Customer Success (CS) software helps your enterprise understand what matters to your customers. And what matters most to your customers should matter most to you.

The reality of the unique relationship you share with your customers is captured in the raw numbers your CS software gathers, detailing usage rates, demographics, logged interactions, voice of customer data, and other key metrics. By sharing the insights of these multi-dimensional data streams across your enterprise, you increase accountability for the customer experience and create a customer-centered enterprise that is poised to effectively deliver customer lifetime value. It all starts with knowing how to gather customer insights and properly leverage that data.

How Does CS Software Work?

A customer success platform contains all the information needed to create a complete picture of your customers. It is a living repository of every customer engagement, touchpoint, product interaction, and piece of data generated by your customer relationship.

This covers every aspect of the customer relationship, including:

    • Financial: Contract and transactional data.
    • Voice of Customer: Survey responses and satisfaction scores.
    • Personal: Behavioral data and demographics.
    • Product Usage: Features being used and frequency of use.
    • Support: Help desk tickets and support status.
    • Touchpoints: Logged interactions with anyone in your enterprise.

You can generate an overview of a customer’s satisfaction with your product by combining key metrics into a singular health score. This metric provides at-a-glance insight into a customer’s likelihood to renew. Alternatively, you can use the customer success platform to delve deeper into specific metrics, such as adoption rate, in order to examine the factors that matter most to your unique customer.

Either way, you’re gaining insight into your customer’s relationship with your product. That knowledge is essential to creating a customer-centered enterprise that can generate ongoing value for customers.

How to Use CS Software to Achieve Your Goals

The digitization of business has created a customer-centric economy dominated by subscription services and SaaS enterprises. It’s a customer-driven market that empowers short-term thinking and an expectation of personalized service. The bulk of customer revenue is now gathered through repeated renewals and upsells rather than at the point of sale. As such, enterprises need to continually deliver value to customers in order to inspire loyalty.

The insights from CS software will keep you informed of your customers’ experience with your product at every step of their journey. From onboarding through adoption to renewal, you’ll be aware of exactly how your customer is using your product—and how you can help them maximize their investment.

Let’s take a look at how customer insights can help you during the major stages of the customer journey:

Onboarding

The onboarding process is all about giving customers the tools they need to integrate the product into their daily workflows. It is a critical first step, one that can define the customer’s attitude toward you and your product throughout their journey.

CS software allows you to monitor and guide every step of the onboarding process. For example, you can track the time spent on customer training and measure this progress against historic expectations to understand where a customer is on their journey and how to proactively help them. This information is then stored in your CS database for future reference. A customer that takes longer than expected to complete onboarding, for instance, may also require extra training sessions during the adoption phase.

Product Adoption

With CS software, it’s easy to track product usage. You should monitor metrics such as average time of login, frequency of product access, and new feature access in order to identify signs of positive growth or churn risk. You can customize CS software to alert you of fluctuations in product usage over any measure of time, be it weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually.

As your relationship develops, these alerts provide insight into your customer’s journey and can let you know if any actions need to be taken.

Upselling

Unlike renewals, upsell opportunities are not tied to a specific timeframe. Rather, they are the result of the ongoing customer experience and the rate of customer growth. By monitoring measures such as product and feature usage and license utilization, you can identify if and when a customer would benefit from expansion.

If, for example, a customer has reached the maximum number of seats allocated to their account and is continuing to grow, it may be time to offer additional access. Conversely, if your CS data is telling you that a customer is not frequently using a particular feature, you may consider more education initiatives.

In this way, CS software prompts proactive responses to a customer’s unique circumstances. It can provide a digital trigger that a customer’s situation has changed or that they have reached the end of a certain phase in their journey.

How to Gather Customer Insights that Matter

Your customer success software records every interaction in your customer relationship and makes it easier to identify the next steps. By collecting data from every touchpoint within your enterprise and sharing the resulting insights across your organization, you can create a better experience for your customers.

Used correctly, CS software helps you anticipate your customer’s needs and deliver lifetime value for years to come.