Find the best Customer Success Software

Businesses play a major role in the success of their customers. In today’s competitive market, thriving enterprises are not only about making sales but also ensuring clients get full value from the product they've purchased.

Businesses, therefore, are focussed on building strong relationships to boost customer retention and prevent churn. They regularly monitor the customer lifecycle as well as use data to understand buyers' needs and preferences, which helps increase customer satisfaction.

Customer success software offers the insights and business intelligence companies require to make their customers successful. It facilitates customer communication, offers behavioral analytics, centralizes data storage, and automates workflows to help customer success teams perform better.

To assist you in selecting a customer success platform that's right for your business, we've created a buyers guide that has all the information you'll need.

Here's what we'll cover:

• What is customer success software?
• Common features of customer success software
• What type of buyer are you?
• Benefits of customer success software
• Market trend to understand

What is customer success software?

Customer success software is a software solution that helps businesses monitor the customer lifecycle, engage with clients, offer personalized support throughout the customer journey, and foster strong relationships even after closing a sale.

It enables them to identify signs of customer churn and dissatisfaction, such as a fall in product usage or an increase in support ticket volumes, and resolve these issues before they turn into full-blown crises. This ensures proactive customer service and increases customer loyalty.

Consolidated activity dashboard in SmartKarrot (Source)

Common features of customer success software

Here are some common features most buyers seek when purchasing a customer success platform.

Customer data management	Store customer information at a centralized location. This information can include details about previous interactions (on emails, calls, live chat, etc.), ticketing history, website activities, billing details, and more.
Customer account health monitoring	Access key metrics such as product usage data, customer sentiment and behavioral data, and the net promoter score (NPS—i.e., users’ willingness to recommend your company) to calculate customers’ satisfaction and account health scores.
Alerts and notifications	Receive alerts when there’s a drop in the NPS, an increase in customer support tickets, a fall in revenue, or other similar events, so you can identify issues and mitigate them proactively. You can also receive notifications for upcoming customer account renewals or pending activities, such as billing follow-ups.
Workflow management	Streamline workflows by managing tasks that affect customer experience. For instance, you can define a structured workflow, with step-by-step tasks, to onboard a new customer. Assign these tasks to your agents, set due dates, add details or comments, and attach relevant documents.
Reporting and analytics	Access key metrics related to customer churn, customer account health, revenue forecasts, and more to measure how well your customer success strategy is performing.
Email automation	Schedule emails to inform customers about company updates, product upgrades, new features, etc. You can also send automated emails to prospects, informing them about your offerings and relevant discounts.

What type of buyer are you?

Before you start evaluating customer success platforms, you'll want to know which buyer category you belong to. Most buyers belong to one of the below categories.

• Startups (fewer than 100 employees) and small businesses (up to 500 employees): These buyers are usually companies with products that have limited customer outreach, so their focus is on marketing their products better. They want to get new customers as well as retain the existing ones. These buyers should opt for a customer success tool with outreach capabilities (emails, social media communication, etc.), basic reporting, and customer account health monitoring to increase customer engagement and reduce churn.
• Midsize and large business (over 500 employees): These buyers have a steady customer base and a large product portfolio. They’re more focused on automating workflows to manage multiple customers and save time. They’re also interested in identifying upselling and cross-selling avenues through their existing customers. Such buyers should choose a customer success platform with advanced reporting and customer behavior analytics, so they can tap into more upselling and cross-selling opportunities.

Benefits of customer success software

There are several benefits of using customer success software. Here are a few of them.

• Data-based business decisions: The reporting functionality of a customer success solution provides insights into customer satisfaction, churn rates, support ticket volumes and trends, customer health score, and more. These insights help you make data-backed business decisions to identify product improvement areas and mitigate other customer experience-related issues.
• Higher customer retention: The software lets you collect feedback and track the NPS to analyze customer sentiments and satisfaction levels. Equipped with this information, your customer success team can identify issues and address them proactively to keep customers happy, which will ensure higher client retention.
• More time-saving: The tool can help your customer success management (CSM) team streamline workflows by automating routine, time-consuming tasks. With automated workflows, your CSM team will spend less time on administrative work and focus more on helping customers achieve success.

Market trend to understand

Here’s a market trend related to customer success technology that you should be aware of.

• Innovative use of artificial intelligence (AI) to ensure customer success: Businesses are increasingly investing in AI to get insights into customer behavior and understand their needs better. Customer success software equipped with AI technology can mine customer data to offer intelligent inputs, such as revenue expansion opportunities. Businesses can also use AI to get personalized recommendations for individual customers, resulting in better customer success rates.

Note: The application selected in this article is an example to show a feature in context and isn’t intended as an endorsement or a recommendation. It has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.