About Success Plans

A success plan enables you to capture customer information and expectations in a centralized location, enabling you to capture all of the goals that your customer has. From here, you can also begin to understand your customer's expectations and how you're able to help them achieve success.

Permission Sets

To use this feature, users must have one of the following permission sets assigned to their profiles:

  • To view, create, edit, and delete success plan records: CSC - Customer Success
  • To view success plan records: CSC - Participant User

For more information, see Assigning and Removing Permission Sets.

Viewing Success Plans

You can view success plans in:

You can view the following records associated with a success plan in the Related tab of the success plan's record page:

  • Business challenges
  • CS activities
  • Objectives
  • Playbooks
  • Playbook tasks

You can also view and manage objective KPIs of a single success plan in Value Tracker. For more information, see Using Value Tracker.

Creating Success Plans

You can create either blank success plans or success plans from templates. A success plan created from a template inherits the information stored in the template, including its child record information. You can also select a record type for your new record if your administrator has set up custom record types.

You can create success plans using:

  • The Create Success Plan action in the Actions panel, which is available on the Customer Success Management Workspace. This action might also be available from a record page if your administrator has added the Actions panel to the page. This method enables you to create either blank success plans or success plans from a template, and add business challenges to new success plans.
  • The Add Success Plan button in Success Tracker. This method enables you to create either blank success plans or success plans from a template, and add business challenges to new success plans.
  • The New list view button in the Success Plans tab. This enables you to create blank success plans only.

For more information, see Creating Success Plans.

Note:

You must have the correct permissions assigned to create success plans:

  • From templates
  • In Success Tracker

For more information, see Setting up Customer Success Cloud.

Blank Success Plans

You can automatically associate a blank success plan record with an account. To do this, create the success plan from the Actions panel on the account's record page. This automatically populates the Account field on the new record.

Note:

  • If the Actions panel is not enabled on the success plan, objective, playbook, or playbook task record page, contact your administrator.

  • The Template field is selected by default when creating a record from the Actions panel on the record page of a template success plan, objective, or playbook, or from Success Tracker.

Success Plans Created from Templates

You can save a success plan as a template by selecting the Template checkbox while creating your new success plan. Success plans created from templates inherit their information and the following child records:

  • Objectives, including their related objective KPIs
  • Playbooks
  • Playbook tasks
Note:

You can select a playbook or playbook task child record without selecting its parent record.

When creating a new success plan record from a template that contains child records, the Select Records grid displays so that you can:

  • View the child records inherited from the template, such as objectives, playbooks, and playbook tasks.
  • Deselect any child records that you do not want to include in your new record. By default, all of the template's child records are selected. If the template contains no child records, a message notifies you of this, the Select Records grid does not display, and you can finish creating your new record.

  • Edit the child records inherited from the template. When adding resources to new child records, ensure that the resources you want to add are active and are not PSA resources. You can add a single resource to objectives and playbooks, and multiple resources to playbook tasks.

  • Edit, create, and delete objective KPIs, if the success plan template has one or more objectives.
Note:

Changing the effective date of a success plan affects the start and end dates of its child records. In this case, any changes you made to the start and end dates of child records will be lost and the start and end dates will be set according to the success plan's new effective date.

When you create a success plan from a template:

  • When selecting a template:

    • Only success plans with the Template field selected are displayed.
    • You can switch between views using Cards and Lists. By default, the last-selected view is displayed.

    • To refresh the template information, click Reload.

  • When creating a success plan from an account record page, the Account field is automatically populated with the account you are currently viewing.
  • The account details are inherited by any associated records and their related records.

  • The Template field is selected by default when creating a record from the Actions panel on the record page of a template success plan, objective, or playbook, or from Success Tracker.

Custom Record Types

If your org uses custom record types:

  • You can select a record type for your new record, if your administrator has set up custom record types.

  • The displayed fields might vary if your org uses custom record types. For more information, contact your administrator.

  • When creating a record of a specific type, the Record Type field is automatically populated and is read-only. To display this field, your administrator must add it to the necessary page layouts.

  • If there are no record types available in your org for the CS Activity, Objective, Playbook, Playbook Task, and Success Plan objects, the fields in their related creation and edit windows use the related field sets.

For more information, see Setting up Customer Success Cloud.

Editing Success Plans

You can edit success plans from:

  • The Success Plans tab
  • Success Tracker

For more information, see Editing Success Plans.

Notes:
  • The displayed fields might vary if your org uses custom record types. For more information, contact your administrator.

  • If there are no record types available in your org for the CS Activity, Objective, Playbook, Playbook Task, and Success Plan objects, the fields in their related creation and edit windows use the related field sets.

  • Updating a success plan's account automatically updates the account of the CS activities associated with the success plan.

Allocating Resources to Success Plans

You can manually allocate any active CS Cloud resource to a success plan. The resource allocated to a success plan record is also the owner of that record. For more information, see Allocating Resources.

Associating Business Challenges with Success Plans

The Business Challenges feature enables you to understand the challenges that your customers are facing. Customer success managers can use this feature to track, categorize, and provide more context about their customer's business challenges. You can associate business challenges with success plans and objectives.

Notes:

  • A business challenge can have the following records associated with it:

    • A success plan
    • An opportunity
  • Success plans and objectives can have multiple business challenges associated with them

For more information, see Business Challenges Overview.

Deleting Success Plans

You can delete success plans in the Success Plans tab only.

Value Tracker

Value Tracker enables you to view and manage all the objective KPIs of:

  • Objectives associated with a success plan
  • Objectives associated with an account
  • A single objective

This consolidated view of objective KPIs gives customer success managers more control over them.

For more information, see Using Value Tracker.

Note:

By default, Value Tracker is displayed on success plan record pages, but your administrator can add it to additional record pages, app pages, and workspaces. For more information, contact your administrator.