How customer success software benefits your sales, marketing, and product teams

When the responsibilities of customer success are confined to a single department, your customer success efforts become like a drop in the ocean. No matter how hard you work, how much water you pour in, the ocean is too big for you to make a transformative impact on your own.

Customer success should ripple out from the CS team through other departments. Customer Success software is like the pebble that starts that ripple, sending customer insights throughout your organization. 

Customer success software gives departments beyond the CS team access to customer data they might not have had before. Now they can see who your customers are, what your customers need and want, where your customers are in their journey, how your customers use your product and make decisions, and why your customers keep coming back, or not.

Those insights aren’t just crucial to the CS team. Sales, marketing, and product teams can all benefit from having the answers to those sorts of questions. We take a look at how these three teams can use customer success software to level up their game, positively shape the customer experience, and drive success.

How sales team can benefit from customer success software

Get a tighter industry focus

Customer success software can easily show sales teams the customer type or particular industry in which current customers have renewed, or are forecasted to renew. With this information, sales teams can prioritize outreach to prospective accounts in these high potential industry segments that have shown the best product-market fit and have contributed the highest predictable revenue.

Within customer success software, sales teams can use customer health scores to strengthen their sales territory planning. These metrics measure a customer’s product engagement, satisfaction, and renewal likelihood, among other factors. A health score compiles all of this data into a single score that you can use to help define your business’s ideal customer profile. Customer success software allows sales teams to automate, adjust, and monitor multiple scoring models at a time based on customer segmentation, lifecycle stages, and other situational factors.

Sales can also use customer review data to see which customers have engaged with a campaign and left a positive review to target prospects with similar attributes.

Find more relevant customer references

Customer success software manages all customer data in one place, so sales teams can quickly find references among your customer pool for specific use cases. Teams can use combinations of specific account attributes to search for their ideal customer. Some of these searchable attributes include a company’s firmographics (industry, size, funding, location), technographics (current tech stack and integrations), and product usage (features, functionality, frequency).

Teams can also use customer success software to quickly check if an account is still in good standing by looking at customer health scores, recorded survey responses, and financials. 

It’s also possible to log activity on customer accounts with customer success software, so sales teams can monitor how often they call on a reference. This way, they ensure they don’t overuse valuable advocates as well as track which references successfully convert prospects.

Set realistic timeliness, every time

Customer success software allows sales teams to have access to statistics and data in real time. When data gets handed down and passed around, they’re bound to become slightly skewed over time. During sales pitches, however, these discrepancies can have real consequences. 

Differences between what the data shows and how it usually goes when it comes to customer implementation can lead to sales teams making promises that CSMs and implementation managers later can’t fulfill. You risk frustrating or disappointing your new customer before they even get started with your product.

Customer success software, however, tracks the entire customer journey, down to task-level detail. Sales teams can view this data to find the average duration of onboarding among all accounts, or the average among a specific segment by targeting particular attributes. With this information in hand, sales teams can make accurate predictions and promises during the sales and implementation process.

Increase expansion opportunities

Customer success software allows sales teams to gather customer data all in one place as well as automate it to help increase expansion opportunities and renewals. Both quantitative (product usage, service utilization) and qualitative (relationship quality, satisfaction) data can be used to trigger personalized communications such as in-app messages, product walkthroughs, and emails. These can be set up to target just the right customers, at just the right time, with the most relevant upsell offers..

Renewal teams can also give more accurate expansion forecasts with customer success software by using the tool to report on customer health scores and predict the likelihood that a customer grows. With this data in mind, sales teams can better prioritize those customers more likely to expand in their pipeline.

How marketing teams can benefit from customer success software

Get more positive reviews and referrals by automating requests

Customer reviews and referrals are crucial to building your business’s reputation and popularity, and Marketing teams can use customer success software to increase their chances of receiving rave reviews by perfectly timing the request.

Using automated playbooks built into the customer success software, marketing teams can trigger emails asking for online reviews or referrals after a customer records a positive Net Promoter Score® (NPS). This allows you to capitalize on moments when your customers are more primed to spread good sentiments about your company.

Find use cases for every type of case study

Marketing teams can use customer success software to easily source customers for case studies without needing to ask or rely on the CS team for input.

Marketing teams first decide on baseline requirements for candidate consideration:

•  A customer’s health score: is it in the green, or “healthy”?
• Tenure: have they been a customer for at least nine months?
• Product usage: is the account above 80% license utilization? 
• CSM sentiment: does the customer have a sentiment score of at least a four out of five?

Then, marketing teams can begin their search. From the original pool of results, teams can narrow it down by searching with specifications drawn from their particular use case, such as industry, size, and product/feature.

After the marketing team has selected a candidate, the team can even use customer success software to help prepare for case study interviews. They can view an account’s logged activity and other key details to quickly get up to speed on the customer’s history.

Reinforce marketing resources

Marketing teams often rely on email to reach their customers. They promote new content, webinars, events, all within the same channel. Customer success software, however, can help them complement their outreach efforts.

Using a centralized success panel, which lives within a customer’s own application, marketing teams can reach customers with marketing content when they’re actively using the product. Customers can open the success panel (which first displays as a small icon similar to chatbot) to engage with the content or the message sent.

How product teams can benefit from customer success software

Know customers beyond their persona

Customer success software can serve as a single source of truth for your customer data and offer your product teams a deep understanding of your customers. With this understanding, they can build the best possible experiences for them. 

Product teams receive detailed insight from customer success software on how customers use and feel about the product. From there, they can segment customers into specific groups and then, based on these groupings, strategize targeted engagements and reporting.

Teams can use both pre-built as well as custom dashboards to track product usage, easily analyze trends, and identify opportunities for product improvements. They can also create alerts to notify them about significant changes in customer behavior, such as when a customer starts using a new or updated product feature.

Optimize customer engagement

Product teams can use in-app communications supported by customer success software to communicate with customers while they’re using the product, increasing the likelihood that they’ll engage, respond, or take action right in that moment.

In-app communications and WalkThroughs are effective ways to introduce new customers to the app, highlight new features, or simply display content to the right person at the right time. 

In-app communications can be tailored by customer segments, which allows you to customize messaging or guidance based on a customer’s role, tenure, product proficiencies, or use case.

Gather customer feedback for product improvements

Customer success software can collect survey responses, which contain valuable information about customers’ experiences, to help product teams identify pain points or opportunities for product enhancements. Product teams can use customer success software with integrated surveying capabilities to easily solicit feedback from customers to measure sentiment and satisfaction with the product. They can then stay informed about and adapt to evolving customer needs.

Teams can deploy popular survey types such as Customer Effort Score (CES), Customer Satisfaction (CSAT), and NPS. These sorts of scores and questions help product teams better understand customer satisfaction rates, how easy it is to use the product, and which customers are more likely to recommend your product.

With these insights to the customer experience, product teams can expand their perspective as well as their problem-solving abilities with customer success software.

Share customer data across the organization

When other departments — such as sales, marketing, and product teams — don’t prioritize or understand your customer, no amount of work will transform your company into a “customer-centric” company. It takes a company-wide effort to put the customer at the center of your business. 

An organization where every department makes use of customer success software and prioritizes the customers will always be greater than an organization with only a part that does. Customer success software democratizes your customer data, allowing every department to make better, more informed decisions when it comes to your customers.

Learn how implementing customer success software, like ChurnZero, can improve your cross-organizational collaboration and knowledge sharing in our webinar, “A CSM’s Introduction to ChurnZero.”