Process family

Customer lifecycle process: eight templates from qualified lead to churn

The customer lifecycle as eight linked swimlane flowcharts: lead qualification, the sale, handoff to customer success, onboarding, ticket triage, escalation, cancellation and churn, in the order an account meets them.

The customer lifecycle is the whole arc of an account: the first qualified lead, the sale and its handover, onboarding, day-to-day support and escalation, and finally the cancellation and the churn analysis that follows. This family lines up the eight templates that cover that arc in the order an account meets them, so every handoff between sales, customer success and support has an owner on both sides and a gate that can send the account back.

The lifecycle opens in sales. Lead qualification takes a captured lead through ICP scoring, the MQL decision and discovery to an account executive, and the sales process runs the opportunity through quote approval, negotiation and close to a signed order. Closed won crosses the first boundary between teams: the sales handoff assembles a pack of goals and promises made outside the contract and gets customer success to accept the account rather than receive it by silence. Customer onboarding takes that pack from contract signature through kickoff, configuration, training and go-live to the 30-day review.

From go-live the account lives in support. Every request enters through ticket triage, which completes the intake, screens for an incident or a security risk, sets a priority on impact, checks self-service, and ends when a resolver accepts the case and the customer is told the owner and the next update time. The escalation process draws the first-line attempt itself, so a ticket closed at tier 1 is not a missing chart: 'Resolved at tier 1?' sends a fixed case to customer confirmation and the rest into one handover record, a severity and SLA reassessment, an engineering route for confirmed defects and a review before closure.

The lifecycle ends in one of two charts. Customer cancellation handles a request that has already arrived: notice period checked, the reason coded before any save attempt, the offer ladder and its limits, final billing, data export and deprovisioning on the effective date. The churn process starts earlier, at a risk signal, and runs the save play, the retained-or-churn decision, the exit interview and the win-back decision; it and the save charts are gathered under customer retention.

One step has no template of its own: the sell-side renewal, where your organization asks the customer to sign again. Contract renewal is drawn buy-side, with you as the customer deciding whether to keep paying a supplier, so treat it as a mirror of the decision rather than a stand-in for it. The nearest chart on the sell side is customer cancellation, whose offer ladder and notice terms are the same conversation seen from the other end.