Regardless of whether it is a product or a service, it ultimately depends on what the customer’s needs are. If the businesses focus on giving an excellent customer experience, it surely leads to the profits they desire. When you know this fact, providing an amazing experience becomes your top priority. And it calls for customer success software which is a higher version of customer relationship management software – CRM, that is curated to gauge specific goals of driving success, and especially to cater to SaaS businesses.
Brief on customer success management software
The customer success teams have to focus on building meaningful customer relationships. However, they, are most probably, collecting data and dealing with complex formulas to solve.
A customer relationship management software eases this task of collecting data. But it limits itself to pre-sales activity and lacks a 360-degree view of the customer information.
To take it a level higher, the existing data in the tech tools are imported and are combined automatically to give 360-degree insights on the same information. This is to analyze the customer experience and reveal the clue to improve the working of the current strategies. This is what customer success management software does.
A software that erases noises and gives relevant information needed for the business to work on actionable insights. Actionable alerts take care of heavy tracking and KPI monitoring. Whether it is to increase retention or find opportunities for upselling or improve the customer health scores, it keeps you proactively ahead.
Delivering success to the clients by using the vendor’s product was never easier without the customer success software that tweaks all the essential paths of the buyer’s and customer’s journey from onboarding to customer advocacy and as well tracking the KPIs that resonate with the goals of the company.
Bonus Read: List of the Best Customer Success software for the year 2022
Customer Service Management Software
A customer service management software intends to engage customers and automate FAQ workflows. It is the customer support software that responds to customers’ queries as and when they request. This software enables faster and more efficient customer support by supporting multi-channels of communication. For example- chats, calls, emails, self-service, messaging, etc.
This typically follows a reactive approach towards customer satisfaction. A customer raises a ticket, you look into the issue and then resolve it to provide the best customer experience possible. Although customer support is an important leg in ensuring customer loyalty, it’s just not enough. You can’t afford to be reactive when your competitors are being increasingly proactive. That is precisely why you need customer success software.
What is customer relationship management software?
This is what we call CRM software. A tool far evolved from the spreadsheets helping in engaging the customers with your business coming with a unified intelligent system that makes gathering and managing the customer data way more accessible.
Mostly used for acquiring, analyzing, managing customer information, and planning strategies for marketing as well to maintain good customer relationships.
Customer success management vs customer relationship management software
Sales Activities
Managing to onboard, retaining customers, upselling products, and driving monthly recurring revenue (MRR) growth is the main objective of customer success management software. Where the journey of a customer starts post-sales and all those elements of the journey are taken care of here. Storing customer information and keeping track of pre-sales activities of the customers such as emails, phone calls, website visits, purchase history, acquisition and more is the focus of a CRM.
Metrics
CSM software will have metrics like customer acquisition cost and customer lifetime value which is based on the relevant information collected by driving customer advocacy and improved retention which is not a simple calculation. While CRM doesn’t look into these aspects as the tool only stores such information.
Pro tip: Serious about Customer Retention? Salesforce is not enough
Productivity
CSM software streamlines the process associated with the journey of a customer from onboarding to customer advocacy. Well, it increases the efficiency and productivity of the customer success team members to be able to achieve more success per team. In the case of CRM, it can’t increase productivity to this level as it alone is not sufficient to do so.
Customer Health Score
The Customer success management software offers insights on customer account health which derives value such as understanding the needs of the customers and offering actionable alerts to drive retention. In this case, customer relationship management software is not enough to handle the situation.
360 Portfolio
CSM software look into product health, relationship health, service health, financial health, and impacting other factors. This means, there is all data you need from onboarding to advocacy. CRM can’t look into these aspects of the customer data.
Product Adoption
Insights such as whether the product is adopted correctly or regularly and if the licenses are utilized or have a probability of downgrading can be derived from customer success management software. But a CRM fails to do so as they are not designed to monitor these data.
Touchpoints
The customer interaction with the product is analyzed through the term touchpoints. Regardless of the low touch or high touch model this data is well analyzed by customer success tools. A CRM can’t offer information on touchpoints.
Warnings
A Customer Success software alerts you of the risks associated with the customer. It provides insights to take necessary actions before they churn. The CRM software performs transaction management and shows no warnings or alerts.
Interactions
A high touch base is an approach that has higher human interaction. CSM software tells you when there is a need for human intervention. Whereas CRM software provides only raw data and making sense of the insights is a bit harder.
Bonus Read: Customer Lifecycle vs Buyer Journey, which should you focus on?
Business Reviews
To interact with the customers face to face, a quarterly business review is carried out, where it is conducted based on the information gathered from customer success tools such as product usage, license utilization, etc in CSM software. But carrying out this review using CRM software is not possible as it doesn’t gather the data needed for such reviews.
Handling Accounts
Customer Success software handles each and every individual account as it gives insights into each account’s health. Whereas the CRM software doesn’t track health and has no objective of catering to individual accounts.
Leader
Customer success management software is a leader in delivering customer success and hence has developed the precise product. Customer relationship management software is solely a customer information database. It’s pretty hard for the customer success teams to confidently drive success with this tool.
Tips: What should be focus areas of Customer Success leaders in 2022
Thoughts
The CSM software can drive real-time customer success with various factors associated with it. Whereas, CRM software is apt in revolutionizing customer relationship data. They both differ in this aspect.
Teams
A customer success management software helps in carrying out the customer success team’s responsibilities and nullifies most of the manual work. The customer relationship representatives, rather than customer success teams, use customer relationship management software. If used by CS teams, they have to indulge in manual work a lot.
Wrapping up
With a notion of impressing customers by giving the best customer satisfaction, there arises a need for qualitative customer success management software for all the businesses that greatly value customers in the SaaS industry. Picking and implementing it appropriately is essential. With that being said, you don’t have to worry about revenue churn as it provides every information right there in the application to take action.
