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Customer Progression Design is the first of the six capabilities in the Customer Relationship Maturity Model (CRMM), developed by Kate Barrett of eFocus Marketing. It measures an organisation’s ability to design how customer relationships should move through the lifecycle, and to run the diagnostic disciplines (Customer Drift™, Customer Momentum™ and the Next Best Customer Decision) that show where each relationship actually stands.
It sits on its own in the Discover stage, because everything in Grow and Evolve depends on it: you cannot execute a strategy for relationships you have never designed, and you cannot measure progress against a lifecycle nobody has written down.
Most organisations assume they have this capability because they have a welcome series and a lapsed-customer segment. Every time I have looked at it in an audit, the honest picture is closer to a set of journeys that were built at different times, by different people, for different reasons, with no shared view of what a customer is supposed to do next.
Three questions tell you most of what you need to know. Have you written down how a customer is supposed to progress, stage by stage, from first purchase to established relationship? Do you know, today, which customers are drifting away from you and which are gaining momentum? And when you find out, does anything change?
If the answer to the first is no, you have journeys rather than an architecture (a journey is one path; an architecture is the map that says which paths exist and why).
If the answer to the second is “we look at churn”, you are measuring the end of the relationship rather than the point at which it started to weaken, and by the time a customer shows up in a churn report, the decision that would have kept them was needed months earlier.
If the answer to the third is a shrug, the diagnostic work is being done as a report rather than as a discipline, which is the single most common pattern at Level 2.
The CRM Priority Check asks one question about this capability, with five statements describing how organisations actually behave. You pick the one that matches yours, not the one you would like to match. The levels below describe what the evidence looks like at each point on the scale.
No documented lifecycle or journey architecture exists, and Customer Drift, Customer Momentum and next best decisions are not measured in any form. Whatever is happening to the customer base is happening without anyone watching for it.
A named lifecycle model exists with some journeys mapped against it, and a drift or momentum assessment has been run at least once, as a project rather than a repeating discipline. The readout tells you where things stood on the day someone looked.
The lifecycle and journey architecture covers most segments, and drift and momentum assessments run on an agreed cadence whose findings genuinely change what gets prioritised next. This is where diagnosis stops being an audit and starts being how the organisation decides.
Drift and momentum are monitored continuously rather than on a schedule, and Next Best Customer Decision outputs feed automatically into workflows for most of the customer base. Nobody is waiting for a quarterly check to find out something has shifted.
The organisation tests and revises its own definitions of drift and momentum, and redesigns the relationship architecture ahead of observed behaviour change rather than in response to it. Very few organisations treat the diagnostic model itself as something to keep improving.
The mistake at every level is trying to build the whole thing at once, so the recommendation changes depending on where you are.
At Level 1, do not attempt a full lifecycle map. Pick one transition that matters commercially (new customer to second purchase is the usual place to start), and run a single manual Customer Drift check against it this month: which customers who should have moved on have not, and why? One check gives your team a working example of the discipline before you try to build it everywhere.
At Level 2, the fix is scheduling rather than redesign. Take the assessment you already ran and put the rerun in the diary, quarterly to begin with, because the value of drift and momentum is in comparing readout to readout rather than in any single number.
At Level 3, check whether next best decision findings are reaching the people who plan activity, or just sitting in the assessment report; require one finding to be referenced explicitly in the next planning cycle.
At Level 4, the risk moves to the minority of customers the automated feed does not reach: identify that segment and decide deliberately whether it is a gap or a considered exception.
At Level 5, put a standing review on the definitions themselves, twice a year is reasonable, because a definition that has quietly stopped matching reality is harder to spot than a broken data feed. The numbers keep flowing either way.
Customer Progression Design is capability one of six in the Customer Relationship Maturity Model, and the only capability in the Discover stage. It draws directly on the Customer Progression Model and the Next Best Customer Decision framework.
The Grow capabilities that depend on it are CRM Strategy, Execution Excellence and Technology and Enablement. The Evolve capabilities that prove whether it is working are Measurement and Optimisation.
When this scores lowest in a CRM Priority Check it is flagged as the capability to fix first, because progress here opens up progress in the other five. A Customer Momentum Review is the engagement that builds it properly.
Journey mapping is one input. Customer Progression Design covers the architecture those journeys sit inside (which stages exist, what moves a customer between them) and the diagnostic disciplines that tell you whether customers are actually moving. A beautifully mapped journey with no measure of drift or momentum running against it is Level 2, however good the map looks.
Only partly. Churn tells you a relationship has ended; Customer Drift tells you it is weakening across attention, behaviour, relevance and value while there is still time to act. Measuring churn alone puts you at Level 1 or 2 on this capability, depending on whether a lifecycle model exists at all.
At its simplest, a list. Take one lifecycle transition, define what “should have progressed” means in behaviour (a second purchase within 90 days, say), pull the customers who met the entry condition and did not meet the exit condition, and look at what they did instead. The first time you do it you will find a pattern nobody had a name for.
It depends on your objectives and on how much of the architecture already exists, but the honest answer for most teams is two to three quarters, because Level 3 requires the assessment cadence to have repeated at least twice and to have changed a priority at least once. You cannot shortcut the repeat.
Because every other capability is built on it. A strategy for relationships you have not designed is a campaign calendar; execution against stages nobody has defined is activity; measurement without a lifecycle has nothing to measure progress against. If it scores lowest, the model always points here first. Tell me if your data says otherwise, because I would want to see it.
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