customer Effort Score (CES), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction), and Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• A customer success or customer experience (CX) leader may be appointed, often managing multiple roles in a matrix structure.

However, there is still limited alignment between customer success and your technology adoption strategy. TSIA refers to this as “thematic customer success,” which means considering and experimenting with customer success, but not yet fully operationalizing it.

Phase 3: Norming – Building the Foundation

By the norming stage, your organization has matured its customer success strategy. One of the three core charters — adoption, retention, or expansion — has likely become a clear priority.

You’re probably seeing:

• Some level of product data automation, such as login frequency or usage analytics.
• Early signs of structured programs, including onboarding workflows, customer journey mapping, or quarterly business reviews (QBRs).
• A customer success manager (CSM) team may be in place, though often working reactively and focusing on escalation management.

While technology adoption is still relatively low, you’re starting to implement real systems that can scale with your growth.

Phase 4: Performing – Operationalized and Outcome-Driven

This is where your customer success organization becomes a proactive, strategic driver of business value.

In the performing phase, you’ll typically have:

• All three charters of customer success in motion: adoption, retention, and expansion.
• Customers achieving and measuring business outcomes tied to your technology.
• Documented customer success strategies, such as success plans, workflow automations, and playbooks aligned to value-based, event-based, or time-based triggers.
• Monetized success programs with cost-sharing between sales, marketing, and customer success.
• Visibility into key cost metrics like Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC), Customer Expansion Cost (CEC), and Customer Retention Cost (CRC).
• A proactive CSM team that reports on customer growth or revenue functions.

This is the gold standard. You don’t just react to customer needs—you anticipate them, support business outcomes, and build long-term value.

Related: Critical Customer Success KPIs, Metrics, and Health Score Variables

Using the Customer Success Maturity Model To Guide Your Next Steps

TSIA research shows that customer success typically falls into one of two use cases:

• Thematic customer success, where it exists as a project or loosely connected initiative across different services teams.
• Strategic customer success, where the function is purpose-built to drive technology adoption, boost renewal rates, and create new opportunities for expansion.

It is essential to understand which model reflects your current approach and where you want to go. That’s where the Customer Success Maturity Model comes in.

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By answering the fundamental questions of what customer success is, who owns it, and how it should function, this model gives you a practical framework to:

• Assess where your organization stands today.
• Spot capability gaps.
• Align your strategy with customer and business outcomes.

Whether you're just starting or aiming to optimize a mature customer success operation, the maturity model can help you chart a smarter path forward.

Your Key Takeaways

• Customer success is more than just churn prevention—it’s about delivering on the promise of your technology and driving tangible business outcomes for your customers. To succeed in a subscription-based world, you must ensure your technology is adopted, your value is clear, and your customers stay and grow with you.
• The Customer Success Maturity Model helps you benchmark your organization's current state and determine what it will take to level up. The model provides a clear path to help you build scalable, outcome-driven capabilities during the forming, storming, norming, or performing phases.‍
• As you mature, the goal is to move from fragmented, project-based efforts to a fully integrated, strategic customer success function. When customer success is proactive, measurable, and aligned with business impact, it becomes a genuine growth engine for your organization.