Customer Success Software

Maintaining successful relationships with customers drives future revenue, helps prioritize resources, and attracts new customers to your brand. However, small and midsize businesses (SMBs) may not have the staffing resources to proactively monitor customer experience.

Customer success software can help. These tools help businesses understand their relationship with their customer base by aggregating data from customer relationship databases and customer service team communication channels. By scoring customer success, companies can proactively identify customers that require extra support or even highlight customers that may be ready for additional products or services.

In this guide, we'll cover:

• What is customer success software?

• What are the benefits of customer success software?

• What are common features of customer success software?

• How do small and midsize businesses use customer success software?

What is customer success software? 

Customer success software allows businesses to proactively assess the level of overall satisfaction that its customers experience on a day-to-day basis. By analyzing and combining key data from existing customer relationship databases⁠—such as customer service response times and customer satisfaction surveys⁠—customer success software can generate health scores that represent overall customer sentiment, track resources required for proper customer engagement, and generate reports that identify potential improvement areas.

What are the benefits of customer success software?

The benefits of customer success software for businesses and institutions include:

• Lower churn rate: Customer success software creates health scores that indicate the overall level of customer satisfaction. By proactively identifying unhappy customers, businesses have a golden opportunity to provide the required support needed to turn a customer on the verge of taking their business elsewhere into one that will continue to do business with you in the future.

• Manage resources: By providing detailed scoring, customer success software helps companies identify what areas of customer service require additional resources. Whether it be providing more assistance onboarding new customers or providing follow-up after customer service has been provided, customer success software uses the entirety of a customer's history to identify broader needs in customer experience.

• Increase revenue: Customer success software also identifies the products and services that your customer base is most satisfied with. In doing so, your business can emphasize these successes in the form of marketing campaigns to spur purchases and increase revenue. 

What are common features of customer success software? 

• Usage tracking and analytics: Track usage of customer service resources and interpret the effectiveness of customer experience measures.

• Onboarding: Familiarize new clients with your business' products, services, and customer support mechanisms.

• Customer engagement: Proactively initiate customer interactions aimed at improving customer experience or providing information on additional products and services.

• Activity tracking: Monitor and track project-related activities based on various metrics.

• Collaboration tools: Provide a channel through which customer service team members can share files, communicate, and work together.

• Health score: Create and aggregate a score for a client’s overall satisfaction with your business' products and services.

• NPS of customers: Calculate the net promoter score (NPS) of customers to ascertain the likelihood of them referring others to your company.

• Reporting: Organize and automate reports to more easily analyze customer success data.

• Revenue management: Utilize customer success data to plan for increased demand and revenue.

• Task management: Keep virtual checklists of action items and monitor the steps necessary for their completion.

How do small and midsize businesses use customer success software?

SMBs can use customer success software throughout the entire customer experience lifecycle. Once a customer profile is built, the software will then capture customer data, such as order history, customer service logs, survey results, and interactions with employees through either direct input or by pulling information from accounting or CRM databases. 

The software then uses this data to generate a customer health score that can be used to either identify which customers are primed for additional product offerings or that require additional attention to help SMBs proactively work to retain customers. Additionally, these businesses can determine which of their products and services customers are happiest with in order to keep up with demand and increase revenue.

What are some important customer success software integrations?

Customer success software solutions see their real power when they are put to use by other business processes. Consider the following integrations and how your company might benefit in using customer success data:

• Sales and CRM tools: By providing customer success scores directly to your sales and CRM systems via integration, sales teams can closely monitor satisfied customers who may be ripe for additional sales purchases.

• Email and messaging platforms: Integrating customer success software with messaging platforms allows questionnaires and surveys to be automatically sent to customers so that vital customer experience data can be collected.

What are the trends in customer success software I should be aware of?

• Social listening integration: A lot of what customers say about your products and services doesn’t come from a customer feedback form. Customers will frequently discuss their experiences with a company’s product or service on their social media platform of choice without the company even knowing that there has been an issue. As this trend continues, look for more customer success tools to integrate with social listening tools as a way of procuring more data related to customer experience and success.

• Growth of customer forums: It is becoming increasingly common for users of a product or service to create their own online forums and user groups through which they can share information about the product. Considering that users tend to be more open about their experiences with other users of the same product, customer success software will most likely be used to collect customer sentiment from these resources.

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