What benchmarks does your customer success team have for 2021?

Increased revenue? Reduced churn? An active customer base that’s eager to engage with your brand?

Attainable? Yes. Easy? Not exactly.

The good news is that some good customer success work — and a solid customer success platform — can help.

What is customer success software?

First off, a customer success solution is a dedicated software platform built especially for the needs of CS teams, giving them an unified view of the customer life cycle. From onboarding to feature adoption, you have a single pane of glass to see every piece of data related to customer activity, satisfaction and sentiment.

The best platforms offer user-friendly dashboards and compelling visualizations so you can grab a quick glance of customer satisfaction trends or take a deep dive into customer activity and sentiment data, including:

  • Customer health scores
  • Product adoption rates
  • Product usage figures

Having this data and insight in one location is an incredible time-saver and offers more context, quicker.

The right platform can act as your customer success team’s command center and help you manage every aspect of the customer life cycle, keep users engaged, capitalize on cross-selling opportunities and maximize the long-term value of your customer relationships.

CS tools to support every user

You know it. We know it. The job of a CSM is tough. Maintaining unshakable relationships with users and catering to their every need is a never-ending process that mixes science with art. Predicting outcomes, from churn to expansion, requires impactful data.

Customer success professionals wear a lot of hats. At any given time, you might act as a:

  • Brand advocate
  • Product trainer
  • Customer support agent
  • Product data analyst

That’s a constant rush to anticipate customer needs, resolve issues and produce tangible results.

A 2019 HubSpot survey found that 44% view reacting to customer demands as one of the hardest aspects of their work. Meanwhile, 39% cited difficulties with clearly viewing customer adoption figures and customer health scores.

That’s a lot to keep up with but customer success software can give teams all the insight and support they need to excel — all in a single package.

Metrics for stronger relationships

Tracking meaningful customer sentiment metrics can give your customer success team advanced notice of emerging trends and opportunities to proactively respond to dissatisfied users. This capability is especially important for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies relying on subscription-based business models and recurring revenue to maintain healthy bottom lines.

The beauty of a customer success platform is that companies can monitor any number of key performance indicators (KPIs) across different customer segments, individual accounts or the user base as a whole.

We’ve found these metrics often deliver the most immediate impact when it comes to keeping customers happy, building lasting brand relationships and assessing your customer success strategy:

  • Customer satisfaction (CSAT)
  • Net promoter score (NPS)
  • Churn rate
  • Customer lifetime value (CLV)

Consider also integrating your customer success platform with sources of customer data like your customer relationship management (CRM) system to tap into more insights and get a well-rounded view of each segment and account.

A customer success platform takes the guesswork out of customer success by putting all of that valuable information right at your team’s fingertips. Accurate predictions and better experiences start with understanding customers better.