Quick Summary: Buying a purpose-built customer success platform offers stronger functionality, better integrations, and long-term efficiency compared to building in your CRM. Custom builds often drain resources, limit scalability, and rely too heavily on internal champions—making a CSP the smarter, lower-risk choice for growth-focused teams.
It’s the ultimate technology dilemma for customer teams and the execs who control budgets: should you buy or build your customer success platform?
When presenting a business case for a customer success platform, you can expect this to be the primary objection of a CEO or CFO: can we build this in our CRM instead of buying a new tool? Should you use the tools you already have to build something that will kind of get you what you’re looking for, or should you buy a tool developed for that specific purpose?
“People are always going to say, ‘Hey, we can build it. Why do we need this? We already have reporting in Salesforce; what are we really getting out of a CS platform? Why would we buy this?’” says Aaron Levine, chief financial officer at Prophix. “And while you can kind of mimic what a true CSP does in Salesforce or another CRM, along with some internal reporting, I think it’ll be more expensive ultimately, if you do it on your own. It’ll be less efficient, less effective, with far fewer insights. It’s harder to do on your own, and you’ll be less successful ultimately.”
So, why, exactly, should you buy instead of build, as Aaron explains? There are four major reasons:
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- CRMs are not created for customer success; CS platforms are.
- CS platforms offer better integrations with your CS tech stack.
- The resourcing drawbacks of a custom CRM build.
- The risk of a custom build champion leaving.
Here’s why they each matter, and how to arm yourself with rebuttals for handling the build versus buy objection.
1. CRMS are not created for customer success. CSPs are.
CRMs are designed to support sales teams, helping them track leads, manage opportunities, and close deals. They are deal-centric, perfect for managing a sales pipeline, but are not built to handle a CSM’s workflow or post-sale engagement. Once a deal is closed, a CRM often loses visibility into the customer’s journey, making it difficult to track product adoption, engagement, and value realization over time.
While some CRMs allow for basic account management, they still lack the tools to proactively manage customer retention, identify churn risks, or drive product adoption. A CRM primarily records static information, such as contacts, past interactions, and deal history, rather than providing dynamic, real-time insights into how a customer is actually using the product or whether they’re at risk of churning. Without these insights, CSMs are left reacting to problems rather than proactively preventing them.
A CSP, on the other hand, is purpose-built for ongoing engagement and complex lifecycle management. These platforms are designed to help CSMs:
Monitor customer health in real-time using product usage, support data, and sentiment analysis.
Automate key touchpoints based on customer journey milestones (onboarding, renewals, expansions, etc.).
Flag churn risks proactively before they become a problem.
Facilitate success plans and business reviews to drive long-term value and adoption.
While CRMs allow for task setting and manual assignments, their automation capabilities are typically sales-driven, such as setting reminders for follow-ups or tracking pipeline changes. They lack the ability to create data-driven, automated task triggers based on real-time customer insights, like sudden drops in product usage, delayed onboarding progress, or low engagement scores. For CSMs to be truly effective, they need software that automatically surfaces key insights and prescribes actions, rather than relying on manual tracking and disconnected workflows.
Ultimately, while a CRM serves as a customer database, it is not a proactive engagement tool. A CS platform ensures that customers are continuously receiving value, staying engaged, and ultimately renewing and expanding their business, something a CRM simply wasn’t built to do.
2. A CSP integrates better with your tech stack.
Customer success workstreams combine data from external and internal platforms, not just manual inputs like a CRM. The data integrations available in CS platforms like ChurnZero help CS teams monitor customer health, automate engagement, and drive retention. Here are some key integration categories and their benefits:
CRMs (e.g., Salesforce, HubSpot, Microsoft Dynamics). Syncs customer records, lifecycle stages, and engagement history, ensuring CS teams have a unified view of customer interactions.
Product usage & analytics (e.g., Segment, Pendo, Mixpanel): Helps track in-app behavior and feature adoption, enabling proactive engagement based on usage patterns.
Support & ticketing (e.g., Zendesk, Intercom, Freshdesk). Provides insights into customer issues and escalations, allowing CS teams to address pain points before they lead to churn.
Marketing automation (e.g., Marketo, HubSpot, Pardot). Aligns CS and marketing efforts by ensuring personalized onboarding, nurture campaigns, and engagement tracking.
Billing & financial (e.g., Stripe, NetSuite, QuickBooks). Helps CS teams monitor payment history, subscription renewals, and expansion opportunities.
Communication & collaboration (e.g., Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom. Enables real-time alerts and seamless collaboration between CS teams and other departments.
Data warehouses & BI tools (e.g., Snowflake, Tableau). Facilitates advanced customer analytics and reporting, helping businesses make data-driven decisions.
Surveys & feedback (e.g., Qualtrics, Medallia). Collects and analyzes customer sentiment, helping predict churn and improve the customer experience.
The integration and synthesis of this varied data creates a holistic customer view for CS teams, enabling proactive engagement, churn prediction, and risk mitigation through automation and personalization.
ChurnZero’s integrations have helped CallTrackingMetrics unify its customer workflows, says VP of revenue Jeremy Wingate.
3. A custom CRM build will drain your resources.
Building a custom CRM-based solution for customer success introduces significant resourcing challenges, including increased overhead, fragility, and a heavy time commitment from your development team, and the risk of creating a rigid, non-scalable system that fails to evolve with your business needs. You can expect:
Extensive upfront development work to configure workflows, automate customer health tracking, and integrate multiple data sources.
Ongoing maintenance and troubleshooting, as each modification or update to the CRM could potentially break existing workflows.
Heavy reliance on developers for even simple changes, since customization often requires coding, rather than being adaptable through no-code or low-code configurations.
Implementing a purpose-built CS platform, on the other hand, is a light-touch project for dev teams, more comparable to setting up Google Analytics tracking on a website. A junior developer can typically complete the integration in minimal time.
Beyond the technical overhead, a custom CRM build creates operational inefficiencies. CS teams must rely on engineers or data analysts to manually extract customer insights, often through ad-hoc data requests and custom reports that are tedious to produce. This slows down decision-making and burdens technical teams with ongoing, non-core requests that could otherwise be self-served with a CS platform.
A dedicated CS platform eliminates these bottlenecks by providing real-time product usage insights without requiring manual data exports. It offers pre-built dashboards, automation workflows, and templates that non-technical users can easily customize, and enables CS teams to act independently without constant developer requests.
4: There’s always the risk of your custom build champion leaving.
One of the biggest risks of a custom CRM build for customer success is the potential loss of the internal champion who designs, configures, and maintains the system. Many custom-built solutions rely heavily on a single person or a small team with deep knowledge of how the system is architected. What happens when the architect of the custom solution departs?
Knowledge transfer gaps: The nuances of the custom build may not be well-documented, making it difficult for a new team member to step in and manage the system efficiently.
Technical debt accumulation: Without a dedicated owner, workarounds and legacy customizations may become outdated or break over time, leading to inefficiencies and potential failures.
Scalability concerns: Future modifications to the system require significant time and effort from a new developer or admin, especially if the system was built with hardcoded rules, complex integrations, or undocumented processes.
Increased dependence on IT/dev teams: If CS teams lack self-service capabilities in the CRM, they will need constant support from IT or engineering, slowing down decision-making and reducing agility.
A custom-built system may seem like a flexible solution at first, but it often locks companies into a rigid, high-maintenance framework that becomes difficult to scale or pivot over time, making it a less-than-ideal long-term solution. By choosing a purpose-built CS platform, companies reduce dependency on individual employees, minimize disruption risks, and ensure long-term flexibility to adapt to changing customer success strategies.
