3 Features You NEED in Your Customer Success Platform
Customer success is one of the critical functions of any successful SaaS company, and as such it requires a platform that is fully dedicated to the strategic needs of a customer service team. As the needs and responsibilities of customer success teams change over time, tools must be able to keep up with the changing nature of the business.
As such, it is a necessary step for customer success teams to re-evaluate their platform features and functionality to make sure the tools are up to the task. Here are three critical features your team needs in your ideal customer success platform:
1. A repository for all conversations, communications, and customer notes
The relationship between customers and vendors has never been so critical, and customer success engagement is at the heart of that relationship. A key feature of an ideal customer success platform is the ability to track and manage all conversations, outreach, and communication in one place. Everyone from customer success managers to team leaders to executives should have visibility into customer updates, notes, and next steps in order to ensure a clear, straightforward relationship plan for every customer.
2. A single, objective customer success ‘grade’
Customer ‘success’ is measured by many different metrics. There is NPS, platform engagement, incident reporting – the list goes on. With so many metrics to track, it can be overwhelming to get a hard read on exactly where a customer is when it comes to sentiment. A key feature of your customer success platform should be an objective, weighted ‘grade’ that combines all of these external metrics into a single score to keep your team on track towards customer success.
3. Intelligent forecasting and revenue management insights
As customer success has become such a large part of both corporate strategy and revenue generation, a huge focus of the function has shifted to growing and expanding accounts. While CSMs work hand-in-hand with account management teams on identifying areas of expansion, your customer success platform can provide additional visibility and predictability into these conversations. By combining revenue forecasting insights with detailed customer success reporting, customer success teams can approach account expansion, renewal and growth from a strategic perspective.
Across the board, the most important part of any customer success platform feature or function is organization and flexibility. Customer success platforms should automate and streamline processes wherever possible so your team can get more done and provide a higher level of service to customers.
More from ClientSuccess
Finding the perfect customer success platform for your team is key for ensuring long-term success for customers. With a clear understanding of the right features and functionality needed in a customer success platform, your team can operate at a higher level while delivering superior service to customers.
You can learn more about investing in your ideal customer success platform with these additional resources from ClientSuccess: