Quick Summary: Many CS teams still rely on mismatched tools that limit their impact. If your team is struggling with static CRMs, scattered data, inconsistent processes, reactive risk management, or lack of AI adoption, it’s likely time for a customer success technology upgrade.
ChurnZero’s latest Customer Success Leadership Study found that technology adoption shifts depending on company size by revenue. Nearly 70% of CS teams at larger companies ($500 million or greater) have adopted CSPs, while teams at smaller companies tend to lean on support and CRM software.
Whether this discrepancy points to budget cuts or misaligned strategies, it’s critical for a CS team to have the right technology for managing customers and building revenue through retention and expansion. Every trend points to customer success becoming the growth engine of businesses, and since customer success typically owns NRR (net revenue retention), tracking how the team’s investments impact performance is also part of that need.
Here are five top indicators that it’s time to upgrade your customer success technology to a purpose-built platform, if you’re not there already. (You’ll find even more signs it’s time to invest in CS technology here.)
1. You notice your CRM is holding your team back.
A CRM is a great tool for sales operations, but it falls short for customer success needs. Built to support a linear sales process, a CRM doesn’t support a dynamic customer journey in which onboarding, product adoption, and the renewal process fluctuate.
Using a CRM to manage your customer success workflows means that:
- The data is static and subjective, without any option to auto-update fields.
- The platform is a reference tool, not built for customer segmentation, and lacking built-in actions to trigger workflows or customer alerts.
- It won’t fully integrate with your product and other customer data sources (meaning your CSMs are missing out on data across product usage, finance system, support and development ticketing, and project management). If that sounds familiar, consider whether it’s time to evaluate whether to buy or build your customer success platform.
Find out more: the key differences between a CRM and a CSP.
2. Your customers do unexpected things regularly.
If you don’t have unified customer data, and a proper way to analyze and automate from it, then how can you expect to understand your customers’ experience and anticipate their needs?
Maybe you have the data somewhere – engagement metrics are in the marketing automation platform, sales lives in the CRM, product usage data lives in your own application, the list goes on. Regardless, without having your data in a central place, you’ll notice things like:
- Your customer sends an unexpected request to the engineering team to fix a product issue you didn’t know they were having…
- Because you can’t track customer product usage (therefore no tracking satisfaction, retention, product feedback, etc.)
- You don’t have enough data to segment customers based on meaningful attributes and behaviors
Find out more: Anticipate customer churn and more with customer success software analytics.
3. Your CS team’s processes feel inconsistent or repetitive.
Spreadsheets, meetings, manual tasks, emails… without standardized processes, how can you maintain an optimal level of service? Customer success is now a leader in retention and expansion revenue, and those top CS teams are mapping and easily tracking customer journeys, from onboarding to advocacy, on both the individual and account level.
Automating the process is not:
- Manually creating, scheduling, managing, and sending regular customer communications (AKA losing time and increasing your risk for error from repetition).
- Limiting tasks and assignments to date ranges in a marketing or sales system (instead of task creation based on behavioral data points).
- Missing major customer milestones without clear onboarding, renewal, and status processes.
Take a minute to watch how Frank Smith’s CSMs at Temenos always know what to do next.
4. You’re more reactive than proactive on risks and opportunities.
It doesn’t matter how experienced a CSM is or how long your high-value client has been singing your praises: a “gut feeling” will never accurately predict customer churn or expansion. It’s inconsistent at best and inaccurate in the long run.
Timing is everything, and it’s easier to wrangle with a CSP. It’s a perpetual advantage when you have the tools and plan to track customer events and get alerts before an issue develops. Without the proactive edge of a customer success platform, CSMs will miss:
- Usage drops for high-value accounts.
- Meetings or calls with that hard-to-reach customer.
- First renewal notices (is it too late for the customer to plan for it now?)
- Upsell opportunities.
Find out more: How ChurnZero’s Renewal and Forecast Hub ensures you never miss an opportunity.
5. You’re not taking advantage of AI yet.
It’s a common refrain now: integrate AI to make things easier, save time, do more. Despite knowing it’s a competitive advantage, most CS teams still have not adopted it into their tech stacks. According to the 2024 Leadership Study, only 21% of participants had incorporated AI (despite 87% indicating they are using or plan to use it in their work).
And the hurdle can seem hard to clear when teams want AI for automation, health scoring, predictive analysis, and the day-to-day – it’s not realistic to pull together all that data manually.
Find a CSP that has centralized its AI, and then you can avoid:
- Uneven distribution of use, such that different team members are experimenting without any standards or plans to scale
- Compliance issues, as half the team uses ChatGPT while others try out Gemini, Meta, or Claude
- Risking exposing customer data in AI models that will use what you import for training
Not sure where to begin? Start by identifying when to centralize your customer team’s use of AI.
