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Marketers have marketing and sales automation platforms while sales teams leverage customer relationship management tools. It’s only natural that customer success managers have their own secret weapon to help them achieve their goal of helping customers in getting the most business value out of their solutions and services.

Customer success  is the key to reducing customer churn rate, increasing customer engagement and retention, identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and discovering customer advocates that can help boost revenue. However, to fully reap the benefits of a customer success model, businesses must integrate a technological solution into their operations.

A customer success software is a solution that offers a consolidated, 360-degree perspective of a business’s customer relationships across the entire customer journey. The software unifies all of your customer data from third-party applications such as email, live chat, customer support tickets, and CRM services, providing insights into customer behavior and access to each computed customer health score.

A customer success platform is crucial for optimizing your customer support team’s performance, sales, marketing analytics, and overall financial results. Customer success software solutions are a valuable tool for building long-term relationships with customers, developing products, and discovering new income streams.

Given the wide range of available customer success software, it is important to take a minute to examine your business’s needs and identify how a particular solution can help your business grow. 

Here is a list of factors to consider to help you get the most from your investment.

Number of Clients

Your choice of customer success software is heavily influenced by the number of clients you service. This type of software is packed with several features that you may or may not want to acquire or utilize, depending on the number of clients you now have or anticipate having.

For instance, you may choose a less expensive and less comprehensive plan if your customer base is likely to remain small and there is little prospect of expansion. On the other hand, if you’re expecting to grow and scale your business to support thousands of clients, you may want to invest in a customer success solution with more extensive capabilities.

In the same manner, the difference between offering in-person service or implementing an effective chatbot to create a positive experience for your customers depends on the number of customers you expect. It would be unreasonable and unrealistic to expect your employees to respond to thousands of simultaneous online queries.

Touch Model

A touch model refers to the level of attention that a business can afford to provide to every customer.

A low-touch strategy is appropriate for a large volume of consumers who have straightforward demands and are willing to pay less for solutions and services. 

For a smaller number of high-value consumers, a high-touch strategy is ideal. These customers have more complex requirements and demand more personalized service.

A mid-touch model combines both one-on-one human interaction and digital engagement and is typically used for mid-range transactions of moderate complexity. 

Note that there are other elements to consider when choosing the ideal touch model for your business. Online forms, chatbots, personalized group emails, and other kinds of communication may be used in different ways. The combination and strategy you choose are entirely dependent on your business model and the specific needs of your customers.

Integrations

When evaluating customer success solutions, it’s critical to understand the integrations available. Make a list of your required and desired integrations before investing in any customer success software. By utilizing a combination of marketing and sales automation software, CRM solutions, communication platforms, and online training software, you can maximize the value of each of these tools.

Keep in mind that the more integrated and visible data becomes, the more influence it has on customer satisfaction, attrition, renewals, growth, and product adoption.

Interface

Naturally, the interface will vary depending on the customer success software you use. Therefore, you should conduct thorough research on the software you’re considering to determine whether you’re satisfied with the interface or not.

The interface options for data representation vary. Additionally, you may discover that more affordable plans offer considerably fewer interface options, making it more difficult to make informed decisions on client satisfaction and retention.

Moreover, take note of the benefits of having intuitive UI  when choosing a solution. A user-friendly interface can help increase customer acquisition, improve customer retention and engagement, identify and optimize revenue-generating opportunities, and gain more insights from user engagement.

Analytics

Consider the range of reports and analytics you need to perform on your customer success software. 

Some of the customer journey analytics your customer success team may need to track include the following: customer satisfaction, customer health scores, customer retention rate, churn rate, product usage, product engagement, net promoter score (NPS), and revenue-increasing opportunities.

Conclusion

Juggling several accounts with varying demands requires organization, patience, and a clear understanding of your business goals and expectations. A customer success solution can be an excellent tool for accelerating your strategy, but only if your objectives are clear from the beginning.

Choosing a customer success software solution, configuring it, training your team and clients, and integrating all of your existing data into this new system may all feel very intimidating.  

However, using the right customer success software for your business will not only make your life a lot easier, but it will give provide you with the resources to make informed decisions to boost customer satisfaction and increase sales.