With recent developments, especially in the B2B SaaS tech space, Customer Success Managers and Customer Success Softwares become increasingly important for organizations of all types.
The main career objective of any customer success manager is to help your customers realize value, see clear ROI and generate additional revenue on existing business.
Many organizations, already realize the HUGE power Customer Success is having, are often looking to empower and increase their Customer Success operations to unlock the full potential of their current customer base, this will often be combined and supported by Customer Success softwares, and Sales Softwares that can better support and enhance their continuous efforts and help them in hitting their quotas.
So why do you need to empower your Customer Success team with the right technology? What are the best Customer Success softwares out there? And how can you choose the best Customer Success software for your business? Let’s take a look.
What is a customer success software?
By definition Customer Success Software is software unifying all your customers data and information associated with their account into one centralized location where your CSM teams and upper management can view, edit, and track all relevant information about their customers or accounts they have been managing.
The main idea of implementing the right Customer Success Software is that it automatically syncs and gathers customer data from different resources and softwares that your organization is already using.
The best customer success softwares include include important features like: customer engagement analytics, product usage tracking, customer health scoring, complete customer profiles, workflow automation and real time insights, and most importantly a seamless integration to your CRM software so you and your CSM teams will always stay on top of things when it comes to your customers.
The benefits of implementing a customer success software
Now that we already have some information and ideas on what Customer Success Software is, and why there’s a growing demand around it among various B2B SaaS companies, let’s take a close look at the benefits you get when implementing the right Customer Success Software for your business.
Smooth, automated onboarding process
Onboard new customers on autopilot sounds like the sweetest dream every SaaS company is after. Thankfully we do have the right tools and technology to support this statement. The best Customer Success Softwares are the ones which enable you to create your very own customized onboarding process for new customers, send automated emails with different instructions, and to see who is struggling with the onboarding process and who’s been successfully activated their account following your pre-defined process. Additionally, it gives you actionable insights and feedback about the process you created, so you’ll know what’s working and what’s not.
Low churn rate, higher NPS score
Having the ability to almost completely supercharge you customer activities, account usage, and to understand when a contract renewable is about to take place and act accordingly with the account, minimize the risk for churn.
Moreover, a recent study found that companies who utilize the power of Customer Success Software are showing greater results in their NPS survey as their customers would highly recommend their peers about the service and the product.
Team alignment
There’s nothing better than having all teams aligned, by having a complete view on the customer profile, related data, actions, and suggestions. That way, you automatically ensure team alignment at its highest level since everyone gets notified about an account that is in risk, or about an account that requires immediate action.
Besides having your CSM team aligned it will also improve the communication and the alignment between marketing and CSM since in many companies marketing are also supporting CSMs with different campaigns throughout the entire customer journey, mainly by using different marketing automation tools.
360 degree view of your customer profile and activities
Gaining valuable insights, suggestions, and a complete visibility on your customers is paramount to success in today’s rapidly changing tech environment.
The best Customer Success Softwares can provide you with alerts, notifications, suggestions, and a complete view on the account health so you’re constantly staying on top of things when it comes to account management and account resilience.
The best solutions are the ones which can easily enable you and your team to view the history, conversations, channels, and account potential so you’ll know how much effort should be put towards this account maintenance and the overall ROI your company is projected to generate by having this specific account.
9 Best customer success softwares any CSM team should be using
While the benefits of having the right Customer Success Software in place are much clearer now, we’re happy to present with our top 9 Customer Success Softwares you should get to know today!
UserIQ
The UserIQ customer success platform helps software companies predict user behavior, act on it, and create winning experiences.
Packed with some great features like: customer health dashboard, product intelligence and in-app engagements such as user onboarding tours.
UserIQ helps hundreds of SaaS companies scale their CS operations and prove that customer success is company-wide success.
PlanHat
Planhat is a customer success platform that provides accurate insights, manages workflow and drives exceptional customer experience. Planhat is helping hundreds of B2B SaaS companies across the globe to easily enable a more customer-centric approach in order to maximize customer success, customer lifetime value, and reduce churn rates.
Amity
Amity is a well known vendor that provides robust Customer Success software.
Amity, uses an advanced AI algorithm to forecast and identify changes in customer health or churn, recommends the right actions and measures the effectiveness. The combination of real-time playbooks, intelligence and automation helps customer success organizations scale their operations rapidly and effectively.
Gainsight
Gainsight is a popular and innovative software that drives the future of customer success. The company offers a robust set of features focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, customer experience, and customer data. This unique all-in-one approach enables businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do and build a true customer-centric organization.
ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a real-time customer success software that helps subscription businesses reduce customer churn. The platform is uniquely designed to integrate with CRM systems and tightly into an application or service.
Totango
Totango’s customer success software platform helps businesses of all sizes optimize their customer engagement across the entire customer journey. Companies worldwide use Totango to get real-time access to customer health, stay alert to risks and opportunities, and engage proactively and intelligently with their customers to drive evaluation, onboarding, product adoption, renewal, revenue growth, and advocacy.
Catalyst
Catalyst is an intuitive and flexible Customer Success Platform built by CS Leaders for CS teams.
It helps Customer Success teams centralize siloed customer data, get a clear line of sight into customer health, and scale customer journeys that drive retention and growth. It also provides many options for integrations, flexible platform configuration, intuitive workflows, and more.
Strikedeck
Strikedeck’s Customer Success platform gives you the right tools to understand customer health, usage trends, reduce churn, improve advocacy, and increase CSM productivity in a centralized system that boosts your revenues.
Vitally
Vitally helps Customer Success teams to deliver outstanding customer experiences, meet unexpected challenges, operate more efficiently, and grow their business's bottom line. With Vitally you can easily unify all your customer-facing data -- across your tech stack with bi-directional and real-time integrations.
3 Experts tips for choosing the right customer success software
We really hope you’ll find your next vendor by using the above list of top vendors within the customer success softwares list, that’s why we wanted to share some expert tips and things you must look at before buying your next customer success software.
Pricing
When it comes to pricing you must make sure you understand the value and projected ROI in terms of timeframe. In other words, how much time will it take you to get back your initial investment you did in favour of getting this new Customer Success Software.
Some platforms will be charging based on usage and seats while others will charge a flat fee (usually annual fee) and will be charging extra for what so-called ‘out of the box’ features their platforms provide.
The last aspect in terms of pricing is that you shouldn’t be punished for growth! Means, in case you’re starting off with 10 CSMs, and after 6 months time you doubled your team to be 10 CSMs you should make sure that the platform can support you and your team and won’t get over charged.
Adoption
This one is paramount to the success of your team, your company, and the actual platform. You must pay close attention to how well this platform is being adopted by other businesses within your niche, talk to other teams who uses the platform, try to understand form them what are the pros and cons and then reevaluate and guesstimate how well this new solution you’re looking to implement will be adopted by your team, as you know their preferences and weaknesses.
Another thing to look at, in terms of digital adoption of the new Customer Success Platform is the support, and onboarding they offer. While some offer a dedicated account manager to act as you POC, others will offer only self-serve support and onboarding processes to get your team started.
Integrations
Integrations play a crucial role within the implementation and the success of the new software. Having the ability to use open-API or even a one click integrations feature can really help you and your team to see all data centralized into one location, regardless if it’s coming from your email, CRM, ERP, Live Chat Software or any other tool you temas are using to conduct daily interactions with you customers.
Having the ability to integrate to different platforms and to seamlessly and automatically update user data collected from various sources is the real game changer in terms of the adoption across the different customer success teams.
Under the hood
With the rapidly growing adoption of the SCM role in the B2B SaaS tech space and the need of companies to hire and train more customer success managers, we can also see many technological solutions to support their day to day work with the customers.These tools aim to deliver automated but yet human and helpful insights about the account health, analytics, and suggested improvements so your customer success team can easily manage their customer accounts and always stay on top of the game when it comes to customer satisfaction, possible upgrades, and low churn rates.We made this article specifically for you guys, who are looking to implement the right Customer Success Software for their business, and we truly hope that you got a better understanding of what a customer success software means for your business.
