Customer Maturity
The parallel dimension of client engagement
It takes two to Tango. Customer success is no different.
No matter how well CS knows the steps, the outcome depends on two coordinated parties.
Here is the part that gets skipped. Results only count when the customer is able to recognize them, confidently and professionally.
That recognition is not a given. It asks something of the stakeholder: enough knowledge and experience to do their own job, and then the ability to judge their vendor’s contribution.
I call that customer maturity.
Experience, skills, and knowledge combine into the ability to set clear, measurable expectations for a vendor.
Mature stakeholders and mature organizations verify. They check the work, and they acknowledge what the vendor delivered. Over the years, I have also seen the reverse effect: a strong CS organization can lift its stakeholders' maturity, creating additional hooks into their success and directly increasing the probability of the next renewal.
Less mature organizations struggle to identify the value. They miss key parts of a product or service offering, adoption sits lower than it should, and the vendor's value never fully registers.
One caution before we go further.
Maturity is a diagnosis, not an alibi. If low customer maturity explains every adoption gap in your portfolio, the problem is your onboarding, not your customers.
Maturity is not sentiment, and it is not attitude. It is a parallel dimension of customer engagement.
Five indicators carry it. Four have been with us for a long time. The fifth arrived with the technology shifts of the last few years.
1. Domain expertise
2. Product understanding
3. Internal collaboration
4. Growth mindset
5. AI literacy
Domain Expertise
Finance, cybersecurity, insurance, legal, health, education, travel. Every industry carries knowledge that belongs to it alone, built from academic grounding and years of practice.
I have met people who spent a career inside their trade and never widened their view. Their maturity slipped as a result, and when something new arrived- a technology or a process- they did not have the confidence to take it on.
So I stopped counting the years of experience. I read the questions instead: what they ask on calls, in meetings, in tickets. What challenges they put on the table, and how they think about the solution a vendor puts in front of them.
Call transcripts, meeting summaries, and ticket analysis now run through AI, which makes this measurable. They also tell you which stakeholders need help getting to the next level.
Product Understanding
The familiar one. We end up measuring adoption, but adoption happens at more than one depth. Tools such as Pendo give solid usage analysis, and categorizing users from it is straightforward.
Three levels of product literacy keep the analysis simple:
Basic. Logs in and performs the minimum actions a standard process requires.
Intermediate. Runs advanced workflows and tries new capabilities.
Advanced. An intermediate who notices what is missing and can frame it as a feature or a
change request. They see the added value even before the product offers it. These influential users shape the roadmap.
Training and enablement exist mainly for the basic group. Moving more of them into the intermediate band is a positive signal, and it usually shows up as better value recognition.
Internal Collaboration
CSMs tend to miss this one because it is not what they watch first when they engage a customer. It sits in organizational culture, in internal politics, in the personalities of particular stakeholders.
Client maturity is also not one-dimensional. Teams differ from each other, and individuals differ inside a team. The most revealing question is how willing they are to pass on knowledge.
I have watched genuinely skilled experts turn into knowledge focal points with little or no interest in sharing what they know. The worst part is that nobody challenges it, and managers sometimes find the arrangement convenient. Then that person leaves, and the vendor is left with a team that needs extensive training before anyone can re-establish why the product is there at all.
Treat a single point of knowledge as an account risk and record it as one. You cannot remove the risk, but you can reduce it by engaging additional stakeholders and building their product knowledge.
Growth Mindset
Harder to measure, and it counts for most when a client is absorbing a storm of technology change and business turbulence. We hold ourselves to it as vendors: agile, quick to adapt, willing to take on something unfamiliar.
That is a growth mindset.
The question is whether our clients do, too.
Startups and small businesses usually do, because frequent change is the condition of their survival and speed is not optional.
Work with a large, established organization and the picture changes. Stakeholders are accustomed to a corporate way of operating, and new ideas can meet resistance.
Where the growth mindset is low, trying to "educate" people into the muscle rarely works. Instead, focus on change management and a gradual plan. Force a big bang, and you should expect rejection, weak adoption, and a real chance of churn.
Avoid This Trap
Put the four together, and a contradiction shows up.
The startup scoring highest on growth mindset may sit lowest on domain expertise. The enterprise with twenty years of domain depth is often the one that will not move at the same pace.
That is not a flaw in the model. That's why you must profile maturity account by account instead of averaging it into a single number.
A customer strong in three indicators and weak in one needs a different engagement from a customer sitting mid-range on all four, even though the averages match.
AI Literacy
It overlaps with growth mindset, and almost everyone I work with will tell you they use AI.
The questions I run in my own head when I assess a client's AI maturity:
▸ Which workflows and what scope have they actually changed or optimized with AI?
▸ Are those workflows deployed and running at scale?
▸ Do cross-company AI policies exist, and are they enforced? A company that has written the rules is further along than one that has not.
▸ Is there an owner or head of AI with a plan and a budget behind it?
▸ Do teams collaborate and share what they learn while building AI-based solutions?
There are many ways to read AI progress. None of them are scientifically accurate, and a global AI maturity model is still some way off.
Until then, we ask questions and align our vendor capability and progress with where the client sits.
The balance is the hard part: don't overwhelm stakeholders who aren't ready for advanced AI implementation, and don't set the bar so low that clients read you as “running behind.”
Your Takeaways
Customer maturity does not slot neatly into a health score formula or a churn prediction model. AI tools that read customer communications, the questions raised, ticket comments, and feedback give you a way to measure it across every aspect covered here.
To make it practical, I mapped the first four indicators onto a three-level scale. Rate each account against it, then follow the trend rather than the number itself. A stakeholder moving from level 1 to level 2 tells you more than one sitting comfortably at level 3.
Put the maturity assessment alongside your existing health and risk prediction. You will spot risk earlier, act before it hardens, and grow the client's knowledge and capability in the process.
You can know every step of the dance. That is still only half of it.
Practitioner Tip for TheCSCycle Readers
Raising a stakeholder’s maturity is a campaign, not a conversation.
Pick one account where adoption looks fine, but value recognition is weak. Name a second stakeholder beside your champion, someone one level down who touches the product daily. Over the next quarter, give that person three things:
1. a standing 30-minute slot that is not a status call
2. One advanced workflow to improve their outcomes
3. An early sight of the roadmap.
Then watch what they ask for.
This is one of the frameworks I explore with CS executives inside TheCSCycle. If this resonates with where you are today, visit thecscycle.com to learn more.
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