Your Quick Start Guide to Understanding Customer Success Software
A quick-start guide to customer success software: what it does, how it differs from a CRM, and why it gives CS teams visibility across the customer lifecycle.
TL;DR
- Customer success software gives an organization full transparency into customer information, bringing engagement, adoption, NPS, and health-score data into one place for CSMs and executives.
- Unlike a sales-focused CRM, a dedicated customer success platform is built for the entire customer lifecycle — onboarding, adoption, growth, and renewal — not just onboarding.
- A CS platform tracks multiple metrics and project plans in one solution, helping CSMs move customers past roadblocks and deliver a consistent, high-touch experience.
Over the last few months, customer success teams – and the unique relationships they have with customer contacts – have been thrust into the spotlight of the SaaS world. CSMs have been hard at work managing their customer accounts throughout the tumultuous months 2020 and, in many cases, keeping their organizations afloat until new sales can catch back up.
Now that the role and importance of a customer success manager is more important than ever before, many organizations are looking to invest time and resources into customer success teams. While sales-focused customer relationship management (CRM) tools are often the first to be considered, a customer success-specific software platform can be the key ingredient to take your customer success team to the next level.
Here is a quick primer on customer success software and why it’s so critical for CSM teams:
1. Full transparency into your organization’s customer success information.
In most cases, confusion or uncertainty around customer sentiment occurs because the right people don’t have access to the right information. A dedicated customer success software platform brings all of these details into one place so that everyone from CSMs to executives has the insight they need to make the right strategic decisions. A customer success platform helps manage everything from engagement and adoption metrics to NPS and customer health scores.
2. Tracking multiple metrics and KPIs in one place.
In addition to providing a single source of truth for your organization, a customer success platform also helps streamline account metrics and KPIs. Modern CSMs rely on multiple different numbers to accurately gauge the sentiment and overall ‘success’ of a customer account, and for a long time these metrics were only accessible from different places. With a customer success-specific platform, CSMs can visualize all of this data – including revenue information, feedback, and dashboards – in a single solution.
3. Designed for the entire customer lifecycle – not just onboarding.
While new customer onboarding and implementation may be one of the most important parts of a customer journey, it is only the beginning. A true customer success platform delivers solutions and strategic tools for every single stage of the customer lifecycle: onboarding, adoption, growth, and renewal. By working through current projects with these future goals in mind, CSMs can ensure accounts stay on track for success down the road.
4. Keep customers moving forward.
When a CSM is working through a project plan with a customer, a single roadblock or issue can cause a huge escalation and lead to high costs (including loss of customer trust) for a vendor. By tracking project plans and managing customer deliverables with a customer success platform, CSMs can tackle roadblocks and issues while still moving customer projects forward.
5. Delivering an optimal experience to customers.
Modern SaaS customers have come to expect a certain level of service and attention from the vendors they work with. Managing account project plans with a dedicated customer success platform shows your customers that your team is serious and dedicated to delivering a high level of service – and that your organization is worthy of a customer-focused reputation.
** Want to learn more?**
You can learn more about customer success software with these additional resources from ClientSuccess:
- Product Demo: Request a Demo
- Toolkit: Customer Success Metrics Toolkit
- eBook: Customer Success Best Practices from 20+ Executives
Frequently Asked Questions
What is customer success software?
How is customer success software different from a CRM?
Why do customer success teams need dedicated software?
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