While we all agree that marketing is one of the key ways to keep up your sales and sustain a company’s revenue, it is also important to acknowledge that marketing alone is not enough to please your customers.
They say that if you can keep your customers happy then nothing can come in your way to reach your goal. But in this competitive market, where new companies are emerging very quickly, how do you manage to hold your customer base and stop them from switching to other companies?
The answer is simple: using customer success management to build healthy relationships with the customers.
It is a proven fact that acquiring new customers is far more expensive than retaining the existing ones and this is where customer success management comes into the frame. With a well-drawn strategy, you’ll be able to ensure greater customer satisfaction and customer lifetime value.
However, without the proper set of tools, there is no way you will be able to carry out this technique efficiently. This guide will show you the necessary types of tools you will be needing to manage customer success.
Calendaring
As a Customer success manager, you will have back-to-back meetings, attend calls and not to mention the dozens of tasks you will have to complete. While you may have the drive to complete these tasks, you might face issues on how to manage time for them. This is where the calendaring tools will help you out.
Tackle is designed to show you how much time you’re spending on each of your projects or clients. Throughout the day you’ll be dealing with thousands of clients but all of them do not have the same significance. You need to categorize and then decide on how much time to spend on each. And if plans don’t go accordingly, this app will show you the results, and based on that you can reconstruct your working pattern.
Collaborative communication
Effective communication is fundamental to customer success managers. It shows how much value is being given to them and in return increases satisfaction. By doing this a company also gets to know the preferences of their customers so they can preempt them accordingly.
One of the fastest-growing platforms these days is Slack. This is designed for workspaces so that all the people linked to a company are able to maintain regular communication and find out the specific information they’ll need. Using its features, you can get more work done and also make quick and analyzed decisions
Task and Project Management
The role of a customer success manager is almost the same as a project manager and each customer’s needs are as a project to them. Finding the perfect solution for them under the specifications given by them and also according to a company’s budget is not a small task. That is why maintaining these projects in an organized way must be ensured.
Most customer success managers these days use project management tools like Trello to structure their work. Trello is basically a listing app. Using this you can collaborate with your clients or team and the best part is you can customize it to get the best outcome from your team.
Monday also has the same kind of integrations as Trello; however, it offers more features. Moreover, it gives you greater support but like all good things, it is priced higher than Trello. It allows its users to make their tools to get their work done and also provides better analytics as well.
Surveying
In order to gather relevant data, CS managers have to carry out multiple surveys so that their data is adequate for use and they can later utilize it to improve customer satisfaction.
However; using google forms to do this might turn out to be risky since it has some security issues. Typeform is an advanced tool to carry out surveys as it has more integrations. Moreover, it allows users to create more elegant forms and in return improves engagement from customers.
CRM
Customer relationship management tools are also vital for customer success managers. To understand your customers you need to dig out information from them and to do that you will need a lot of data. Now if the data is not organized, then it will be very tough to analyze and transform them into useful data, which can be helpful for product improvements in the future.
CRM tools are like a lifesaver for our CS managers. Copper is one such tool that automatically gathers information from G-Suite line of products like Gmail, Google Calendar, and others. The only thing you have to do is link these G-Suite accounts with Copper so that you have data for every lead of your company. Moreover, they offer a 14-day trial as well to demonstrate its many uses and benefits. Sounds like a good deal, right?
Pipedrive is also very popular among customer success managers for its tons of useful features. With this, you can have a clear overview of your progress with a particular client, have the ease of filtering out data from a cluster, save up time using the email templates, and also improve your product development and marketing strategy using their customizable reports feature. If you ask me, then I think it’s everything a customer success manager would need.
Managing customer success has become a big deal right now as it leads to greater customer satisfaction and retention. Keep in mind that acting smart in these cases is the key to success.
Rather than spending millions to gather new customers, think for a while and invest in customer success to deliver more value to your clients. In this way, not only will you be able to generate more revenue but save your valuable resources as well. And your route to acting smart begins with trying out these tools which are designed to make your career as a customer success manager easier.
