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Customer Success is a relatively young function in the SaaS space, which is why you can still see professionals across the world who are unsure about which CS tool that they should choose for their business.
Once you’ve decided to go with the CS tool (e.g CustomerSuccessBox), then choosing the best-suited one for your business, from the multiple options available in the market, could be a herculean task!
The following image is a grid showing the different Customer Success Platforms available in the market today.
CustomerSuccessBox is a leading player in the mid-market segment.
I hope to ease your pain through this cheat sheet. Let’s check out the different dimensions which you need to look at before you can finalize the tool.
Do you want the platform to be actionable or not? People no longer look at a successful platform purely from a data point of view. Data is good but more importantly, you need to know what to do with that data!
A CS tool should help you there. Actionability is:
The CS tool should have the ability to Integrate data sources smoothly and quickly. A company will need:
With regards to integrations, you want to factor in two key parameters- Quality of Integrations and decide if you want a 2-way integration. If you have a separate success and support team, then you do not need a support integration.
The platform should be able to see historical scores and data trends (what has changed in score). Ideally, it would be great if:
Average Revenue Per User. It’s a vital factor to be considered before buying a customer success platform.
ARPU Customer Success required or not (TABLE)
$100,000Set up a CS team where one CSM would typically handle 10 or 20 accounts.$5,000 to $50,000You’re restricted to serving customers remotely. You’d need to allott 50 to 100 accounts per CSM to justify a CS team.$1,000 to $10,000You will have to segment the customers into high-paying (close to $10k ARPU) and low-paying (less than $5000). The customers closer to $10,000 in ARPU would enjoy a customer success program. Whereas, the rest of the accounts could be treated with a self-serve platform with a lot of built-in automation.$1000Better to automate your processes
As already discussed, a CSM with 20 accounts as compared to a CSM with 100 accounts will have different expectations from the technology.
You need to first understand what does your customer expects or what does the market expects?
Playbooks are essentially simple processes that define a successful manager’s workflow. There are 3 key things to keep in mind here.
Which one is better- 100% automation or 100% personalized attention? An answer is a hybrid approach. We call it “optimized human intervention”: you automate everything and wherever or in whichever case, in whoever’s case it breaks, then comes human intervention.
Following attributes of a CS tool will work wonders when you need them.
Segmentation lest you bucket the customers with similar characteristics. Segmenting your customers in different buckets & cohorts helps you set up the right process & analyze the performance of the cohort. The CS tool you select will help you in segmenting customers intuitively. For example, if a trial account is actively using product features, it should be automatically moved to the convert segment so that a CSM can act on it and close the deal.
Some of the points to be considered in Analytics are:
You need both Account & User level reporting but the ability to zoom into an account should be huge. Also, don’t get lost in activity reporting. The number of tasks does not matter in the long run.
The CS platform should have the:
This is the last step in your evaluation journey and it comes down to every factor which we discussed earlier like growth stage, ARPU, required integrations, touch model, customization requirements, etc. Also, you need to know how often do new features come out? Is that information Included in pricing?
Check out The Essential Guide to Choosing a Customer Success Platform!
Customer Success is a relatively young function in the SaaS space, which is why you can still see professionals across the world who are unsure about which CS tool that they should choose for their business.
Once you’ve decided to go with the CS tool (e.g CustomerSuccessBox), then choosing the best-suited one for your business, from the multiple options available in the market, could be a herculean task!
The following image is a grid showing the different Customer Success Platforms available in the market today.
CustomerSuccessBox is a leading player in the mid-market segment.
I hope to ease your pain through this cheat sheet. Let’s check out the different dimensions which you need to look at before you can finalize the tool.
Do you want the platform to be actionable or not? People no longer look at a successful platform purely from a data point of view. Data is good but more importantly, you need to know what to do with that data!
A CS tool should help you there. Actionability is:
The CS tool should have the ability to Integrate data sources smoothly and quickly. A company will need:
With regards to integrations, you want to factor in two key parameters- Quality of Integrations and decide if you want a 2-way integration. If you have a separate success and support team, then you do not need a support integration.
The platform should be able to see historical scores and data trends (what has changed in score). Ideally, it would be great if:
Average Revenue Per User. It’s a vital factor to be considered before buying a customer success platform.
ARPU Customer Success required or not (TABLE)
$100,000Set up a CS team where one CSM would typically handle 10 or 20 accounts.$5,000 to $50,000You’re restricted to serving customers remotely. You’d need to allott 50 to 100 accounts per CSM to justify a CS team.$1,000 to $10,000You will have to segment the customers into high-paying (close to $10k ARPU) and low-paying (less than $5000). The customers closer to $10,000 in ARPU would enjoy a customer success program. Whereas, the rest of the accounts could be treated with a self-serve platform with a lot of built-in automation.$1000Better to automate your processes
As already discussed, a CSM with 20 accounts as compared to a CSM with 100 accounts will have different expectations from the technology.
You need to first understand what does your customer expects or what does the market expects?
Playbooks are essentially simple processes that define a successful manager’s workflow. There are 3 key things to keep in mind here.
Which one is better- 100% automation or 100% personalized attention? An answer is a hybrid approach. We call it “optimized human intervention”: you automate everything and wherever or in whichever case, in whoever’s case it breaks, then comes human intervention.
Following attributes of a CS tool will work wonders when you need them.
Segmentation lest you bucket the customers with similar characteristics. Segmenting your customers in different buckets & cohorts helps you set up the right process & analyze the performance of the cohort. The CS tool you select will help you in segmenting customers intuitively. For example, if a trial account is actively using product features, it should be automatically moved to the convert segment so that a CSM can act on it and close the deal.
Some of the points to be considered in Analytics are:
You need both Account & User level reporting but the ability to zoom into an account should be huge. Also, don’t get lost in activity reporting. The number of tasks does not matter in the long run.
The CS platform should have the:
This is the last step in your evaluation journey and it comes down to every factor which we discussed earlier like growth stage, ARPU, required integrations, touch model, customization requirements, etc. Also, you need to know how often do new features come out? Is that information Included in pricing?
Check out The Essential Guide to Choosing a Customer Success Platform!
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