Customer success tools are a powerful way to boost revenue by enhancing client satisfaction and fostering long-term retention. However, achieving the best results starts with choosing the right software. To make the most informed decision, focus on six essential features.
1. Easy integration
Customer success tools are most effective when integrated with the other applications you use to engage with customers. These tools rely on data from sources like CRM software, marketing platforms, data warehouses, and customer service systems.
To deliver a comprehensive view of your customer interactions, your customer success tool must connect with these data streams, ensuring you can make informed, customer-focused decisions.
Simplify this process by choosing a tool designed to support integrations with your existing apps. Totango offers robust data hub integrations through a built-in library of JavaScript codes. This lets you easily connect your customer success platform to a wide range of popular tools, including HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, and more, ensuring smooth data flow across your workflow.
2. Support for scaling
Customer success tools play a vital role in driving business growth, but it’s essential to ensure your tool can scale alongside your expanding customer base and team. When assessing customer success solutions, consider these key questions:
- How many users can the software accommodate, and what are the costs associated with upgrading between tiers?
- How many customer accounts can it manage effectively?
- Does it allow you to segment customer data for personalized service at scale, without needing to grow your team?
- What is the administrative cost for both managing and updating the solution over time?
- Can it automate workflows for both human and digital tasks?
Choose a solution that meets your current needs, but also has the scalability to support your customers and foster long-term business growth.
3. Customer engagement metric monitoring
Customer success depends on effective customer engagement. For customers to achieve their goals and realize value from your product, they must actively engage with it. This starts with a smooth onboarding process and successful product adoption.
To foster onboarding and adoption, your customer success platform should actively monitor engagement metrics. A well-designed dashboard that provides clear insights into key data — such as onboarding progress, adoption rates, and customer satisfaction scores — is essential. Additionally, the platform should generate detailed engagement reports, empowering you to review performance and take targeted action as needed.
Tracking customer engagement data allows you to take steps to boost engagement. For instance, with the Onboard New Customers SuccessBLOC in Totango, you can identify when a customer hasn’t completed the onboarding process within a reasonable timeframe. In response, you can automatically trigger a series of follow-up actions to re-engage them and guide them through the remaining steps. This approach can also be applied to monitoring and encouraging product adoption.
4. Customer health scoring
To effectively manage customer success, the right tool must include the ability to track customer health scores. This metric consolidates key performance indicators (KPIs) into a single measure, offering a clear view of whether a customer is likely to renew or at risk of churning. KPIs like product usage, license utilization, and engagement provide critical insights into whether customers are obtaining value from their purchases.
Understanding customer health scores, you will understand an upsell opportunity to a satisfied customer or intervene early to retain one at risk of leaving.
5. AI-powered insights
Traditional health scores, often created manually, provide a useful snapshot of your customer base. However, they sometimes fail to uncover the nuances that reveal whether a "healthy" customer is truly thriving.
AI leverages engagement and sentiment data to refine health scores, providing sharper, more accurate insights into your customers. By uncovering patterns and trends that might escape human analysis, AI offers a deeper, more dynamic understanding of customer health. Real-time updates enable early risk detection, predict potential churn, and empower you to take proactive steps to enhance customer satisfaction.
Unison, is Totango’s AI-powered customer intelligence engine designed to improve health scoring. It combines AI analysis with your existing metrics to help identify accounts at risk and find upsell opportunities, enabling more informed, data-driven decisions.
Select the right customer success tools for your needs
The best customer success tools combine features that drive growth and retention. Key capabilities include seamless integration, scalability, complete data access across the customer journey, engagement tracking, customer health scores, and real-time insights. To ensure success, choose a platform that offers everything you need to reduce churn and deliver meaningful value to your customers.
Recurring revenue is a rhythm — not one note. It’s a commitment to continuous improvement and innovation, led by the customers you’ve got. So, they meet their goals, and you meet yours.
Learn how Totango can help your business put revenue on repeat.