An Ultimate Guide on Customer Success Software

What is Customer Success Software?

Customer success software is a tool that is designed to help team members such as customer success managers to manage their day to day activities. It gives CSMs a 360 degree view of the entire customer relationship, and keeps track of where they are throughout the customer lifecycle.

Just like marketeers have their own marketing automation platforms and sales teams have CRM systems that manage their communications with customers, so do customer success teams need their own tools that help customers find value in the software.

Your customer success software brings together all your customer data in one system so you calculate customer health score and analyze activity relating to your SaaS. CS software takes the customer past onboarding, through to adoption, and then renewal and upsell.

Why do I Need Customer Success Software?

1. Makes it possible to proactively reach out to customers

In contrast to customer support, which is a reactive function, customer success teams are tasked with the responsibility of reaching out to customers who might need help. This type of communication is proactive because CSMs don’t wait for customers to send a distress signal before they offer their services.

Customer success software assists with this type of communication by giving you a customer health score and data relating to product usage. CSMs finally have the insights that tell them when is the best time to speak to a customer.

Instead of sending them vague, generalized messaging that doesn’t really hit home, you can mention that you’ve noticed that they haven’t taken advantage of a particular feature. You can send them a targeted message with a tutorial that helps them get the most out of your software.

2. Reduces customer churn significantly

The big advantage of customer success software is helping your team to reduce churn. Some level of churn is inevitable, as companies no longer have a need for your services or it turns out that there isn’t a good product fit. Preventable churn occurs when customer’s card details expire or they fail to be properly onboarded to your software.

Customer success software helps you prevent this kind of churn by alerting your CSMs when customers aren’t moving through the stages of the customer journey and they have gotten stuck somewhere along the way. Your software can automate actions that are designed to recover lost customers or your CSMs can reach out manually.

If you don’t intervene with customers who are unhappy then you risk losing them altogether. Looking at your churn data can tell you where your product is causing the most problems for customers and then you can take steps to eliminate the bottleneck.

3. Offers in-depth reporting and tracking

Segmenting customers and tailoring customized reports is a crucial benefit of customer success software. CSMs can view at a glance important KPIs like customers by journey stages or customers by industry.

The platform will typically integrate with financial systems like Chargebee and usage tracking softwares like Segment to bring in all the data that you would need to understand the health of the customer in one simple view. The advantage of customer success software is not that it does everything, but integrates with other products that fulfill vital functions.

You can quickly see whether credit cards are expiring and identify when there is a reduction in active users, with all the information together in one place. It’s no longer necessary to switch between more than one app and or gather data from different sources into a spreadsheet.

4. Identifies opportunities to cross-sell and upsell

As well as tracking and preventing the risk of churn, customer success software also provides you with insight into cross-sell and upsell opportunities. It can alert your CSMs to when customers are reaching the end of their free trial with your software and increase your trial to paid conversion rate.

Your customer success software will also tell you when customers have fully implemented your solution and are taking advantage of all the features you have to offer. These customers are ripe for an upsell to one of your higher-paid plans.

It tracks customers through the customer journey from onboarding to adoption, to renewal and upsell, letting you add tasks, activities and milestones. Never miss an opportunity again for cross-sells and upsells to happy and satisfied customers.

5. Enhances customer onboarding

Churn is most likely to happen early on in the customer lifecycle when customers don’t understand how to use your product and fail to find value in it. 63% of customers think that onboarding is key to deciding to subscribe to a product. That’s why a vital benefit of customer success software results in improvements to the customer onboarding process.

Using customer success software, you can define the onboarding process as it fits in with your business and assign tasks to particular CSMs and customers, which will increase the likelihood that the onboarding phase is as smooth as possible.

This is where you’ll especially want to keep of customer health score and monitor the plays, tasks and milestones that tell you when a customer has become stuck. You’ll be able to spur your CSMs into action, allowing them to understand where the bottlenecks are and propel customers forward on their journey.

6. Streamlines workflows for CSMs

With customer success software, your CSMs have access to their own personal dashboards. In the dashboard, they can discover all the information needed to fulfill their daily activities and meet their goals, such as upcoming tasks, calendar, emails from their customers and support tickets.

When CSMs don’t have to switch between multiple third-party softwares to manage their activities, their work is streamlined and they can achieve more in less time. The right customer success software will provide you with a broad overview of every customer so that CSMs have necessary context each time they interact with an individual.

CSMs understand exactly what they have to do when your business uses plays to automate your customer success processes, in the course of which tasks are automatically created for CSMs. These automated tasks, along with tasks that are manually created by the CSMs, are all available in one place in the workspace so your team always knows what they have to do.

7. Enables you to manage high volumes of customers

Without customer success software, your CSMs have to manually track and interact with each individual customer. This is time-consuming, and totally unnecessary when you realize there is software available that can automate many customer actions with plays and automations.

Many parts of your customer success process can be automated so that CSMs don’t have to manually perform many tasks. You can create tasks and meetings, and send personalized emails at scale so that every customer feels important.

In customer success software, plays enable CSMs to define milestones, activities and tasks that will implement your Customer Success processes. You can create plays for various processes like onboarding, renewal, low health score revival, and more.This makes it much easier for them to keep track of their high-priority tasks and intervene with customers at the right time.

How can customer success platforms address the challenges?

Having the right set of tools to manage hundreds of accounts at the same time is important. A Customer Success Platform lets you collaborate with multiple departments of different clients, with different backgrounds to brainstorm strategies for expanding accounts after you’ve already delivered value.

The CS platform can send out automatic monthly updates on new products and company news, keeping your customers in the loop. Plus, it can track key metrics like NPS scores and set up alerts for when something needs attention. This way, you’re always a step ahead in managing account health.

You can dig deep into your customers’ needs and preferences. This knowledge is gold when it comes to creating successful onboarding and ongoing education experiences tailored to each account.

Now learn how you can leverage the Churn 360 customer success platform and streamline your manual process.

1. Automating customer onboarding

Manual customer onboarding processes can be challenging, often leading to inefficiencies and potential churn. However, with the right tools and other automation solutions, you can transform the onboarding experience. Here’s how:

Challenges in Manual Customer Onboarding Processes:

• Time-Consuming Activities: Manual onboarding involves repetitive tasks, such as data entry and searching for relevant customer information, which can consume valuable time.
• Information Overload: Sorting through a vast amount of data, including past activities and customer history, can be overwhelming and make it challenging to focus on what’s relevant.
• Personalization Barriers: Providing a personalized onboarding experience becomes difficult when you’re bogged down by manual processes and lack the time to tailor interactions.
• Communication Gaps: Keeping track of communication and follow-ups can be prone to human error, leading to missed opportunities or unanswered queries.

How a Customer Success Platform Can Streamline Customer Onboarding:

• Automated Activity Tracking: Customer Success Platforms like Churn 360 can automatically sync with CRM systems, providing a 360-degree view of customer activities. This eliminates the need for manual data entry and ensures you have up-to-date information at your fingertips.
• Efficient Data Retrieval: By offering easy-to-use search and sort features, these platforms simplify the process of finding relevant customer records, contact engagement history, and notes. This means you can quickly access the information you need without sifting through heaps of data.
• LinkedIn Integration: Integrating with LinkedIn through the platform allows you to access valuable customer insights directly from their profiles. This information can be used to personalize interactions and build stronger relationships.
• Email Templates: Customer Success Platforms often include email template features, making it easy to send consistent and effective messages. You can save time by reusing high-performing emails and ensure smooth handoffs between teams.
• Task Reminders: Setting up reminders within the platform helps you stay on top of crucial tasks and follow-ups. This ensures that you don’t miss opportunities and maintain proactive communication with customers.

2. Streamlining support ticket management

Managing support tickets manually can be repetitive and time-consuming, as each ticket often requires manual entry and tracking. It can lead to inefficiencies, such as

• delays in ticket resolution,
• lack of prioritization, and
• difficulty in assigning tickets to the right teams or individuals.

For faster resolution of tickets, the CS platform provides efficient ticket assignment and tracking workflows. It consolidates customer data, including support ticket history, into a single accessible location, providing a holistic view of each customer’s journey and issues.

With features like automated actions and triggers, a Customer Success Platform allows for proactive engagement with customers. For instance, it can identify users with specific support needs based on their history and engage them with relevant resources or solutions.

A great Customer Success Platform like Churn 360 helps you with

• significantly enhancing support ticket management by automating processes,
• improving workflows,
• enabling proactive engagement, and
• seamlessly integrating with existing tools.

3. Enhancing customer communication and engagement

Imagine a customer who signed up for your service a few months ago. If they haven’t used it much, the platform can flag this and prompt you to reach out. You can offer assistance, answer questions, and turn a potentially disengaged customer into a satisfied one. Well, manual processes make it a tedious task and customers may get disengaged and leave you without intimation.

Instead of spending hours drafting and sending individual emails to customers

• after they’ve made a purchase,
• when there’s no activity in the dashboard after sign-up
• the platform can automatically send a thank-you email with a personalized message right after they buy.
• show instant gratitude when your customer unlocks a new feature.

This way, you don’t need to dig through endless email threads to find crucial customer info and customize communication as per their needs.

4. Optimizing data analysis and reporting

Manual data analysis and reporting can be a real uphill battle for Customer Success Specialists. Here are some common challenges:

• Manually collecting and processing data from different sources eats up precious time, leaving less room for strategic tasks.
• Human error is a constant risk when handling data manually, which can lead to flawed insights and decisions. Customer data often resides in various systems and spreadsheets, making it hard to create a comprehensive view of customer health.
• Manual processes may not provide timely access to critical data, which can hinder proactive decision-making.

A customer success platform can rescue these challenges

A Customer Success Management (CSM) platform that serves as a single source of truth for client-related data is essentially a centralized hub where all relevant information about your clients is stored, organized, and easily accessible. It acts as a comprehensive repository of data, providing a 360-degree view of each client’s history, interactions, needs, and preferences. This means that you no longer have to juggle multiple tools, spreadsheets, or systems to gather information about your clients; it’s all conveniently housed in one place.

Moreover, such a platform allows you to prioritize your book of business effectively based on criteria provided by management. You can use various features and functionalities within the platform to rank and segment clients according to specific criteria set by your team or organization. For instance, you can prioritize clients based on their revenue potential, engagement levels, support ticket history, or any other relevant metrics.

5. Monitoring Customer Health:

Monitoring customer health is critical for any Customer Success team, but manual analysis can be a daunting task. Imagine a scenario where you have hundreds of clients, each with multiple data points to track, from product usage to support tickets and communication history. Manually calculating health scores for all of them is a time-consuming nightmare.

When you switch to a Customer Success Platform–It automatically collects data from various sources, like product usage analytics and support ticket systems, and calculates health scores for each client in real time. For instance, if a client’s product usage drops significantly or they encounter recurring issues, the platform instantly flags it.

This real-time insight enables Customer Success Managers to reach out proactively. They can offer assistance, address concerns, and ensure the client stays on the path to success. It’s like having a radar system that spots potential problems before they become critical.

Additionally, with customizable metrics and data visualization, the platform provides a clear, at-a-glance view of each client’s health. This makes it easier to prioritize actions, allocate resources, and make data-driven decisions. In summary, a Customer Success Platform simplifies health score monitoring, helping teams stay proactive and focused on ensuring customer success.

7 features you need in your Customer Success Software

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.

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 Customer 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.

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.

Which Customer Success Software is Best for Your Business?

We’ve got some of the best customer success software solutions out there for you.

Churn360

First, we have to recommend our very own Churn360. It’s customer success software that is perfect for growing businesses and comes with all the features you’d expect to make your customers successful. Churn360 is AI-driven and helps B2B SaaS companies turn data into actionable insights to reduce churn. You can set up Churn360 within minutes and integrate with all your favorite third-party solutions such as Pipedrive, Chargebee and Freshdesk.

Managing customers for success has never been easier. You can group customers with similar attributes that are available in the system together to help CSMs perform bulk actions, enabling them to look after high volumes of customers. Save even more time with plays that convert your customer success processes into templates, making them reusable and repeatable.

ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a real-time customer success platform that enables subscription businesses to reduce customer churn. Their software solutions allow businesses to gain an appreciation of the ways that their customers use their product, and analyze their overall health and their chance of renewing. Businesses also have the ability to personalize the customer experience through appropriate and relevant touchpoints.

ChurnZero brings together anything you might want to know about your customer in a single view. You can enhance your team’s productivity and eliminate manual, repetitive activities that distract your team from what’s most important: your customers.

Read more: Churn360 Vs ChurnZero: Which is a better customer success software?

Totango

Totango is aimed at large enterprises with a sizable customer base managed by a big customer success team. It’s an agile customer success software that gives teams the ability to design, run, measure, and scale their SaaS customer journey to retain and grow customers.

The customer journey starts with increasing activation, conversion, and retention of your freemium customers, moving through personalizing the product adoption experience to maximize usage and release additional value, and finally automating the renewal process to enhance customer retention and growth.

Read more: A detailed comparison between Churn360 and Totango

Steps to go Through for Implementation

Choose a system administrator

Choose a dedicated CSM to be the system administrator of your new customer success software. Without a team lead, the launch will be a failure and you won’t be able to update and maintain your new system.

Your system administrator will be responsible for leading the charge in replacing all outdated systems with your new software. They will take the initiative in resolving all technical issues and liaising with the customer support team to ensure the software is working correctly.

Work closely with your onboarding specialist

There is likely to be an onboarding specialist working for your new customer success software who will be in charge of onboarding. Work with them to ensure that you understand your new software and can make the most of every feature to help your customers.

Take advantage of all the help available for implementing your new system and ensuring that it delivers on everything that was promised. Ideally the system will be intuitive and you can learn on your own, but it never hurts to work closely with the onboarding specialists when you’re in the early days.

Train your CSMs in using the software

CSMs who are well-trained in your new system are more likely to adopt it and implement it in their daily work. Set the time aside to show them how everything works and help them understand how it can assist them in helping customers.

Training never stops, even when your new system has been implemented. New features might require more training and system overhauls means your CSMs might need a refresher in how to use the software.

Keep the team informed about upgrades and updates

If you invest in the right software, it’s likely to be regularly updated with new features and more streamlined workflows. To keep your team engaged, make sure that CSMs are consistently informed about new features that will make their work life easier.

Before committing to your new software, find out about the product roadmap and the improvements that the team intends to make in the near future. Regular updates are vital to continuing value for money and ensuring that the software keeps providing useful features.

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.