Customer Success Management Comes of Age

The success team will want to know the right time to reach out to a customer with informational material, and how to present it so that the customer is engaged and pays attention and learns something from it.

"The more you engage, the more you understand, and the more effective you're going to be moving forward," Rumelhart says.

These teams will also want to analyze customers’ behavior with products and automate messages they can send to customers, ones with tips to help customers get the most out of products or services they’re using.

According to Leggett, CSM tools collect data from different systems into one hub. They track and report on the status of accounts and offer up opportunities for improvement. Analytics can help companies identify patterns in usage and elements that lead to churn. The systems can also trigger alerts that notify users when they should tend to an account.

Gainsight's Customer 360 option, for instance, centralizes customer information from different sources—including a CRM system, service desks, usage tracking software, survey tools, and financial systems—to give customer success managers a more immediate view of their customers that enables them to act quickly.

The client relations directors at Bright Horizons Family Solutions, a company that provides child care services in workplaces, has used the tool to keep better track of client information. "They [needed] a tool that would help them manage accounts and make sure that they're successful—that people are attending the day care, having a good experience, and will renew that contract—so that they can sell additional services," Rumelhart says.

Using Gainsight's solution, the company reduced the amount of time and work required to make sense of the data that lived in different systems (data that could tell them how each client fared). Armed with this information on client health and history, Bright Horizons’ client relations directors could better understand which clients needed immediate attention.

NEXT STEPS IN CSM

The CSM market is still maturing, analysts say. There are around 20 serious vendors in the nascent industry, and most of these have emerged in roughly the past five years. Natalie Petouhoff, vice president and principal analyst at Constellation Research, identifies the top vendors in this market as ServiceSource, Totango, Gainsight, and Bluenose.

"There is a lot of venture capital funding going into this area," Leggett says. But because it is so closely tied to CRM, Leggett anticipates that the two will eventually merge into one.

Before investing in technologies, Leggett notes that companies should have discussions about customer success strategies, and let those discussions guide their efforts. "The first discussion point is what are your metrics and indicators of success," Leggett says. Then a company can begin to figure out what data it will need. Once the metrics and data are defined, a company can begin the process of tracking them, either with a homegrown CSM system or a commercial one.

CSM solutions are clearly beneficial to organizations that have implemented a subscription services model. And if CSM is not on your radar now, it will be: As the Internet of Things takes hold and the number of digitally connected devices increases, organizations will have ever greater opportunities to study customer usage patterns, making a CSM solution not only appealing but necessary.

Associate Editor Oren Smilansky can be reached at osmilansky@infotoday.com.

CORRECTION: In the print and earlier online versions of this story, "ServiceSource" was misidentified as "ServiceNow." CRM regrets the error.

Related Articles

Cisco Offers Customer Success Manager Certification

The enhanced learning certification service aims to help sales reps take on managing customer success beyond the dotted line.

Badgeville Gamifies Customer Success

New Application Connectors bring digital motivation to leading collaboration, service, and CRM systems.

Azuqua Releases Azuqua for Customer Success

AZuqua for Customer Success integrates data and workflows from disparate CRM, marketing automation, service, and support applications.

6 Things You Should Know About Customer Success

Paying extra attention to current customers will help prevent churn—and turn them into promoters of your business.