The purpose of a playbook is to build scalable processes for your customer success team. A playbook helps you quality assure the basics of your customer success methodology. Playbooks help you align your teams, and help make on-boarding of new CSMs easy.

Think of Playbooks as a simple “if-this-then-that-manual" that help your CSM to be proactive.

General advantages of creating customer success playbooks:

1. Your CSM division will scale better as your company is growing (playbooks make training, and implementing changes easier)
2. You can add and roll out new playbooks at scale as you’re adding new features/products or encounter new solutions to customer challenges
3. You don’t need to rely on individual superstars to “figure things out”
4. Your clients experience a standardized process; you quality assure Customer Success
5. Playbooks help your CSMs to plan, organize and prioritize the most important tasks each day
6. You can pinpoint problems and improve parts of your overall strategy in a systematic way)
7. You can measure, award or follow up with your under-performing CSMs

Customer Success Playbooks have different levels of sophistication, and will vary based on each company’s feature-set and pricing.

Some companies start out building very basic plays, and some build advanced playbooks that are data driven and fully automated.

The 4 most common ways to build playbooks are:

1. Playbooks Triggered by Lifecycle Phase
2. Playbooks Triggered by Events
3. Playbooks Triggered by Schedules
4. Playbooks Triggered by the CSM

Hopefully these examples will help you get started!