2021 Budget Planning: 3 Reasons Why a Customer Success Platform Needs to Be Included
In the modern SaaS world, sales is often considered the flashiest and critical of departments across organizations. But if 2020 has taught SaaS leaders anything it’s that it’s a company’s current customers – not the new ones – that have the potential to keep a business afloat when things get hard. Customer success departments were truly put through the ringer this year, with some teams dealing with an incredible amount of uncertainty, change, and, unfortunately, customer churn.
2021 Customer Success Planning
Now that we are (unbelievably) in Q4, many SaaS organizations are finalizing their 2021 budget planning strategy. While customer success is definitely at the top of every organization’s priority list for 2021, investing in a dedicated customer success management platform requires executive and administrative input that can be garnered during these planning strategy sessions over the next few weeks.
Here are three reasons why a customer success management platform needs to be part of your 2021 budget planning:
1. Customer success is only going to be more important in the months to come.
2020 put a spotlight on customer success, and while it was necessary to increase focus and dedication for many customer accounts this attention has now become the norm across the board. There is really no going back to how things were before, and customer success teams must be prepped and ready to hit the ground running in 2020, and a customer success platform can help right out of the gate.
2. The way internal teams communicate has changed, and your technology needs to keep up with these processes.
When the global lockdown hit at the beginning of 2020, some organizations and industries were rocked figuring out how to transition to a fully remote workforce. For customer success teams, working from home while managing customer relationships remotely identified gaps – and opportunities – in internal processes that a customer relationship management platform can help address.
3. Your customers are also planning their 2021 budgets, which means you may need a more focused risk and customer churn management solution.
Your team may have seen its fair share of customer account churn over the last few months, and this will likely continue into 2021. As your customers plan their 2021 budgets and identify non-essential vendor partners, you may have to deal with more churn (or restructuring) throughout 2021. A dedicated customer success platform can help mitigate customer churn risk and make it easy to stay on track when churn occurs.
Even if your team struggled to make it through 2020 with your heads up, there is hope for 2021.
2021 is a new year, and there has never been a better time to start out on a clean slate. Budgeting for and implementing a customer success platform can ensure your team kicks 2021 off with a bang and stays on track – and on top – throughout the year.
Check out some of these additional resources: