Find the Best Customer Success Software & Grow Lifetime Customers

Find the Best Customer Success Software & Grow Lifetime Customers process.st/customer-success-software December 7, 2020

Amanda Greenwood December 7, 2020

Have you ever typed out a full message on your phone, only to realize that you’ve misspelled something at the very beginning?

It can often take you longer to navigate the teeny- tiny cursor back to fix your mistake than it did to write the message in the first place, right?

I’ve got a little trick that will make correcting your texts 10x easier.

If you slide your finger over the spacebar, you can move the cursor around quickly, easily, and accurately, letter by letter.

Try it!

With this small but effective tip, I’ve not only taught you how to get more value out of your phone, but I’ve also given you an example of how customer success works.

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“When you teach your clients how to maximize the value of your product, you help them succeed and you show them why it pays to stick with you.” – Tenfold, 10 Companies Mastering Customer Success Now, if I was an organization, I’d want to provide this type of value to my customers on a far larger scale – all of the time. And, judging by the fact that the use of customer success software platforms has risen from 25% to 43% over the past few years, so would a lot of other people.

Allow me to elaborate as we go through the following in this Process Street post: What is customer success software & what does it do?

Why you need customer success software How do you choose the right customer success software?

4 customer success software platforms to consider So, put your phone aside, and let’s get cracking!

What is customer success software & what does it do?

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Customer success software refers to a kind of platform or tool that collects data about who your customers are, how they’re using your product, and how you can help them get more value out of it. The exact function of customer success software will depend on your product or service, and how you conduct operations like onboarding.

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Having this kind of centralized, 360-degree view of each of your users will help drive satisfaction with your product, and ultimately result in happy, loyal, and lifetime customers. It will enable you to: Build strong relationships; Spot issues before they become problems; Proactively offer support; Identify opportunities for feature engagement and adoption.

But, to truly understand what customer success software is and the important role it plays within organizations, we first need to establish…

What customer success is & why it’s so important Customer retention is the new client acquisition.

There’s no doubt that your business needs to play a strong marketing and sales game to sustain growth, but it’s far easier and far more profitable to retain your customers than it is to acquire them.

“A 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 75%.” – Precision Marketing Group, 3 Memorable Customer Success Examples to Inspire Your Own Strategy To keep a tight hold over your customers you need to give them the best possible experience every time, all the time. You need to anticipate their problems, provide them with solutions, and show them how to get the most value out of the product or service you’re offering.

Which is what customer success is all about.

“Customer success is a system, run by people whose only goal is to help customers get the best out of your product.” – Process Street, What is Customer Success? An Introduction for SaaS Companies It’s about identifying what success means to your customers and proactively helping them achieve this with your product or service. “[Your customers’] commitment to you is only for as long as you’re delivering value…even if they’re in a multi-year agreement with you, they won’t buy from you or recommend your product again—unless they’re seeing value.” – Gainsight, The Essential Guide to Choosing a Customer Success Solution If your customers see the value in what you’re offering, they’ll not only stick around, but they’ll become loyal brand advocates and be more open and receptive to the upsell 3/15

opportunities you present them with.

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Below is a perfect, real-life example of customer success in action. It’s an email, from a Process Street customer (I’ve changed the name for security purposes), singing the praises of Tony – a member of our customer success team.

Hello Jason, I asked for your contact information so I could let you know about the outstanding support Tony has provided to us. He went above and beyond to make sure we were successful with our onboarding process set up. He’s representing your organization in an exemplary manner and we can’t thank him enough.

All the best, Fran If your customers succeed, you’ll also succeed.

“Success comes from focusing on a customer-centric approach…from a [continuous] feedback loop of service delivery, support, improvement, and surpassing expectations.” – Forbes, Why Customer Success Is The New Growth Engine For SaaS Companies Now that we know what customer success is and why it’s so important, let’s bring customer success software back into the picture.

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Customer success is key to securing lifetime customers and staying profitable, but how does customer success software help with this?

As we’ve already established, if you want to retain your customers, you need to give them attention, support, and exceptional experiences all of the time.

Not only do you need to be there for every step of your customer’s journey, but you should be anticipating the next three steps, and providing them with the support they need before they realize they need it.

To do this, you need to treat every customer like they’re the only one. Which is a tricky thing to do if you have more than one.

Say for instance you had 100 customers: How would you know who each of these customers are?

How would you know what success looks like for each of them?

How would you know what each customer has purchased and when they purchased it?

How would you know how each customer is finding your product?

How would you know if any of your customers have had any problems?

How would you know when their contract is up for renewal or when they’ve finished their free trial?

How would you find opportunities to upsell and grow each customer?

How would you keep track of your communication with each of your customers?

All these questions can be answered with customer success software.

“Customer success software allows you to keep track of your customer success best practices and workflows – like collecting and analyzing customer feedback, managing customer communications, and setting up self-service customer education.” – Hubspot, 12 Essential Customer Success Tools for Every Budget Customer success software helps you track, organize, assess, automate, and manage all your customer success operations from one central place.

If you think about it, doctors and customer success software have a lot of similarities.

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They both perform regular check-ups with ‘patients’; they both take the temperature of ‘patients’ to see if they’re feeling hot or cold; and they both determine the appropriate remedies to cure the ‘patients’ problems and make them feel better!

So, that’s why we need customer success software, I guess the next question is…

How do you choose the right customer success software?

As we established earlier, the uptake of customer success software has gone from 25% to 43% within the last couple of years.

Which is great!

It means there are loads of different customer success software tools, platforms, and solutions out there for you to choose from.

But how do you make that choice? What makes one piece of customer success software better than another?

For a start, you need your chosen customer success software to perform five basic functions.

The 5 key things all customer success software should do As a bare minimum, you’d expect your customer success software to: 1. Capture customer data, history, and feedback; 6/15

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Monitor and assess the health of your customers, in real-time; Identify opportunities to upsell; Alert you when contracts are due for renewal; Predict potential issues.

But aside from these five basic functions, the customer success software you choose should largely depend on what your organization needs.

“In practice, customer success methods and organizations vary in important ways across companies.” – Customer Success Association, Customer Success Case Study: A Survey of 5 Companies So, follow these three simple steps to determine what you need from your customer success software:

Step #1: Determine how many bells & whistles you need It’s natural to think that bigger is better because in most cases, bigger is better!

But not necessarily when it comes to customer success software.

If you’re a start-up or a smaller organization, you might only have a handful of customers.

Do you need an all-singing, all-dancing customer success software solution with all the expensive trimmings?

Probably not. A simple, easy to use platform would be better.

But, if you’re a large enterprise with hundreds and thousands of customers and a big customer success team, you’ll need something more robust to handle the complexities of your customer success processes.

Size does matter!

Step #2: Identify the tools you need to integrate with

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You probably have a variety of internal systems that collect customer data at key points.

For example, during the customer onboarding process, the sales team might store key customer information in a CRM system. The accounts team might store payment information in a billing system, and the customer support team might log their customer conversations in a support system.

Because customer success spans across the entire customer journey, your customer success team will need access to all this information and more.

So, make sure that the customer success platform you choose integrates with your internal systems, so you can sync data across all platforms.

Step #3: Decide what your customer success goals are

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What does customer success mean to you? Reduced churn? Increased customer engagement? Improved customer satisfaction?

You need to decide what customer success looks like for your organization, so you can choose the right customer success software to help you achieve it.

Think about how you want to handle your customers. How much time can you spend on each customer? Do you want to greet each new customer personally, or through virtual channels? Are you running a high-touch, a low-touch, or a tech-touch operation? Is your main goal to reduce churn, expand your customer base, engage users, increase customer happiness, or create brand advocates?

Once you’ve followed these three steps and determined what you need from your customer success software, you should be ready to look at some customer success software options.

Which is handy…

4 customer success software platforms to consider Because I can’t list out every single customer success software platform, tool, and app there is, I’ve narrowed it down to four.

Each piece of software I’ve listed offers something different, so there should be at least one solution that suits your needs.

1. Process Street’s customer success software 9/15

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Process Street’s customer success software creates lifetime customers.

It’s a cloud-based, zero-code business process management (BPM) platform. It allows you to create, organize, manage, and monitor your customer success processes with a simple, easy-to-use interface.

The best bit: Consistent customer success. Process Street’s customer success software gives you the ability to create workflows and ensure a consistently excellent approach to your customer success operations.

See how it works first-hand by watching the below video where Salesforce describes how they use Process Street to create consistent customer success processes.

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Watch Video At: https://youtu.be/BuP8pADSOs0

The key features & benefits: Create or use pre-built workflows for all your customer success processes to make sure that each of your customers gets the care, attention, and support they need, consistently. If you want an example of a pre-built customer success process, check this Upselling Process for SaaS Companies workflow out: Use form fields to collect information and build a 360-degree profile of your customers.

Reach out and respond to your customers at any time, from any location, on any device by storing key customer information securely in the cloud.

Spot red flags and identify upsell opportunities by tracking the real-time status of your customers ‘health’ via the Checklist Dashboard.

Connect to over 2,000 apps through Zapier, webhooks, or API integration to automate your customer success processes, trigger key tasks, and access your customer success data instantly.

Set dynamic due dates to alert you when a customer has finished their free trial, is due for a check-up, or is up for renewal.

The price: Prices start from $12.50/month but you can try it out for free.

Click here for more information.

2. Intercom’s customer success software 11/15

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Intercom’s customer success software gives customer satisfaction the boost it deserves.

Through its ‘conversational relationship platform,’ you can build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences.

The best bit: Instant messaging. Intercom’s customer success software has an in-built messenger function which makes providing proactive support effortlessly easy.

The key features & benefits: Business messenger allows you to respond to customer messages quicker than you can with a phone or an email.

Use the inbox feature to organize messages and respond to your customers as a team.

Prioritize conversations that need your attention by adding assignment rules and SLA’s.

Provide your customers with help center articles so they can serve themselves without needing your team’s help.

The price: Prices start from $39/month.

Click here for more information.

3. Akita’s customer success software

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Akita’s customer success software nurtures long‑lasting relationships with your customers.

It’s a customer lifecycle management tool that allows you to work proactively throughout the customer’s journey and provide relevant support when and where it’s needed.

The best bit: Customer segmentation. Akita’s customer success software allows you to segment your customers so you can tailor your customer success efforts to different customer requirements.

The key features & benefits: Schedule, collect, and track customer feedback and reviews to stay on top of what your customers are thinking.

Set-up alerts so you can take action when a customer is at risk of churn or open to an upselling opportunity.

Get instant insight into a customer’s health with powerful customer health scoring.

Segment customers into groups so you can use different approaches to suit individual needs.

Access to engineering support to help with the technical set-up and maintenance of the software.

The price: Prices start from $159/month.

Click here for more information.

4. Custify’s customer success software 13/15

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Custify’s customer success software turns customers into advocates.

Through the platform, you can see all your customer information in one, central place so you can manage your customers in real-time.

The best bit: Detailed customer profiles. Customer data is collected and consolidated to build a complete 360-degree view of your customers.

The key features & benefits: View all your customer data from various systems and platforms in one, central place to keep track of your customers easily.

Identify at-risk customers by setting customer health measures that tell you when to reach out and take action.

Set up notifications to alert you when an upsell opportunity arises so you never miss the end of a free trial or a contract renewal again.

Create playbooks that automatically trigger key customer success tasks such as sending onboarding emails and welcome messages.

The price: Prices start from $199/month.

Click here for more information.

And there you have it. That’s what customer success software is. That’s what it does, why it’s needed, what types of customer success software there are, and how to find the best type.

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If you’re still not convinced, let me leave you with this: $98 billion is left on the table every year by companies who fail to provide exceptional customer experiences.

I’ll let that sink in.

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