How to Choose the Right Customer Success Software

Customer success software plays a critical role in enhancing your support agents’ performance, sales, customer education, and marketing metrics, as well as overall financial results. According to G2, “Customer success software is a solution that provides a unified view of customer relationships with a business throughout the entire customer journey.”

Without these solutions, companies find it very difficult to accurately measure a customer’s journey through a product, from how it is sold to how they gain value over time. Customer success software solutions are an invaluable resource for establishing long-term relationships with customers, developing the product, and discovering new sources of revenue.

Who Benefits from Customer Success Software?

No matter what department you’re in, everyone plays a role in ensuring customer success. Having the right software in place to automate processes can be of great value to:

Customer Success Managers (CSMs)

The days of traditional customer service teams are long gone. Today, companies implement a more comprehensive approach to customer success with their staff. Forbes cites customer success among the Three Approaches To Developing Customer Retention And Loyalty.

Support and Service

Support teams are prepared to face customer problems more efficiently with the right customer success software. In order to ensure your product is serving customers effectively, agents should have access to built-in metrics that reveal customer usage, customer health, and other criteria.

This data can also allow support agents to prioritize incoming user tickets to address the most critical issues first. For example, If many customers generate similar support tickets, the best software can provide data to the training team to create a custom educational module to address that issue.

Related: Support + Content: A Win-Win for Customer Education

Product Managers

Data from customer success software can help product managers better understand how users are interacting with their solutions. By leveraging customer success software, you gain access to a customer’s health score and other related information to make smarter decisions. A health score is a method for tracking and scoring customers based on any metrics you deem important. In addition to this, a health score lets you forecast potential outcomes with users. It may also possible to use these tools to identify your top clients and communicate regularly with them to get their feedback on your products.

Product Development

The Product Development team can view customer requests, questions, and complaints that will help improve and enhance the product. The right software will let you prioritize and review IT tickets to understand where there are product glitches that need to be resolved.

Sales and Marketing

Sales departments can check customer data such as onboarding status, adoption trends, and health scores to improve reps’ performance. Marketing can identify advocates and target them for referrals both proactively and reactively with the help of customer success software. Additionally, the Marketing department can easily see whether various customers experienced a positive return on investment using your product.

Customer success software allows companies to increase the lifetime value of customers while making each customer feel as though their needs are being met.

Customer Success Software Types

There are several types of customer success software, generally classified according to their primary function. Customer success software can be used for the purposes of:

Analytics

In their study Introducing customer success 2.0: The new growth engine, experts at McKinsey agree that customer success analytics should assess and predict customer risks and implement activities to increase client satisfaction.

Analytics solutions offer a comprehensive view of customer activity by tracking revenue, support contacts, product usage, and more. With the correct data, you can accurately measure customers’ health and drive change through these indicators. By examining customer attributes and actions, managers can identify trends and predict future product performance. Comprehensive customer relationship management solutions like Salesforce and Hubspot have analytics built in to help support these activities.

Communications

You have a variety of customer success software tools at your disposal to communicate with your users. For instance, you can chat live or create customized onboarding and lifecycle emails based on specific actions taken by customers.  Some examples include Intercom or Zendesk.

Related: Build Better Customer Relationships With Intercom & Skilljar

Customer Support

Customer support is clearly a strong indicator of customer success, as customers that have questions or issues need prompt attention. There are several types of support software, including documentation management, ticketing systems, and community forums.

Improving Customer Success with Customer Education

While all of these types of customer success software play an important role, they are not designed for customer education, which is a key contributor to customer success. In fact, you may need more than one customer success software to help you achieve different goals. The key is to identify which solutions best fit your business needs, with seamless integration capabilities so they can all work together to serve your customers.

Related: The Key to Any Successful Integration is Implementation

Delivering a great experience to your customers is no longer optional; it’s a must-have. A customer education program can be one of the most effective ways to cultivate meaningful, long-term relationships with your clients.

A learning management system (LMS) specifically designed for customer education can assist companies in driving product adoption, scaling customer success, and tracking ROI on customer satisfaction. A specialized cloud-based platform can offer self-service, on-demand online training so you can support more customers while also creating faster, more consistent onboarding procedures. You help build customer relationships and boost long-term customer satisfaction by providing the right content to your users when they need it.

4 Customer Success Software Features to Look For (and Why)

Given the wide variety of customer success software available, how can you be sure you are choosing the best option for your business? Let’s review four features to help you get the most from your investment.

Branding

You should be able to create a seamless experience for all user-facing customer success software features so that it feels like one unified session. Consistency in brand guidelines, look and feel should be a consideration for optimizing the customer’s experience.

Integrations

Make sure you have a list of desired integrations before you invest in any customer success software. By using a combination of online training software, communication platforms, marketing automation software, and CRM solutions, you can boost the power of all of these tools. Remember: The more integrated and visible data becomes, the greater its impact on tracking customer training, satisfaction, churn, renewals, growth, and product adoption.

e-Commerce

You can also find software tools that provide you with e-commerce features for revenue opportunities and upselling. The best LMS solutions for customer training, for example, support flexible pricing, packaging, and discount codes to purchase individual classes or a package that can lead to certification.

Training

With customer success software focused on training, learners can take courses online at their own pace or participate in instructor-led training virtually. Many companies offer these training sessions as a free service or as a value-added service, or simply use webinars to educate customers in the early stages. Later on, customer training can be used to offer certifications for various types of software.

Providing your customers with on-demand training integrated into your customer success software can help you address common problems facing support teams and reduce their burden. Training automation allows customer success managers and call agents to handle fewer issues, so they can focus on strategies for customer growth, all while utilizing fewer resources.

If you’re looking to enhance your customer success efforts by focusing on customer training, consider Skilljar. It is a leading, purpose-built education platform designed for external learners. You get access to all the tools needed to onboard, engage, and retain customers through education on our enterprise-grade platform. We provide features to help you effectively engage customers that integrate with today’s most widely used customer success software solutions.

Want to learn more about how Skilljar can help you meet your customer success goals for onboarding, retention and engagement?

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