Customer Success Management: Objectives, Outcomes, Success Blueprints, and Success Plays

Mike Edmonds · 3 weeks ago

Success Blueprints are a core capability within Customer Success, designed to enable a structured and repeatable approach to driving customer outcomes. A Success Blueprint represents a predefined set of success activities, milestones, and objectives that align with a specific customer journey or use case—such as onboarding, adoption acceleration, or value realization. Each blueprint is based on a reusable template that captures best practices, standard operating procedures, and recommended success activities. Templates can be configured to automatically generate work items, tasks, objectives, and more.

By leveraging Success Blueprints, Customer Success Managers can:

Align on customer goals and KPIs
Track progress against defined milestones
Ensure consistency and scalability in engagement execution.

Planning

Requirements gathering

Before creating Success Blueprints, understand key business processes and how they lead to Customer Success. Collaborate with business SMEs to gather documented practices related to maintaining or recovering engagements. There can be many instances of processes to include:

Onboarding new accounts or products within an account
Identifying issues related to and improving CSAT or NPS results
Converting uncovered opportunities into sold products
Collaborating with a cross-functional team to address poor or declining engagement health
Increasing adoption through training
New product deployment
And more…

Things to consider

Are there documented processes for common practices?
Is there a tool currently in use that holds specific information or capabilities requiring integration with ServiceNow?
How will results associated with desired outcomes be measured in ServiceNow?
For a given process, are there measurements that should be tracked every time? Are there optional measurements that could be applied contextually?
Do we understand what constitutes a successful outcome and how it transitions to the next stage?

Components

Initiative roadmap

The Success Initiative Roadmap provides an overview of initiatives past, in-flight and scheduled. The calendar view, color coding, and key details allow Customer Success Managers to have visibility into key activities associated with their engagements. View initiatives contextually based on the Success Objectives and Success Outcomes they are related to. Expand and contract each level of the hierarchy to focus on what’s important. Color coding indicates the progress of each initiative allowing a Customer Success manager to quickly identify where action may be needed. The roadmap tiles contain details such as the Title, Priority, Driver, and who is assigned each initiative. The Opened and Due dates determine where the initiative is place on the timeline.

Workflow Launcher

The Workflow Launcher provides a guided, manual interface for triggering Success Plays based on customer context. Rather than relying on automation, it offers structured visibility into available plays—organized by category and subcategory—so Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can select and launch the most relevant play at the right time. This tool acts as a tactical decision support system, enabling proactive, consistent customer engagement with the flexibility to adapt to real-world situations.

Tables

Success Objective [sn_acct_lc_success_objective] - Success Objectives represent specific, measurable goals set for a customer account to achieve value from products and services. Each success objective outlines targeted outcomes (e.g., product adoption, system performance) that guide Customer Success efforts throughout their customer journey. A key aspect of addressing a customer’s needs is clearly defining the business problem they are trying to solve within the goal description. By deeply understanding the underlying challenge or pain point, Customer Success teams can derive meaningful outcomes that align with the customer’s strategic objectives. This approach ensures that success objectives are impact-driven, fostering alignment between customer expectations and tangible business results.

Success Outcome [sn_acct_lc_success_outcome] - Outcomes document specific results achieved by a customer, directly reflecting the impact and value delivered through product usage and support. Outcomes are tied to measurable achievements, such as cost savings, productivity improvements, or compliance milestones, and provide valuable insights throughout the Account Lifecycle.

Success Objective Template [sn_acct_lc_success_objective_template] – Success Objective Templates are purpose-built for templatization—enabling organizations to define and reuse standardized success goals across customer engagements. Instead of reinventing objectives for every account, teams can apply proven, pre-defined templates that reflect best practices and business outcomes. This not only drives consistency and operational efficiency, but also ensures every engagement contains clear, aligned objectives. Beyond standardization, these templates also play a critical role in measuring success performance. Each objective derived from a template can be evaluated for completion and success rate, which feeds directly into the Success Score for the account or engagement.

Success Outcome Template [sn_acct_lc_success_outcome_template] - Success Outcome Templates enable teams to templatize the measurable components of Success Objectives, making outcome tracking consistent, scalable, and reusable across customer engagements. Rather than defining metrics from scratch each time, organizations can standardize how success is measured—whether through adoption targets, usage milestones, or time-to-value indicators. These templates embed proven measurement criteria directly into Success Blueprints, ensuring every objective includes clear, actionable outcomes from the start. As a result, teams can deliver more repeatable, data-driven success plans with less effort and greater confidence in demonstrating impact.

Initiative [sn_acct_lc_success_initiative] - Initiatives represent planned, strategic actions or projects designed to help a customer achieve specific objectives and overall success. Initiatives are often aligned with customer goals and are essential for structuring ongoing efforts to optimize the customer’s experience throughout the Account Lifecycle. By linking initiatives to Success Objectives, Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can ensure that their actions are directly contributing to the customer’s desired outcomes. Initiatives can encompass a wide range of efforts, including process improvements, technology implementations, training programs, and adoption strategies—all tailored to enhance the customer’s success with the product or service.

Initiative Task (Success Task) [sn_acct_lc_success_task] – Success Tasks are used to track individual tasks or activities assigned to Customer Success teams as part of broader customer success objectives. Each task represents a specific action required to support the customer’s journey, whether it’s part of onboarding, engagement, issue resolution, or ongoing account management. This table is essential for organizing and prioritizing actions that contribute to overall account health and customer satisfaction. Additionally, these tasks can be made visible and collaborative with the customer, fostering transparency and alignment. By sharing key tasks, progress updates, and milestones, Customer Success teams can engage customers in the process, ensuring they have visibility into ongoing efforts and can actively participate in driving success. This collaborative approach helps strengthen relationships, improves accountability, and ensures that both the Customer Success team and the customer are working together toward shared goals.

ALE Choice [sn_ti_core_ale_choice] – ALE Choice Records are used to configure available values for several records in Account Life Cycle Events as well as the categorization of the Success Blueprints and Plays associated with Engagement records in the configurable workspace.

ALE Definition [sn_acct_lc_definition_record] - ALE Definition Records are used to configure the tiles that are presented in the configurable workspace when a Success Blueprint or a Success Play is intended to be launched. The configuration of this record determines what category and subcategory a given offering will be exposed as well as its title and description. Additionally, the Subflow that is triggered on submission of the Success Blueprint or Success Play is indicated here.

Product [cmdb_model] – Product Models are a foundational part of the CMDB (Configuration Management Database). The are standardized definitions of products and models offered by vendors, such as laptops, servers, mobile devices, or software packages. Each entry in the Product Model table defines a specific make, model, or configuration of a product, and is used to ensure consistency across asset and configuration records.

Sold Product [sn_install_base_sold_product] – Sold Products represent the products or services that a customer has purchased from your organization. This table is central to managing post-sale activities in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Customer Success applications, enabling a complete view of what each customer owns or is entitled to. Each Sold Product record links a specific account to a product model, and can include contract, entitlement, and installation details.

Applicable Sold Products [sn_acct_lc_eng_m2m_sp] - Applicable Sold Products represent the subset of a customer’s sold products that are relevant to a specific customer engagement. This concept allows Customer Success Managers (CSMs) to focus the engagement on only the products that relate to a given engagement, driving clarity, alignment, and more tailored success planning. These records are derived from the broader Sold Products associated with the account but filtered based on what the engagement is targeting.

Data source [sn_data_ctx_engine_src] – This data source is used to select the data for analysis by the Data Context Engine. Data can be acquired by selecting an indicator configured with Performance Analytics or by using an external source. External sources must be configured to write to the Context Engine Data table, associating the account, the engagement, and the date the value represents. This can be carried out via an API and transform map as well as other solutions. Once defined, data sources can be reused across all health metric, risk definition and success outcome configurations.

Context [sn_data_ctx_engine_ctx] – Associates a Data Source with a specific table. This relationship enables the Data Context Engine to collect data for the specified table.

Context Engine Mapper [sn_data_ctx_engine_map] – Utilized to determine which field on the related table serves as a breakdown for indicators linked with data sources.

Context Engine Data [sn_data_ctx_engine_data] – These values are gathered from various data sources and are presented in the widgets on the health page of an engagement.

Subflows - A Subflow in Flow Designer is a reusable set of flow logic that can be embedded and executed within other flows. Think of it as a modular mini flow designed to perform a specific task or process that may be needed in multiple places across your automation workflows. Subflows help streamline development, improve maintainability, and promote reuse of common logic—such as sending notifications, updating records, or performing checks—without duplicating steps in every flow.

Scheduled Jobs

Metric Engine Data Collection (sysauto_b5d61c28c3345210ff00ed23a140dd85) – Executes to gather and populate the data displayed in the Context Engine Data table

Calculate Outcome Value (sysauto_script_ 57edfe9fffb012102f03ffffffffffbd) is responsible for evaluating each active Success Outcome where the tracking method is set to metric to retrieve the appropriate metric engine data record and update the current value attribute on the outcome.

Configuration

Data Sources and Context Engine Mappers

Configure Performance Analytics indicators and associate a breakdown for account. For more information about Performance Analytics refer to Appendix A.
Configure Context Engine Mapper if one does not already exist for the data being collected.
Define the data sources to be used, ensuring that the context for Outcome [sn_acct_lc_success_outcome] is added in the respective related list.
Define color bands as necessary; while not required, they enhance usability when viewing metrics in the workspace.
For data collected by an indicator with Performance Analytics, set the source as PA Indicator, and configure the frequency, PA indicator, and Breakdown fields accordingly. Guardrails are in place to ensure that the values of frequency and breakdown align with the selected indicator.
Ensure that each Indicator has the “Publish to Analytics Hub” or “Show in Library” option selected under the Access Control tab. The label of this field may vary depending on your instance version but enabling it is required for the indicator to be visible in the Analytics Hub and available for use in dashboards or other visualizations.
For external data sources, additional configurations are needed to write entries to the Context Engine Data [sn_data_ctx_engine_data] table.

For more information about Context Engine refer to Appendix A.

Testing

Prerequisites

Ensure all data sources and other necessary configurations are in place.
Ensure data exists on the Context Engine Data [sn_data_ctx_engine_data] table that maps to an outcome that has a type of metric. Make sure the data source indicated on the outcome matches available data for the current time span. For example:
1. If a data source is configured to run daily, there should be a row for “today”.
2. If a data source is configured to run weekly, there should be a row for “this week”.
3. Etc.
Set the last and next run dates on the associated data sources to a value in the past.

Executing

Identify a success outcome to test against and set the current value field on the measurement tab to 0. Because the field is mandatory, you cannot simply clear it. So, the value should be something that will provide, clearly, the record has been updated.
Navigate to System Definition > Scheduled Jobs and locate and execute the following jobs in this order:
1. Metric Engine Data Collection job
2. Calculate Outcome Value
Open and execute the job.
Allow time for the job to execute, this may take some time depending on the number of data sources and context engine data present.
Validate the value on the success outcome.

Troubleshooting

Usual suspects for unexpected results are:

Next and last run date on the data source were not reset to be in the past; the scheduled job will only consider data sources in this condition.
The Context Engine Data was not present for the current timeframe necessary for calculation.
The incorrect data source was adjusted. Validate the data source on the success outcome has the last and next run dates in the past by opening it directly from the success outcome.
Context mappers are not correctly configured. Ensure there is a clear linkage from the source data to the resolving context such that it must resolve to the appropriate record.

Appendix A

Docs sites resources