August 27, 2026
Activity Is Not the Same as Confidence
Most Customer Success organizations track activity closely: logins, usage, tickets closed, touchpoints logged. Far fewer track whether the customer still believes in the value they’re getting. Those are not the same signal, and the space between them is where renewals quietly go sideways.
An account can look healthy on every dashboard your team reviews. High usage. Regular engagement. No open escalations. And still be quietly disengaging at the executive sponsor level, where the actual renewal decision gets made. Activity metrics are visible and easy to track. Confidence is quieter, and it rarely shows up until it’s already gone.
What This Looks Like at the Leadership Level
This isn’t a CSM problem to solve account by account. It’s a leadership question about what your organization is actually measuring. A health score built primarily on activity will consistently miss confidence erosion, no matter how disciplined your team is about updating it. The fix starts above the account level, in how leadership defines what “healthy” means in the first place.
One Move This Week
Pull up your current health scoring criteria this week.
Instead of sorting by what’s tracked, sort by what it actually tells you. Write one sentence that answers this question:
Which of our “healthy” accounts would we still call healthy if we removed usage data entirely and only looked at stakeholder sentiment?
If that sentence is hard to write, that is important information. It means your view of “healthy” may be more built on activity than on genuine confidence.
Question for Reflection
If I asked each of my managers to name our three most at-risk accounts right now, would their answers agree, or would each of them be looking at a different signal entirely?
Now Open: The Customer Success Leadership & Performance Diagnostic
The activity-versus-confidence gap above is one of five specific areas this diagnostic looks at directly. Over two weeks, it identifies the leadership, execution, and operating gaps most likely putting your retention and renewals at risk, and hands you a clear, prioritized 90-day plan. Built for VPs and Heads of Customer Success who want clarity fast, without a long engagement to get there.
Until next time,
Beverly Hathorn, PMP, PHR
Customer Success Leadership Consultant
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