What Exactly Is an Engagement?
So you've closed the deal. The contract is signed, the confetti has settled, and now the real work begins — making sure your customer actually succeeds with the products and services they just bought. That's where engagements come in, and they're about to become your best friend.
Let's break down what engagements are, why they're so adaptable.
Think of an engagement as the central hub for everything happening between you and a customer account throughout the customer success journey. It's not just a record — it's a living, breathing command center.
An engagement provides a centralized view of all activities related to an account. It captures and maintains a historical log of interactions like customer meetings, support touchpoints, health checks, renewal discussions, and more. Essentially, if something important happened (or needs to happen) with a customer, the engagement record knows about it.
Here's what Customer Success Managers (CSMs) can do with an engagement:
- Track customer history — Every past interaction is captured, so you never walk into a meeting blind. The new Engagement Timeline feature surfaces a chronological view of key milestones, events, and activities in one place with search, sort, and filter capabilities.
- Make informed decisions — Set reminders for future events and maintain consistent follow-ups based on real data, not just gut feelings.
- Create automated triggers — Configure events to fire automatically based on specific engagement types or statuses. When a risk threshold is breached? The system can jump into action.
- Generate reporting and analytics — Get insights into account health, satisfaction levels, and how frequently your team is engaging with the customer.
But here's the thing that makes engagements truly special: they don't just sit there. They connect to the entire Customer Success Management ecosystem — success objectives, outcomes, health scores, risk signals, touchpoints, playbooks, success blueprints, product adoption data, and more. The engagement is where all of that context comes together.
Built to Flex: The Adaptability of Engagements
One of the most common questions we hear is: "Can this adapt to the way my team actually works?" The short answer is yes — and here's why.
Engagements Meet You Where You Are
Every customer relationship is different. A brand-new account being onboarded looks nothing like a mature account heading into a renewal cycle. Engagements are designed to support the full spectrum of the customer success lifecycle, including onboarding, adoption, monitoring, expansion, and renewal.
The engagement record is the anchor point for several powerful, configurable capabilities:
- Health Framework — Define the business and operational indicators that matter most to your organization and calculate an engagement health score from weighted metrics. Maybe CSAT drives 20% of the score, product usage drives 30%, and license utilization covers another 10%. You define what "healthy" looks like — the framework does the math.
- Risk Framework — Risk signals can be created manually or generated automatically when thresholds are breached. If a customer's NPS drops to 7, or P1 cases spike, the system raises the flag. With agentic workflows, the platform can even recommend remediation plays and schedule touchpoints automatically.
- Success Blueprints — These are reusable templates packed with predefined objectives, outcomes, and initiatives for specific products or use cases. When a new engagement is spun up, CSMs don't start from scratch — they start from best practices and then tailor to the specific customer's needs.
- Product Adoption and Capability Usage — Measure how effectively customers are using what they've purchased. Track adoption scores at the product level and drill down into individual capabilities. Low adoption on a specific feature? That's a coaching opportunity, not a mystery.
- Touchpoints — Schedule and track regular check-ins throughout the engagement lifecycle. Capture meeting notes, action items, and follow-ups so nothing falls through the cracks.
- Playbooks — Step-by-step guidance through success cases, internal plays, and renewals. Playbooks keep processes repeatable and consistent, even as your team grows.
Configurable, Not One-Size-Fits-All
The engagement workspace pages are configurable, meaning administrators can tailor the experience to surface the information that matters most for their teams. The Data Context Engine (DCE) collects data from multiple sources — Platform Analytics indicators, external systems, calculated metrics — and transforms it into actionable insights displayed right where CSMs need them.
DCE now supports calculated data sources for advanced computations and configuration tables that let admins customize what's displayed on Product Usage and Capability Usage records. Different products, different customer segments, different views — all supported.
Thinking Bigger: Engagement Hierarchy (Parent-Child)
Now let's talk about the feature that has a lot of people excited: Engagement Hierarchy.
The Problem It Solves:
If you've ever managed a large enterprise account with multiple products, business units, or regional contracts, you know the pain. Each product or service line might have its own engagement — complete with its own health score, risk signals, objectives, and renewal timeline. But when leadership asks, "How is Acme Corp doing overall?" you're scrambling to pull data from five different places and stitch together a story in a spreadsheet.
That fragmented visibility made it incredibly difficult to coordinate onboarding, monitor health across the portfolio, and get a true big-picture view of an account's status.
How It Works:
The Engagement Hierarchy feature, lets you establish parent-child relationships between engagements. This means you can create a top-level "parent" engagement that represents the overall account relationship, and then link individual "child" engagements beneath it — one for each product line, contract, or business unit.
The parent engagement then becomes an aggregation point, pulling together critical data from all its children into a single, centralized view. Here's what surfaces at the parent level:
- Total engagements — See how many active engagements roll up under the parent engagement.
- Total contract value — Aggregated across all child engagements.
- Health trends and scores — Visualize the health trajectory across the entire portfolio, not just one slice.
- Risk breakdowns by probability — Understand where risks are concentrated and how severe they are.
- Work categorized by type and stage — See initiatives, plays, and tasks organized so nothing gets lost.
A Real-World Example:
Let's say you're managing an account called CloudFirst Technologies. They've purchased three products from you: a core platform, a security suite, and an analytics add-on. Each product has its own implementation timeline, adoption targets, and renewal date.
With Engagement Hierarchy, your structure might look like this:
|
Level |
Engagement |
Purpose |
|
Parent |
Overall Engagement |
Aggregated view of all products and activities |
|
Child 1 |
Core Platform |
Track onboarding, adoption, and health for the core product |
|
Child 2 |
Security Suite |
Monitor implementation progress and risk signals |
|
Child 3 |
Analytics Add-on |
Manage success objectives and renewal prep |
The parent engagement gives you the executive-level dashboard. The child engagements give your CSMs the detail they need to do their day-to-day work. Everyone operates at the right altitude. The image below expands on this a bit further.
Why Engagements Matter
The Engagement Hierarchy enables:
- Proactive decision-making — When you can see aggregated health and risk data at a glance, you catch problems before they snowball.
- Efficient resource allocation — Understand which child engagements need the most attention and direct your team accordingly.
- Streamlined oversight — Managers and executives get the big picture without requiring CSMs to build manual reports.
- Enhanced account health management — The combined view makes it easier to spot patterns, such as a dip in adoption on one product affecting the renewal outlook for another.
Bringing It All Together
The engagement record in Customer Success Management isn't just a place to log notes — it's the operational backbone of the entire customer success workflow. It connects to health frameworks, risk signals, success blueprints, product adoption data, playbooks, touchpoints, and now, through the Engagement Hierarchy, to other engagements.
Whether you're a CSM managing a handful of accounts or a leader overseeing a portfolio of hundreds, the engagement gives you the right level of detail at the right level of abstraction. With AI-powered agentic workflows layered on top — automatically analyzing renewals, recommending risk mitigation plays, and generating summaries — the engagement is evolving from a record of what happened to an intelligent partner that helps you decide what to do next.
Ready to Explore?
Here are some resources to help you get started:
- Customer Success Management Documentation — The official product docs, covering configuration, usage, and reference material.
- What's New in Zurich — Community Article — A deep dive into all the Zurich features including Engagement Hierarchy, Product Usage, the Success Report, and AI capabilities.
- Objectives, Outcomes, and Success Blueprints — Community Article — Technical details on configuring success blueprints, data sources, and the context engine.
- Zurich YouTube Playlist — Video walkthroughs of the latest features.
- Customer Success Management on the ServiceNow Store — Application details and subscription information.
