What’s a Customer Success Software? And How To Choose One

The implementation of a customer success software is unavoidable in today's SaaS businesses.

CS softwares enable the success team to understand your customers to increase their success and your subsequent retention and revenue growth.

You've hired a customer success team to make the procedure simple for your customer, which can bring them the maximum results out of your products. However, hiring a team is not enough for customer success; you must now choose a software that aligns with their needs, for the perfect execution of the company's strategies.

Generally, selecting a customer success software is challenging for most businesses.

Even if you have prior experience in using one, you must take time to decide the right one for you. In this article, we'll clarify the concept of customer success and how to choose the right customer success software for your business.

What is customer success?

Let's clear our basics with the definition of customer success— it refers to helping you increase the customer success with your product and solving their problem proactively.

In the end, it brings mutual benefits in the form of long-term relationships that supercharges your conversions.

The customer success term often overlaps with others such as customer support, account management, and customer experience. But all of these terms are different and signify their respective roles and responsibilities.

So here are brief descriptions for all these terms;

• Customer support is responsive behaviour that is performed after the problems come in.

• Now, accounts management, as its name directs handling your client's account, comes into its scope. It is similar to customer support when it comes to its reactive nature and solving issues as they occur.

• Last, customer experience or CX. The purpose behind a better CX is to provide an interactive and visualised sales process even if it doesn't bring a collective purchase.
• Finally, customer success is all about getting sales to drive revenue and enhancing value to both sides.

How to choose the right customer success system?

Make a list of desired needs from a CSM software

Choosing a CSM according to your company's needs sounds easy to start with, and at the same time, is highly crucial for you.

A CSM that works for another company can be useless to you. So while choosing your desired CSM, you need to keep in mind your customers' needs, team's efficiency, and the company lifecycle's stage.

So the best way to decide the customer success software for you depends upon your business's needs. I would advise you to make a proper list with pen and paper before settling on any customer success software.

I will explain the proper steps you need to follow in choosing and implementing the customer success software. However, if you've already decided on any particular software, go ahead and skip to the implementation part.

Examine your choices before making the final decision

It can be a situation where you will fail to check off all your needs from a customer success software, which is quite natural.

Gather data about the experiences of the existing users of the shortlisted customer success software. Ask them about the implementation expertise required, maintenance frequency, cost, and usage monitoring ease.

Read the CSM's reviews on online platforms and investigate the online community of that CSM tool.

After all that investigation process, you are ready to know if that CSM is for your company or not. Because if it's not, you would be losing out on the capital you've invested in that product and training.

Ensure if it has the required Integration

When you purchase a customer success software impulsively, and it is not in sync with other systems like marketing, surveys, support, CRM tools, services, billing, and advocacy. This scenario can be a headache for you.

To avoid such a situation, you should contact their sales team and clear your doubts.

But if your existing CSM system is having trouble syncing with other tools, you should implement it in different phases with a well-devised strategy.

While you think about your ideal customer success tool—Successeve helps you carry your business by integrating with a wide array of tools such as Segment, Intercom, Salesforce, Zendesk, Hubspot, Stripe, Slack and others.

Choose your touch model

A touch model refers to the total money you can spend in terms of attention to each customer. There are three ranges of touch models corresponding to the significance of a single customer.

• No Touch

It ranges between $100-$5000 of annual recurring revenue. Companies with minimal recurring revenue mainly go with this model.

Either one customer success manager handles hundreds of accounts at one time or various accounts with no personalised managers. AI is often used to give an automated customised response based on customers' data.

• Low touch

With annual recurring revenue of $5000-$100K, it is a popular model among mid-scale companies.

A customer success manager handles 50-200 accounts, and they focus on solving all of the customer's queries as soon as possible.

They keep track of the usage of the subscription purchased by the customer. If a customer is not using the subscription proactively, it's the manager's job to attract them again with reasonable offers and re-establish communication with them.

• High touch

Companies with a customer lifetime value of more than $100k per annum use the high touch model.

Each Customer Success manager interacts frequently with only 5-20 accounts, in a highly personalised way. With the proper study of consumers' data, they can personalise their every response for each customer.

How to implement a Customer Success System correctly?

Nominate a system administrator

One of your customer success managers should be comfortable working with your CSM software. It would be great if you could also involve them in choosing the right customer success software.

Even if you haven’t chosen the appropriate system administrator, there is no need to rush the process. Take your time and invest resources in training one of your skilled customer success managers to use the customer success software.

The right person for this role should be well-proficient in tech, interpreting the data, and explaining it to other team members in the most simplified language.

Train your customer success team on how to use customer software

After you've chosen your software, the next crucial step is to get your team members used to the software. Because they're the ones who will use the software daily. Your customer success manager or team should be comfortable with the critical functionalities of software.

If you skip this part, it may cause turmoil affecting the daily business activities or, worse, delay tasks. So, give them enough time to digest this new setup.

Leverage Successeve for your business

Successeve helps you create better customer experiences. You’ll have a unified dashboard to keep an eye on all of your critical metrics along with the 360-degree view for both customers and the companies.

Salesmachine accommodates all customer success teams needs with the tools they need. From no to low touch strategies based on personalised AI powered automations to high touch command center.n

This saves your time, and you can manage all of your actions in one place. It’s free to join the tribe with a robust customer success solution.

‍