Customer Success Managers (CSMs) are deeply engaged in managing customer relationships. Each customer needs care and attention to increase the chance that they are successful with your SaaS, which enables your product to keep justifying their subscription fee. To enable these relationships to grow and thrive, CSMs need access to specialist tools called customer success software.
Customer success software integrates the data from various systems to provide a full view of customers in one place, as well as offering other features that allow CSMs to track the health of their customers. CSMs are able to obtain deep insights into the success of their customers with the software without having to log into multiple systems. They can see at a glance which customers need immediate attention.
These tools are designed to increase the efficiency and productivity of your CSMs, allowing them to handle a high volume of customers with a multiplicity of needs. In order to choose the right platform, you need to be aware of the core features that your software should have.
7 Top Customer Success Software Features
1. 360-degree view of customers
As we’ve mentioned, your CSMs are likely to be tracking and communicating with your customers through multiple sources. Customers could be using various channels such as email, chat, phone, and online meetings, all of which are handled through several third-party tools. Customer success software brings these channels into one place so any member of your team can gain a 360-degree view of your customers. Other third-party apps such as billing software or CRM tools can also be integrated.
2. Customer segmentation
No two customers are exactly alike but there are common traits that exist across customer segments that can help you group them together to perform bulk actions. Customer success software allows you to segment your customers based on existing data such as industry type, renewal date, health score, or journey stage. Once you’ve created your segmented view, you should be able to use it across the platform.
3. Plays to automate your customer success processes
Plays and automation enable your CSMs to manage more customers at scale while still remaining personal. For example, you could send a welcome email and wait for five days to check for a login, and if the condition is met you can enroll in an onboarding play. If the condition is not met, you can send a reminder email to prompt customers to take action. You can define milestones, activities, and tasks that make it easier for CSMs to understand what they need to do.
4. Customer journey tracking
Customer journey tracking makes it easy to track customers across the customer journey lifecycle, reducing the risk of churn by identifying whether they are moving through the stages of onboarding, adoption, renewal, and upsell. If customers get stuck in the lifecycle then CSMs can be prompted to take corrective action according to the unique steps that happen at each stage. Smart widgets show how the customer is doing and display the most important information about them for CSMs to work with.
5. Customer health score
Health scores are an important part of customer success software because they tell you which customers are most at risk of churn based on an aggregation of various factors. The health score is an analysis of factors such as usage information, licensing information, license utilization, billing status, credit card expiry date, NPS, CSAT survey responses, key sponsor relationships and more. Your health score factors can be adjusted depending on what is most important to your SaaS business and its customers.
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6. Sending campaigns
Your customer success software should have the capability to send customizable surveys that can be issued either by email or through in-app communications. It’s important to regularly capture customer sentiment and this feedback can contribute to customer health scores. Surveys can be sent according to predefined conditions based on plays and automation, reducing the amount of manual work required from CSMs.
7. Push notifications for your customers
Customers using your SaaS platform can be sent timely communications within the app containing targeted messages to improve the user experience. For example, you could inform your customers about new feature releases, or keep them informed about scheduled maintenance. You can also send customers in-app checklists that can take them through the onboarding process and help with product adoption.
Wrapping Up
Customer Success Managers who want to build healthy relationships with their customers need the right software to support their activities. Customer success software is vital for SaaS companies that want to scale and help growing numbers of customers to succeed. If you don’t have the right features, you won’t be able to empower CSMs to help customers more effectively, when and where they need it.
For all of these features and more, check out Churn360’s customer success platform.
