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Demystifying the Core Features of a Customer Success Platform (CSP) + Free Guide

May 30, 2023
May 25, 2023
May 25, 2023
|
15
min.

In today's SaaS landscape, delivering a remarkable customer experience is non-negotiable. Customers expect personalization, efficiency, and a clear pathway to their goals with your product. To meet these expectations, you need a top-notch Customer Success Platform (CSP). 

Yet, with countless options on the market, finding the right one can feel like a monumental task.

A Customer Success Platform is a powerful software solution designed to streamline and enhance your customer success initiatives.

From offering a holistic view of your customer's journey to proactive engagement, automation, and beyond, these platforms revolutionize customer interactions. But navigating through features and benefits, and aligning them with your unique business needs can be challenging.

That's where our comprehensive eBook, "Choosing a Customer Success Platform: A Comprehensive Guide," comes in. It breaks down complex concepts into digestible insights, enabling you to make an informed decision.

In this post, we're giving you a sneak peek into the world of CSPs, focusing on their core features. We'll also introduce you to an innovative offering from Parative—the Customer Success Sidekick—that significantly enhances your customer success capabilities.

Parative's CS Sidekick is a lightweight overlay tool that turns your existing systems into a 'CS conversion kit.' It frees your teams from the constraints of a single dashboard, offering a CSM-specific cockpit for account management and Net Revenue Retention (NRR) enhancement. 

It comes with an array of features, including AI-Powered Churn & Renewal Scoring, allowing your teams to drive NRR from virtually anywhere.

However, the CS Sidekick is more than just a tool. It's an empowering instrument that revolutionizes your customer success strategy with data-driven churn scores, NRR forecasting, and AI-powered Upsell & Cross-sell Scoring.

What is a Customer Success Platform (CSP)?

Before we go any further, it might be useful to lay down a definition, as "Customer Success Platform" might mean different things to different people.

For the purposes of this post, a Customer Success Platform (CSP) is:

A comprehensive software solution designed to facilitate and enhance the customer success strategy of an organization. It equips customer success teams with the tools, insights, and automation necessary to proactively manage the customer journey, from onboarding to renewal and expansion.

What Should a CSP Do?

In this post, we will be focusing on five core categories of what you should look for in a CSP, including:

  1. Reporting and Customer 360: The platform's ability to provide comprehensive, actionable insights into your customers' behavior, preferences, and interactions. Features might include customizable dashboards, health scoring, cohort reporting, and other analytics capabilities that empower your team with a 360-degree view of the customer.
  2. Lifecycle Management: How well the platform facilitates managing various stages of the customer journey, including features like robust note-taking, configurable plays, onboarding task organization, and churn feedback mechanisms.
  3. Proactive Engagement and Automations: A platforms ability to enable you to engage customers proactively, including features like 1:1 and 1:Many email capabilities, task creation and management, product feedback mechanisms, and notifications/alerts.
  4. Integrations and Systems: A platform's compatibility with systems like Salesforce, Google Calendar, Google Mail, Slack, and others that are integral to your operations.
  5. Admin and Service Requirements: How well a platform fares in terms of user permissioning, passive tracking, dedicated customer success management, and initial implementation enablement and support.

Now that we've laid out our definition and set the groundwork for the feature categories, let's get started. Read the next section to learn about the first core feature: Customer 360!

Unlock the Power of Customer Insights: Customer 360 and Reporting

Every customer's journey with your SaaS product is unique. It's a winding path, filled with specific interactions, personal preferences, individual triumphs, and unique challenges. To help them on their journey, you need a map—a complete, 360-degree view of each customer’s experience.

That's where a key feature of any top-notch Customer Success Platform comes in: Customer 360.

What’s in a Customer 360 View?

Parative Unified Record compiled of data from other tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Pendo

A Customer 360 feature pulls together data from all touchpoints into a single, comprehensive view.

Think of it as having a detailed diary of each customer’s experience with your product. It’s got their preferences, interaction history, hurdles they’ve faced, and more.

This data-rich diary doesn’t just detail past and present interactions—it can also give you a glimpse of the future.

Making Informed Decisions

Imagine being able to predict your customer’s next step. With a 360-degree view, that’s possible. You can spot trends, identify customers who might need extra support, and even discover opportunities for upselling. This empowers you to make decisions that are informed, targeted, and effective.

For instance, let's say you spot a trend among customers using a specific product feature. They're engaging more frequently and their usage is on the rise. This could be a signal to proactively offer them an upgraded package that includes advanced features.

The Parative Edge: CS Sidekick

Success Sidekick used in any tool

While understanding the power of the Customer 360 feature is one thing, implementing it efficiently is another. That's where the Parative’s CS Sidekick steps in. It’s designed to work with your existing CRM, enhancing it rather than replacing it.

Like a well-fitted glove, it overlays onto your CRM, extending its functionalities and providing a seamless view of the customer journey.

Here's a real-world example: Your customer success manager is about to jump on a call with a customer. With CS Sidekick, they can pull up the customer's comprehensive profile in a single click. They'll see the customer's usage data, previous interactions, and even their sentiment scores—all without having to jump between multiple dashboards. This means the conversation they have with the customer is more informed, helpful, and efficient.

Keep Evolving with Your Customers

Remember, a complete understanding of your customer isn’t a one-off task—it's an ongoing journey.

With powerful Customer 360 features and a solution like Parative’s CS Sidekick, you can continue to evolve and adapt as your customers do. This way, you’re always ready to provide them with an exceptional customer experience, no matter what their journey looks like.

choosing a CSP guide

The Power of Proactive Engagement and Automations

A web of Parative Automations

In the world of SaaS, the customer's journey is rarely a straight line. It's filled with moments of discovery, learning, occasional frustration, and triumph. To accompany your customers along this winding path and provide an outstanding experience, proactive engagement and automation come into play.

Automate to Elevate

Automation is all about doing more with less—less time, less resources, and less manual labor. It's like having an invisible, super-efficient team working behind the scenes to streamline workflows and tasks. For example, automation can simplify tasks like sending out welcome emails, scheduling follow-up calls, or triggering alerts when a customer's usage drops.

With automation, your Customer Success team can focus on what they do best: creating meaningful relationships with customers. It ensures that your team is on top of their game, even as your customer base grows.

Preempting Problems

Proactive engagement, on the other hand, is like having a sixth sense for your customers' needs. It's about spotting potential issues before they become real problems, or discovering opportunities that may not be obvious. This could mean identifying customers who may need extra guidance, detecting patterns that signal a customer might churn, or noticing a trend that could signify an upsell opportunity.

For example, let's say a group of customers has just upgraded to a more advanced product tier. Proactive engagement might mean scheduling a personalized tutorial session for them, ensuring they can make the most of their new tools.

AI Power with Parative's CS Sidekick

The beauty of the Parative’s CS Sidekick is that it integrates these functions—proactive engagement and automation—while adding an extra layer of AI-powered insight. It's not just about streamlining processes, it's about optimizing them.

Imagine your customer success platform could predict churn before it happens, or suggest the perfect moment for an upsell. With CS Sidekick’s AI-powered insights, this is the reality.

Its algorithms analyze your customer data to provide accurate, timely, and actionable insights.

Say your product usage data shows a customer's engagement has dropped in recent weeks. CS Sidekick won't just alert you to this fact—it'll also suggest actions to re-engage the customer, based on what's worked in the past.

Redefine Customer Success

In conclusion, proactive engagement and automation are about staying one step ahead. These features not only streamline your processes but also enable you to preempt challenges and seize opportunities. And with the added AI capabilities of Parative’s CS Sidekick, your SaaS company can redefine what it means to deliver customer success.

Mapping and Managing: The Importance of Lifecycle Management

Think of your customer as an explorer, and your SaaS product as uncharted territory. The customer's journey through your product—from onboarding to becoming a power user—is their expedition. And to guide this expedition, you need lifecycle management.

Journeys, milestones, and playbooks

A Guide for Every Stage

Lifecycle management features are your customer's compass, illuminating the path from their first interaction with your product to their eventual success. This guidance is essential because every customer's journey is different. Some might sprint through the onboarding process, while others may prefer to take their time, exploring every feature thoroughly.

Your job, aided by lifecycle management tools, is to ensure they never lose their way. It's about presenting the right information at the right time, tracking progress, and nudging the customer forward when they stall.

Let's illustrate this with an example:

Suppose a new user signs up for a trial of your product. A lifecycle management feature can trigger a series of onboarding emails, each offering helpful tips and resources. As the user explores your product, the system tracks their activity and tailors future communication to reflect their progress.

Driving Retention and Upsell Opportunities

Lifecycle management is also a valuable tool for customer retention and upselling. It allows you to identify critical milestones—like a user mastering a key feature—and celebrate these victories with them. It also helps spot the moments when a customer might be ready for an upsell or cross-sell, based on their usage and engagement patterns.

For instance, if a user consistently exceeds their plan limits, it might be time to suggest an upgrade. Lifecycle management tools can alert you to these opportunities, and even automate the outreach process.

Lifecycle Mastery with Parative's CS Sidekick

Parative's CS Sidekick supercharges lifecycle management. It not only manages but also masters the various stages of the customer lifecycle. Its AI-driven capabilities can analyze a vast array of customer data, providing valuable insights that guide your customer success strategies.

For instance, if a user hasn't logged in for several days, the CS Sidekick will not only flag this but also suggest potential re-engagement strategies. Or, if a customer regularly uses a feature available in a higher-tier plan, the Sidekick can signal this as an upsell opportunity.

Nurturing Customer Success

As you can see, lifecycle management is not just about managing but nurturing the customer's journey with your product. It's about delivering personalized, timely experiences that make each user feel valued and understood.

And with the added capabilities of Parative's CS Sidekick, your team can turn lifecycle management into an art form, creating customer journeys that are as delightful as they are successful.

The Imperative of Seamless Integration

In today's hyper-connected business environment, a stand-alone tool that can't talk to your other systems can do more harm than good. And, in the world of customer success, this principle holds even stronger.

When you're dealing with an area as crucial as customer success, working with a platform that's isolated from your other tools can lead to inefficiencies, missed opportunities, and at worst, lost customers.

Why are integrations so important in a Customer Success Platform (CSP)?

It's all about creating a 360-degree view of the customer. Every touchpoint, every interaction, every transaction - it all contributes to the overall understanding of your customer. The richer the data, the better you understand your customers' needs, behaviors, preferences, and even their pain points. With a fully integrated CSP, you have all this data at your fingertips, right where you need it.

You're not just looking at customer interactions on a single platform - you're getting the complete picture. This depth of understanding empowers your team to make informed decisions and deliver personalized, proactive services that drive customer loyalty and retention.

Key Systems for Integration

A robust CSP should ideally integrate with your existing technology stack, notably your CRM, marketing automation platform, and customer support systems. These integrations offer a myriad of benefits:

  • CRM Integration: Your CRM is your primary repository of customer data. A CSP that integrates with your CRM can leverage this wealth of information to drive customer success initiatives.
  • Marketing Automation Integration: Your marketing efforts bring in new customers, but they also provide valuable data on customer behaviors and preferences. Integrating your CSP with your marketing automation tool ensures your customer success team can utilize this data to create personalized experiences.
  • Customer Support Integration: Customer support interactions provide crucial insights into your customers' pain points. By integrating your customer support system with your CSP, you can ensure your customer success team has immediate access to these insights.

Parative's CS Sidekick and Integrations

Parative's CS Sidekick is designed to weave seamlessly into your existing tech stack, providing insights and capabilities right where your team needs them. Whether it's your CRM, your marketing automation platform, or your customer support system, CS Sidekick works alongside your existing tools to deliver a unified view of your customers.

What's more, it doesn't just aggregate data – it uses AI to analyze it, giving your team insights that drive proactive customer success efforts. The result? A holistic view of the customer that's always up-to-date and meaningful, empowering your customer success team to drive Net Revenue Retention from anywhere.

Defining Admin and Service Requirements

As we've traversed through the various features that comprise a comprehensive Customer Success Platform (CSP), it's equally important to pay attention to the backend functionalities that support your operations - the admin and service requirements. Let's demystify this often-overlooked aspect of a CSP.

Your customer success operations should be as streamlined and efficient as possible, and a major part of that lies in the administrative features your CSP offers. These admin features could include user management, data security and privacy, customization, and more. They work behind the scenes to ensure smooth operations, high data integrity, and that your platform adapts to your business needs, rather than the other way around.

Service Requirements: Supporting Your Customer Success Journey

Service requirements encompass the support your CSP provider extends to help you make the most of their platform. It includes areas like customer support, onboarding and training assistance, and ongoing updates and feature improvements.

The value of excellent customer support from your CSP provider can't be overstated. Issues and doubts are inevitable, and a responsive, helpful support team can make the difference between a minor hiccup and a major roadblock in your customer success journey.

Onboarding and training assistance are also crucial, especially when you're transitioning to a new CSP or upgrading your platform. The best CSPs will offer comprehensive training resources to ensure your team can leverage their platform to its full potential.

Finally, look for a CSP that is committed to continuous improvement. Regular updates and new feature rollouts show that the provider is actively investing in their product and staying ahead of the industry's evolving needs.

Parative’s CS Sidekick: Catering to Your Admin and Service Needs

When it comes to meeting your admin and service requirements, Parative's CS Sidekick shines. Its user-friendly interface makes management a breeze, while stringent security measures ensure your data is well-protected. It offers customizable options to match your specific business needs.

The team behind CS Sidekick understands the importance of robust customer support and has a dedicated team ready to help at a moment's notice. The onboarding process is seamless, and Parative's library of resources will help your team get up to speed quickly.

In an industry that's ever-evolving, Parative’s commitment to continuous innovation ensures CS Sidekick users are always at the forefront of customer success technology. The platform regularly rolls out new features and improvements based on feedback and industry trends.

By placing equal emphasis on both the frontend and the backend, Parative’s CS Sidekick ensures a comprehensive, efficient, and future-proof solution to drive your customer success efforts.

Wrapping Up

As we conclude our exploration into the essential features of a Customer Success Platform (CSP), it becomes clear that picking the right tool for your organization isn’t just about ticking off a checklist. It's about understanding how these core features, from Reporting / Customer 360 to Admin and Service Requirements, can truly drive your customer success journey. It's about finding a platform that not only meets these criteria but also integrates seamlessly into your existing systems and processes.

One such platform is Parative's CS Sidekick.

This intuitive tool offers all these features in a user-friendly, easily-integrable package. It defies conventional customer success tools by overlaying on your existing tools, making data-powered decisions a click away for customer success teams. From AI-powered churn and renewal scoring to seamless integration with other platforms, it's a sidekick that empowers your customer success superheroes.

But we’ve only just scratched the surface of what a comprehensive CSP selection process looks like.

Our eBook, "The Ultimate Guide to Choosing a Customer Success Platform" delves deeper into this topic, providing a step-by-step guide to help you make the best choice for your organization. It also further explores the capabilities of Parative's CS Sidekick.

Download the eBook today and embark on a journey towards truly effective, data-driven customer success.

Parative for CS
by
Mark Lerner

Head of Marketing @ Parative, the Customer Behavior Platform. SaaS enthusiast, B2B Marketing Specialist, Startup Survivalist. Dad x2.

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