If you want to have a thriving business in the B2B sector, customer success must always be a top priority. Ensuring your customers are happy and getting the most out of your products or services is essential. Just consider these stats from an article by Outbound Engine:
- Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing customer.
- Increasing customer retention by 5% can increase profits from 25-95%.
- The success rate of selling to a customer you already have is 60-70%, while the success rate of selling to a new customer is 5-20%.
While the importance of customer success is easy to see, maintaining a strong base of successful customers is challenging. You need to understand the unique requirements of each and every customer and be proactive in helping meet those needs. Fortunately, there are tools to help.
The two most prominent tools used by customer success teams are CRM and CSM. While both of these powerful toolsets are capable of improving nearly every aspect of your customer success efforts, it can be difficult to determine which one is right for your business.
In this article we will explore the benefits of both CRM and CSM to help you find the solution that fits your business best.
What is CRM?
A CRM (customer relationship management) platform is a software toolset that assists businesses with managing their people (customers and employees), work processes, products, and projects on a day-to-day basis.
Once thought of primarily as a customer engagement tool for the sales team, modern CRM software has evolved to address the needs of many different business aspects, including marketing, customer support, customer success, and HR.
Through the use of advanced automations tools and data centralization, a CRM system can help businesses improve communication (both internal and external), work more efficiently, and track performance.
What is CSM?
A CSM (customer success management) platform is a software toolset that helps customer success teams engage with customers and help them achieve their desired outcomes while using a product or service.
With a focus on post-sales activities such as onboarding, training, and support, modern CSMs enables proactive outreach and customer advocacy. By leveraging data analytics and customer feedback, CSM systems enable businesses to address customer needs, increase retention rates, and drive overall satisfaction.
Top 10 CRM benefits for customer success
- Personalized interactions- CRM platforms are centralized repositories for customer data, capturing all sales, marketing, and customer support interactions.
This comprehensive view enables customer success teams to personalize their interactions in accordance with each customer’s preferences, including preferred contact times and channels.
- Timely engagement- Real-time alerts and notifications enable customer success agents to respond quickly to customer requests. Combined with CRM automation features, CS managers can create workflows and communication cadences that surpass industry standards and exceed customer expectations.
- 360 degree context- CRM systems enable customer success teams to see all purchases, notes, support tickets, activities and interactions related to a customer or account.
This enables customer success reps to tailor solutions and offers to the specific needs of the customer, improving positioning for better results with upselling and expansion.
- Process alignment- With CRM, organizations can standardize all their customer-related processes and workflows, from lead qualification to renewal. This helps teams across the organization set proper expectations with customers, improving outcomes and building trust.
- Cross-team collaboration- CRM platforms enable teams to communicate, share information, and collaborate on customer-related activities in real-time, from anywhere.
The sales teams can provide insights on customer needs and preferences to the customer success team, while the customer support team can flag recurring issues or challenges for follow-up by the product team. And the leadership team has visibility into all of it.
- Workflow automation- CRM systems can automate routine tasks and processes such as welcome emails and renewal reminders. This ensures these important steps are never missed and gives customer success agents more time to focus on high-value activities.
- Real-time reporting and analytics- CRM provides customer success teams with comprehensive customer health monitoring capabilities. Product and service usage can be tracked. Support tickets and knowledge base queries can be collected and stored. Customer feedback data can be transformed into charts and reports that reveal trends and sentiment.
These metrics can inform real-time dashboards that provide a 360 degree view into each customer’s health status, allowing CS reps to identify at-risk customers early.
- Scalability- As your business grows, a CRM can help your CS team accommodate more customers without sacrificing quality of service. What’s more, as the needs of your customers increases you can quickly and easily implement new processes and workflows to meet these demands.
Additionally, many modern CRMs offer scalable payment packages that allow you to add features, users, and services as you need them, helping you grow at your own pace while maintaining a high ROI.
- Integration capability- A modern CRM platform can integrate with email automation services, customer support portals, survey and feedback tools, project management software, and more to create an all-in-one work management platform.
This can improve operational efficiency, increase cross-team alignment and ultimately help your customer success teams create a better customer experience.
- Return on investment- The biggest benefit of CRM for any team or business is the very high ROI that CRM provides. According to a report by Nucleus Research, CRM has a return of $8.71 USD for every dollar spent.
Top 10 CSM benefits for customer success
- Customer Onboarding management- CSM software can automate many onboarding tasks including sending welcome emails, scheduling training sessions, and guiding customers through initial setup tasks. It can also help you manage and track progress with detailed checklists and task assignment tools.
- Post-sale support- CSM systems can help you better understand customer needs and identify roadblocks and pain points. A customer success manager can use this to develop playbooks and best practices for customer success agents to follow, ensuring consistency and effectiveness in post sale engagement.
- Customer health scoring- CSM software can monitor customer satisfaction indicators such as usage metrics, engagement levels, and support requests to evaluate and score customer health. This can help you identify opportunities for proactive engagement and intervention.
- Feedback management- CSM systems can help businesses gather feedback, insights and suggestions to inform improvements to their product and services. Many CSMs allow you to send customer satisfaction surveys right from the system and organize the results for easy analysis.
- Customer journey mapping- CSM platforms can map out the customer journey, plotting all the touchpoints, interactions, and milestones needed to create the best customer experience.
- Predictive analytics- CSM software can leverage predictive analytics and machine learning algorithms to forecast customer behavior. This can help customer success teams better anticipate customer needs, identify trends, and proactively address potential issues.
- Knowledge base access- Many modern CSM platforms enable easy access to your knowledge base and training resources. This empowers your customers to find answers for themselves while making it easier for customer support reps to share articles, videos, and tutorials.
- Community forum management- Some CSM systems can host community forums where customers can connect with each other online. This encourages knowledge sharing and can be a great resource for identifying customer needs and wants.
- Customer advocacy programs- You can manage all your customer advocacy programs through your CSM, including referral programs, testimonials, and case studies. This helps customer success agents convert satisfied customers into brand ambassadors that drive new business and promote your company to their industry peers.
- Upselling and cross-selling opportunity management- CSM can leverage product usage data to identify upselling and cross-selling opportunities. These data driven insights can guide customer success teams to suggest additional features or higher-tier plans that better address customer needs.
CRM vs. CSM: Which one is right for your business?
CRM platforms are generally considered superior to CSM due to their comprehensive list of capabilities that extend across multiple aspects of customer engagement, sales, and marketing.
While both systems have their strengths, CRM generally provides a broader scope of functionalities that support key business processes, making them a more versatile tool for work management overall.
The ability to manage sales pipelines and execute targeted marketing campaigns also makes CRMs more valuable from an ROI perspective, especially early on. As time goes by however, keeping customers longer and expanding existing usage becomes more and more valuable, and that is when CSM becomes a very strong consideration.
For most businesses, the answer is CRM first and CSM later, but the truth is CRM and CSM are better together.
CRM and CSM: Better together
When used in tandem, CRM and CSM significantly enhance your ability to manage and grow your customer relationships.
A CRM enhances pre-sale support by tracking and managing all customer interactions, sales activities, and marketing campaigns as well as providing access to a comprehensive view of all customer related data.
A CSM focuses on post sales support, ensuring customers achieve their desired outcomes with the product or service while building trust, loyalty, and advocacy.
This seamless flow across all the different stages of the customer journey allows sales teams, marketing teams, and customer success teams to create aligned engagement strategies that optimize every single interaction.
FreeAgent CRM is the best CRM for customer support
FreeAgent CRM is a modern work management platform that provides top-of-field software tools for organizations of all sizes and technical proficiency.
FreeAgent is the best CRM for customer success because FreeAgent is:
- Easy to use- FreeAgent’s modern user interface is quick to learn and easy to use, encouraging teams to work within the platform. This enables you to maintain a comprehensive catalog of every sale, support ticket, and customer interaction.
- User-configurable- With FreeAgent, the power is in your hands. You can customize and personalize FreeAgent to fit the specific needs of your business and teams without external support.
Plus, FreeAgent offers:
- Robust integration- FreeAgent’s flexible toolset and extensive integration library support teams and businesses of all types and structures.
- A mobile CRM tool- FreeAgent’s mobile app allows team members to access the FreeAgent platform from anywhere, at any time.
- Generative AI- Uplift your work with Generative AI-powered features. With FreeAgent, you can access AI across any app, allowing you to get the information you need faster.
With FreeAgent, it’s really that simple.
To see FreeAgent in action, get a demo, and discover for yourself how we are leading the way to a better workday.
