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Ever feel like you’re constantly guessing where your customers stand and what they need next? As a Customer Success Manager (CSM), it can be tough to navigate customer relationships without a clear roadmap. Each customer is unique, and without a structured way to evaluate their progress, it's easy to miss signs of disengagement – or opportunities to nurture long-term loyalty.
This is where the customer maturity model comes in. It provides a framework to categorize customers based on their journey, from onboarding to full product adoption, expansion, and advocacy. By understanding what stage a customer is at, you can tailor your strategies to help them grow, maintain engagement, and achieve their goals with your product.
But here’s the tricky part: keeping track of where each customer fits, understanding their changing needs, and making the right moves at the right time isn’t easy. Without the right tools and processes, even well-meaning CSMs can struggle to keep up.
Proactive engagement and timely interventions require a system that centralizes information, ensures consistency, and automates repetitive tasks to give CSMs the freedom to focus on meaningful interactions.
This blog will walk you through the customer maturity model – what it is, why it matters, and how to use it to support customer growth.
What is a customer maturity model?
In Customer Success, no two customers are exactly the same. Some adopt your product quickly and start seeing value almost immediately, while others need more time, guidance, and engagement to get there.
This variability makes it difficult to rely on a one-size-fits-all approach. That’s where the customer maturity model becomes useful – it provides a structured way to assess where each customer stands in their journey and ensures your team can deliver the right support at the right time.
At its core, the customer maturity model measures how far along a customer is in their growth with your product or service. It allows CSMs to track progress and evaluate how deeply a customer is integrated into the product – whether they are still figuring things out or are on their way to becoming brand advocates.
This model typically involves stages such as awareness and onboarding, adoption and engagement, value realization and expansion, and loyalty and advocacy. At each stage, customers need different types of support.
The goal is to move customers forward by proactively identifying gaps, offering the right resources, and adjusting strategies to meet their evolving needs.
Understanding this model isn’t just about tracking where customers are – it’s also about knowing what actions to take to help them progress. It gives CSMs a clearer view of which customers need more attention and which ones are ready to unlock additional value.
Next, let’s break down the key pillars of the customer maturity model and explore what it takes to help customers grow at each stage.
Common pillars of customer maturity
Understanding where customers stand in their maturity journey helps CSMs align their strategies and ensure the right support is provided at the right time. Each stage of the customer maturity model requires specific actions to meet customer needs and guide them toward the next phase of growth.
These stages range from early onboarding, where customers are just getting familiar with the product, to later stages of advocacy, where they actively promote your brand.
In this section, we’ll walk through the key pillars of the customer maturity model and explore what it takes to support customers effectively at each phase.
Awareness and onboarding
The first step in the customer journey involves building awareness and helping customers get started with your product. This stage focuses on smooth onboarding – ensuring customers feel supported and confident as they explore your platform. Clear goal-setting is also critical here, helping customers understand the milestones they need to achieve in the early stages.
Product adoption and engagement
Once onboarded, customers enter the product adoption phase. Here, they are actively using the product, but some may not be leveraging all the features that could deliver value. At this point, CSMs need to monitor product usage to identify underutilized features and offer training, demos, or campaigns tailored to the customer’s needs.
Value realization and expansion
In this stage, customers start seeing measurable value from the product. They may begin exploring additional features, upgrades, or expansions that align with their business objectives. CSMs need to stay closely aligned with these goals and proactively offer ways to enhance the customer’s experience.
Loyalty and advocacy
The final stage of customer maturity involves turning satisfied customers into loyal advocates. These customers have not only achieved their desired outcomes but are also willing to share their positive experiences with others. Encouraging advocacy strengthens customer relationships and helps drive referrals, further boosting customer retention.
Successfully managing these stages ensures that customers receive the right support at every point in their journey. By taking a proactive approach, CSMs can build stronger relationships and create a seamless path from onboarding to advocacy.
Next, we’ll explore the importance of identifying gaps in the customer’s maturity journey and how CSMs can address these gaps to maintain continuous progress.
Identifying gaps in your customer’s maturity journey
Even with the right intentions, it’s not always easy for CSMs to know exactly where each customer stands in their maturity journey. As customers progress, their needs evolve, and without a clear, organized way to track these changes, CSMs can easily miss crucial engagement opportunities.
A customer might slip into disengagement without anyone noticing, or perhaps an opportunity for expansion goes unaddressed because no one was tracking the customer’s readiness for growth.
The challenge lies in fragmented information. When data lives across multiple tools – like marketing platforms, onboarding systems, and support ticketing tools – it becomes hard to form a complete picture of each customer’s journey.
This disjointed view leads to reactive approaches, forcing teams to respond to issues only after they arise instead of proactively addressing customer needs at key moments.
To identify and close these gaps, it’s critical to centralize data across different departments. A unified Customer Success platform ensures that insights from marketing, sales, onboarding, support, and other teams come together to provide a holistic view of each customer’s progress and health.
Customer Success tools like Velaris allow you to connect siloed data from various tools to automatically populate essential customer insights. This enables CSMs to monitor customer progress in real-time and identify gaps before they become issues.
By proactively addressing these gaps, CSMs can stay one step ahead, intervening at the right moments and driving continuous progress. With a centralized system in place, it’s much easier to identify which customers need more attention, who is ready to expand, and where potential risks might arise.
Next, let’s explore best practices for applying the customer maturity model and how CSMs can use it to build proactive processes that drive customer growth and satisfaction.
Best practices for applying the customer maturity model
Applying the customer maturity model effectively requires more than just understanding where customers stand in their journey. It’s about building processes that proactively guide them toward the next stage, personalizing communication to fit their needs, and tracking key signals that indicate whether they are on the right path.
These best practices can help CSMs stay ahead of customer needs, ensure timely interventions, and strengthen relationships over time.
1. Build proactive processes to drive maturity
Relying on reactive approaches can cause opportunities to slip through the cracks. Instead, building proactive processes ensures that customers receive the right support before issues arise. You can use tools like Velaris to automate check-ins and reminders so your team can stay in tune with a customer’s progress and stay accountable to the agreed milestones
2. Personalize communication based on customer maturity levels
Not all customers need the same message at the same time. Customers at the onboarding stage need support and guidance, while those at the advocacy stage benefit from engagement that nurtures loyalty. Personalizing communication based on where customers stand in their maturity journey helps ensure relevance and boosts engagement.
3. Monitor customer sentiment to intervene early
It’s not enough to wait for customers to raise issues. Monitoring sentiment across customer interactions allows you to identify those who might be frustrated or disengaged before they churn. Early intervention can prevent minor frustrations from turning into major problems.
Velaris offers AI-powered sentiment analysis that can help you identify these trends in communication, giving your team the opportunity to step in quickly and provide support before relationships deteriorate. This allows CSMs to reach out proactively, address concerns, and strengthen the relationship.
Applying these best practices allows CSMs to create a seamless experience for customers at every stage of their journey. With the right processes in place, teams can stay organized, engage meaningfully, and offer proactive support that aligns with each customer’s specific needs.
Conclusion
The customer maturity model gives Customer Success Managers a practical way to understand where customers stand and what they need to progress through each stage. But keeping track of multiple customers at different points in their journey can quickly become overwhelming without the right processes and tools in place.
Managing each stage efficiently requires structure, consistency, and the ability to act proactively rather than reactively. That’s where platforms like Velaris come in. Velaris simplifies the process by automating repetitive tasks, unifying data across teams, and providing real-time insights into customer progress.
With these tools, CSMs can spend less time managing workflows and more time focusing on meaningful interactions that drive growth and retention.
Explore how Velaris can help you build structured processes and guide your customers toward maturity and advocacy. Book a demo today and discover how it can take the complexity out of managing your customer journey.
