Customer Success Process: 7 Tools You Must Try

The customer success process is changing. You’re still searching for ways to grow accounts and reduce churn. But now, there’s more to client communication than phone calls and email.

The communication process for customer success has evolved. So, your toolkit needs to evolve too. 

With Slack shared channels, part of Slack Connect, you can support teams from client organizations in real-time. Through Microsoft Teams, you can invite guests to chat about their services. 

This is great for internal communication, but how often does your client use the same platform as you?

To improve customer success, you need a strategy for maintaining a connection with clients after a deal closes.

In this post, we’ll cover:

• What is customer success?
• The modern customer success process
• Customer success process examples
• Improving customer success with SaaS
• Leading customer success tools

What is customer success?

To give customers the best experience, you create a relationship with them.

Customer success involves following up and asking clients for feedback. It also means answering any questions people have about how to use your tools. For some companies, a customer success process will involve training and onboarding sessions.

A customer success team anticipates the needs of a customer. Over time, you proactively provide solutions to possible problems.

According to Customer Success Mentor, Lincoln Murphy:

“Customer success is about more than delivering service or support. It’s about having real-time visibility into the issues customers are facing and finding smarter ways to manage those issues in ways that allow customers to extract maximum value from your product.”

Customer success process

Let’s take a look at customer success today. 

There’s a lot of variation depending on the specifics of the company. The process usually starts the day your client clicks “buy" or signs their order form.

• Start: You reach out and introduce yourself to the customer. This is the first stage of communication. 
• Requirements: Teams collect information on what the business needs. You’ll ask your client what problems they want to solve or how they want to use the service. 
• Planning: Here, you speak to the decision-makers about how they’re going to encourage adoption. You may need to learn how the team currently addresses the problem. 
• Training: Custom PDFs, documents, and videos help a team embrace the new tool. Webinars and in-person training are also options.
• Ongoing support: You remain in touch with your client. This means checking in and asking if they need support. Surveys and polls are handy for collecting data on customer satisfaction
• Growth and cross-selling: As you release new products, you introduce them to your customers, and offer extra advice. You also check-in on customers to see if they’re progressing towards their goals. 

Customer success process examples

In the past, customer success teams relied on calls and emails. Every stage meant arranging a conversation or scheduling a conference. This made it harder for companies to see the value of purchases immediately. 

Thanks to collaboration tools, the experience is becoming more agile. 

Here are some examples of teams using customer success to their advantage:

Chargify

Adam Feber, Director of Marketing, says the business identifies red flag metrics showing a need for outreach.

If an account doesn’t respond to an email for a while, this indicates a risk of churn. Chargify then sets up a quick conversation with clients to ensure they’re still happy.

Following up with customers through quick messages and calls keeps them engaged. 

Chameleon

Chameleon uses Slack channels to keep the conversation going.

CEO, Pulkit Agrawal, adds customers to a company Slack workspace. This helps form closer relationships between the customer success team, and the client.

Real-time messaging reduces the need for support tickets. Plus, if teams have any issues with onboarding, they get help fast.

Users are less likely to give up on something if finding help is easy. Adding someone to your collaboration channel opens the door for client retention.  

Hubspot

Hubspot recommends looking at your customer service department to begin with. These people know your customer better than anyone.

Equip your success team with guidance and tools. CRM software is helpful for tracking conversations. Regular polls and requests for reviews will help you measure customer sentiment.

Ask yourself, what's the desired outcome for each stage of the customer journey? How can you benefit the customer most at each step? What can you do better than your competitors, and where is your service falling short?

Remember, when creating your own customer success process, measure everything. Establish metrics like customer lifetime value and customer acquisition cost.

When you change aspects of your customer success strategy, only change one thing at a time. This will help to identify the best ways to evolve and improve.

Improving customer success with SaaS

Guiding customers to a successful experience is easier in the digital age. 

You can support clients without emails or face-to-face meetings. With the right tools, your success team can:

• Introduce product features in real-time with screen sharing
• Help customers to see the value of essential features
• Answer questions
• Share documents and helpful articles
• Work with other business specialists
• Grow accounts
• Increase client retention

The customer success process has been made easier through the introduction of specific customer success tools...

Customer success tools

1 - Catalyst

Catalyst helps businesses improve their relationships with their customers and reduce churn. Catalyst’s customers include Checkr, Sendoso, and Attentive. 

This customer success platform streamlines the day-to-day management of customer success tasks. You can identify both risks and upsell opportunities by building different health profiles. You can even integrate your entire tech stack so that your entire customer list is in one place.

With Catalyst, you can generate automated email playbooks that can scale touchpoints for better customer experiences without as much manual effort.

Features include:

• Customer segmentation
• Lifecycle management
• Product usage analytics
• Configurable dashboards
• Customizable success metrics

2 - Custify

For those that require a more personalized experience in their customer success tool, Custify comes with a custom concierge onboarding - a step-by-step process designed to help your team implement and get the most out of their tool. It offers a wide array of powerful features such as automation and a complex health scoring system.

Through automation, Custify gives you the ability to quickly transform your customer success playbooks into a series of automated actions, tasks, and prompts that significantly reduce your workload.

The health scoring system gives users a full view of a customer, with an intuitive, customizable setup that enables you to track multiple health scores simultaneously.

Custify’s top features include:

• Concierge onboarding
• Automation & playbooks
• Intuitive task management that can also be automated
• The ability to set up multiple health scores
• A full 360 view of the customer
• Custom CSM ratings and notes
• Multiple integrations and a simple API

Custify is designed to make a CSM's life easier. It adapts and scales with your needs. Its goal is to help you reduce churn and keep your clients happy.

3 - ChurnZero

ChurnZero is an award-winning customer success platform. You bring all the information you need about your customers into one space. This helps agents to provide relevant and contextual support.

ChurnZero provides client health reports to teams. Included in these, you’ll learn which customers are most likely to churn and which are happy. 

Features include:

• Analytics on product usage and conversations
• Health scoring and lifecycle management
• 360-degree workflow views
• Integrations with collaboration tools
• Success reports
• Agent playbooks

Offering easy lifecycle management, ChurnZero helps companies avoid churn. With a real-time platform for tracking client information, success becomes a team effort. 

4 - Gainsight

Gainsight is another customer success tool for reducing churn. The platform offers capabilities like reporting and feedback collection. 

One top feature is the Customer Health Score. This number measures the satisfaction of each client. 

Machine learning algorithms adapt based on customer past behavior. The more you use this service, the more effective it becomes.

Features include:

• Relationship tracking
• Team activity workflows
• Machine learning insights
• Mobile access to customer information
• Reporting and analytics

Gainsight makes it easier to keep your customers happy. Whenever a satisfaction score drops, you have the information to jump into action. 

5 - ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess helps teams keep and grow a customer base. In the software, you’ll find support for onboarding, adoption, and growth. ClientSuccess helps with things like sales to customer success hand-offs. 

With customizable dashboards, you can set bespoke milestones for your team. Importing customer data is as easy as linking your CRM or helpdesk.

You can also send product usage data from an app into the software. This means tracking adoption is easier.

Features include:

• Onboarding tracking
• Hand-off services
• Adoption tracking
• Cross-selling and up-selling support
• End-to-end view of customer information

ClientSuccess has a clean and easy to use interface. If you need specific detailed scores on customer satisfaction, ClientSuccess can help. 

6 - Totango

Totango helps businesses deliver value to customers. Leading companies like Google, Zoom, and Trustpilot all use this service. 

The customer success software shows you where you need to work on adoption. You can forecast recurring revenue opportunities. There’s also support for finding gaps in your customer success cycle. 

The Totango software provides plenty of visuals like graphs and reports. You can measure, test, and optimize to meet customer expectations.

The modular system includes:

• Onboarding tools
• Escalation and upsell services
• Automatic renewal prompts
• Tools for getting feedback
• Nurture and growth services
• Business reports
• Adoption and voice of the customer

7- SmartKarrot

SmartKarrot has a stark stand on managing customer experience, product adoption, and comprehensive customer success operations under an integrated platform. This intelligence-driven tool boasts automation, prediction, and prescription, and renders success outcomes for its valued customers.

This software aids in analysis, tests, and optimizations to meet and exceed customer expectations. Now, scaling operations with prescriptive and timely guidance is just a click away.

Features include:

• 360 View of Customer
• Customer Health Score
• Upselling and Cross-selling
• Product Usage Analytics
• Account Intelligence
• Customer Onboarding Tools

SmartKarrot's easy-to-use interface strives to adapt to customer's needs, codify and automate best practices, and consistently execute them for unparalleled success.

Improve your customer success process

Providing excellent customer experience is essential. But it’s tough to support customers without the right internal communications strategy.

Mio centralizes conversations between Google Chat, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. And you don’t need to install yet another app.

Mio sets the foundation for a smoother customer success process. This leads to a more efficient onboarding experience, reduced churn, and new opportunities.

Find out how Mio will help you win at customer success here.