What is Customer Success?
Surely every company cares about how successful their customers are?
Of course they do. However, the term Customer Success usually refers to how subscription and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies manage their existing customers.
Why specifically SaaS companies?
Unlike traditional companies, they don’t get paid upfront. SaaS vendors are paid incrementally, in monthly or annual subscriptions. This means they need to work hard to retain customers long enough to cover the cost of acquiring those customers (and make a profit). This is where the practice of Customer Success comes in.
The objective of Customer Success is to help customers achieve their desired outcomes i.e. solve the problems that drove them to buy your software. SaaS Customer Success Managers (CSMs) work with their customers to figure out what they are trying to achieve and provide the required resources and training. This generally involves guiding customers through a structured onboarding and subsequently monitoring how users are engaging with the solution over time. CSMs will generally schedule either regular or reactive meetings to review progress and address potential issues or opportunities. CSMs will also monitor other touchpoints the customer may have had with the company like support tickets, NPS surveys, billing and feature requests.
Does it sound like you should be engaging in Customer Success?
If so, then you may be a good fit for a category of software called, unsurprisingly, Customer Success Management software.
How does Customer Success Management software help?
Customer Success platforms help subscription companies, particularly Software-as-a-Service [SaaS] companies, improve customer retention, reduce churn and grow revenues from existing customers.
They do this by pulling together all of a company’s key customer data into one place and use that data to track customer health, identify at-risk customers and uncover expansion opportunities.
What data is useful?
Some of the best sources of customer data for this type of software come from integrations with other business software e.g. billing platforms, support platforms, chat software, survey software and of course, CRM platforms, like Capsule, that contain much of your customer profile and sales data.
Akita is one of the longest-standing Customer Success platforms on the market and has a native integration with Capsule that pulls in all of the key customer profile, activity and sales details that are held within Capsule. As this data is refreshed every 3 hours - your 360 view in Akita is always up to date.
What are the benefits of Customer Success Software?
Once integrated you can combine your Capsule data with information from multiple other sources to do things like:
- Create granular customer segments use comprehensive filters to identify customers that require attention e.g. At-risk customers, Onboarding customers, customers with expansion potential, etc.
- Build comprehensive 360-degree customer account views all data is stored and accessible in one place.
- Get alerts for changes to your customers’ profile or behavior set and forget. You don’t have to ‘live’ in the platform. Akita will monitor your customers and notify you of changes you need to know about.
- Trigger Playbooks to automate some of your essential or repeating processes e.g. Onboarding new customers or managing your customers’ contract renewals.
- Build Customer Health Scores use data points from any source as components of your customer health score. The score is updated multiple times per day.
What is Akita? How does the Akita integration work?
Akita is Customer Success Software which integrates with Capsule. Simple. When connected, Capsule data will start to flow into Akita and automatically associate with your accounts and contacts to provide you with a true 360-degree customer view.
For more about how Akita integrates with Capsule see here.
