Customer diagnosis and success planning
Objective. Connect contracted scope to the customer's desired business outcome, a baseline and stakeholder ownership, and capture it in a mutual success plan with a measurable milestone and a named dependency.
A new CSM inherits a signed contract, not a success plan. This lesson teaches you to turn 'what they bought' into 'what has to become true for them to renew and expand', anchored to a baseline you can measure and an owner on the customer side who will act. Without this, the account drifts into feature usage with no outcome anyone agreed to.
See it in the demo
The customer problem
A customer signs because a leader has a problem they are accountable for: denial rework is eating margin, overtime is unbudgeted, a client SLA is slipping, FTEs are added faster than output grows. The contract names applications - say RCM Operations and Work Output for KnackGlobal - but the applications are not the outcome. The outcome is 'cost per clean claim down' or 'output per paid hour up without more heads'. If you cannot state the customer's outcome in their own words and numbers, you cannot tell whether the deployment is working, and neither can the sponsor who has to defend the spend internally. Most churn traces back here: the product was used but nobody agreed what success looked like, so at renewal there is nothing to point to.
How Time Champ addresses it
Time Champ gives you the chain to make the outcome measurable: Time and Activity shows available paid hours and utilisation; Work Output shows completed work, quality and cost per clean unit; RCM Operations connects operational actions to revenue-cycle outcomes. Your job in diagnosis is to pick the one or two measures on this chain that the sponsor already cares about, then establish a baseline the customer owns. Use the demo accounts to rehearse: open Work Output Overview and find 'clean output per paid hour' and 'cost per clean unit'; open RCM Operations Mission Control and find the payer/denial/backlog signal a leader would act on first. The point is not to show screens - it is to agree which number, measured which way, will move, and by when.
What to say / do - the success plan routine
Run a diagnosis conversation structured as: (1) Desired outcome in the sponsor's words - 'reduce cost per claim', not 'use the dashboard'. (2) Current baseline - what is it today, measured how, from what source, over what period. If no baseline exists, the first milestone is to establish one; do not skip it. (3) The measurable milestone - 'denial rework hours per 1,000 claims down 15% by end of Q2, measured in Work Output cost view, same payer scope'. (4) The named dependency - the data feed, the manager routine, the config that must land first, and who on the customer side owns it. (5) Stakeholder map - sponsor (accountable), operational owner (acts weekly), data/IT owner (feeds). Write it as a mutual plan both sides sign. Record it in the CRM so it survives your absence.
Separate capacity value from cash
Be disciplined about what kind of value you are promising. Time Champ frequently surfaces recovered capacity - hours released, rework avoided - which is real but is not the same as cash in the customer's bank. The Value Leakage recovery screen explicitly distinguishes recovered capacity from cash recovered, and you should too. A milestone of '200 hours/month released' is honest and measurable. A milestone of 'save $X' is only true if the customer actually removes the cost or redeploys the capacity to revenue, which is their decision, not the tool's output. Writing capacity milestones you can measure, and flagging the financial conversion as a customer-owned step, is what keeps the QBR credible later (see C08).
Objections and honest limits
'We just want to see the dashboards' - acknowledge, then ask which decision the dashboard will change and who makes it; a dashboard nobody acts on produces no outcome and no renewal case. 'We don't have a baseline' - then establishing one is milestone zero; proceeding without it means you can never prove value. 'The sponsor is too busy for a success plan' - keep it to one page and frame it as protecting their investment; if they still will not engage, that is an early risk to log (see C10). Honest limit: you can commit to measures the product demonstrably produces and the customer feeds data for; you cannot commit to a financial result that depends on the customer's own decisions. Where entitlement or integration scope is uncertain, write 'confirm with product' rather than promising it.
Interpretation check
A contract scope is an input, not an outcome. Success is the customer's business measure moving against a baseline they own - not the fact that applications are switched on.
In the field
KnackGlobal (~6,000 seats, largest customer) is under active ProHance displacement. The success plan that protects that account is not 'they log in' - it is output/FTE and cost-per-claim moving against a pre-Time-Champ baseline, so the sponsor can defend the choice versus the incumbent at renewal.
Practical task
Pick KnackGlobal (RCM) or OVO (contact-centre). Write a one-page mutual success plan: desired outcome in the sponsor's words, the single measure and exactly how it is defined and scoped, the current baseline (or 'establish baseline' as milestone zero), one measurable milestone with a date, the named dependency and its owner, and the three-role stakeholder map. State whether the milestone is a capacity measure or a cash measure.
Self-check
Why is 'the customer uses the Work Output dashboard daily' not a success milestone?
It is a usage fact, not an outcome. A milestone must name a customer business measure (e.g. cost per clean unit), a baseline, a target and a date. Usage is a leading indicator of the outcome, not the outcome itself.
A sponsor wants the milestone to be 'save $500k this year'. What is the honest way to frame it?
Measure what the product produces - released capacity or avoided rework hours against a baseline - and flag that converting capacity to cash is a customer decision (remove cost or redeploy to revenue). Promise the measurable capacity milestone; make the financial conversion a customer-owned step.
The account has no baseline for the chosen measure. What is milestone zero?
Establish the baseline - agree the definition, scope, source and period and capture the starting value - before any improvement target. Without it, no later claim of improvement is defensible.
Name the three stakeholder roles a success plan must identify and why.
Sponsor (accountable for the outcome and the renewal decision), operational owner (acts on the data in a weekly routine), and data/IT owner (ensures the feed and config). Missing any one of these is a dependency risk.
Verified vs demo. The measures and screens (clean output per paid hour, cost per clean unit, Mission Control signals, capacity-vs-cash on the recovery screen) are demo-shown. Which measures a specific production account can actually produce depends on its data feeds and entitlements - confirm with product before committing dates.