If you are looking for customer growth, you need a CSP
Wondering if your current tech stack is enough to foster ongoing customer excellence? Read on to learn why CRMs alone may not be enough to ensure strategic long-term customer growth.
See the differences between CRMs and dedicated customer success platforms (CSPs)
Customer success has undergone a transformative journey from its initial focus on customer satisfaction to become the central driver of recurring revenue, through retention and expansion, for subscription businesses.
To deliver on these expectations, CS teams need software that helps them understand product usage, engage and educate customers, recognize trends that contribute to retention and churn, and create a personalized experience – none of which you can find in traditional customer relationship management (CRM) systems. To thrive, your customer team requires purpose-built software.
Focus
CRM software is designed to help sales and marketing teams organize prospect data, maintain communication history, and track the likelihood that a prospect will buy your product.
Customer success platforms (CSPs) analyze data across the customer lifecycle to forecast relationship health, provide actionable insights, and promote ongoing engagement, with the goal of increasing retention and product usage. Central to this are customer health scores for understanding each customer’s likelihood to churn or renew.
Data
CRMs are designed to handle workstreams based on inputs from sales, most of which are drawn from ‘gut instinct’ and are entered manually.
CS platforms integrate customer data such as engagement with CS and support, sentiment, and product usage from disparate systems within your business, which you can use in workstreams to manage each customer’s lifecycle in real time.
Journey
A CRM puts contact interactions into one linear buying journey, regardless of the differences in experience between a new-sales vs. renewal opportunity.
A CSP enables you to segment customers and create tailored journeys based on complex customer lifecycles. CS teams can score, engage, and support customers based on segment and needs.
Workflow and Automation
A CRM is a digital filing cabinet; a point of reference that allows sales and marketing teams to track opportunities, engagements, and tasks. Users can see information about an account, but it’s often difficult to put that data to use within the system.
A CS platform gives you the ability to engage customers and anticipate their needs based on key data-points such as product usage and sentiment. With native reporting and workflows, CS teams can automate touchpoints and tasks to efficiently manage a growing book of business.
Reporting
CRM reports are built to help sales teams focus on opportunities with the new sales pipeline. They require manual intervention to manipulate data for deeper account insights.
A CSP provides flexible reporting dashboards for teams to get a holistic view of customer data. CSP reporting is designed to track usage, sentiment, health scores, engagements, and renewal forecasts.
Collaboration
Information collected within a CRM stays within the system. There are no features to allow you to share helpful data with customer accounts.
A CSP lets you drive accountability and transparency with customers through collaboration tools that provide progress reports, journey updates and checklists.