The Customer Success Glossary

Cross-selling is the practice of recommending complementary products or services to existing customers that address adjacent needs beyond their original purchase. In customer success, cross-selling surfaces from conversations about problems the customer is experiencing that your other products solve, making the CSM's relationship depth the primary discovery mechanism for expansion opportunities that automated prompts can't replicate.

A Customer Champion is a highly engaged customer who voluntarily advocates for a product or service based on their genuine enthusiasm and success with it. Unlike paid brand ambassadors, these champions emerge naturally - sharing their expertise with other users, providing product feedback, and actively recommending the solution to others based on their firsthand experience of its value.

Churn is the rate at which customers cancel, don't renew, or stop doing business with a company over a given period. In SaaS and subscription businesses, churn is one of the most critical health metrics because it directly impacts recurring revenue, growth projections, and customer lifetime value.

Customer-led growth (CLG) is a business methodology where customer outcomes, insights, and advocacy become the primary drivers of revenue growth. Unlike product-led or sales-led approaches that center acquisition, CLG builds growth on the premise that retained, expanded, and vocal customers generate more efficient and durable revenue than any amount of new logo acquisition alone.

A CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) survey is a feedback method that measures how satisfied a customer is with a specific interaction, such as a support ticket resolution, onboarding session, or training call. Unlike NPS, which tracks overall loyalty, CSAT captures satisfaction at individual touchpoints, making it CS teams' most actionable diagnostic tool for identifying where post-sale experiences succeed or break down.

A customer success manager (CSM) is a post-sale professional responsible for helping customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product or service. CSMs own the customer relationship after the sale, driving onboarding, adoption, retention, and expansion by proactively monitoring account health and aligning product value to customer goals.

A customer success platform (CSP) is purpose-built software that helps CS teams manage customer health, automate lifecycle workflows, and drive retention and expansion across their entire book of business. Unlike CRMs that track deals or support tools that track tickets, a CSP connects product usage, engagement, and commercial data into a single operating layer for post-sale revenue management.