In Customer Success Software Tags buyer's guide, buying guide, customer success guide, customer success platform

Puneet Kataria Edit

The Essential Guide to Buying a Customer Success Platform

About buyer’s guide

Customer Success is a relatively new approach for growing SaaS business. We continue to come across

people who are unsure of how they should go about customer success as a practice and how should

they choose from the plethora of customer success platforms available in the market today.

We have tried to demystify the subject with an objective to help you choose the right customer success

platform.

Table of contents

1. Who is this guide for

2. Background

Home

Company

Product

The Essential Guide to Buying a Customer Success Platform

3. Think through what you really need

1. Team working style

2. Scale

3. Integrations

4. ARPU

5. Accounts per CSM

6. Success Strategy

7. Success Goals

4. Three Categories of Customer Success Platform

1. Enterprise Grade Customer Success Platform

2. Full Scale Specialized Customer Success Platform

3. Basic Platform

5. Key Factors before you pay for a Customer Success Platform

1. Actionable vs Non Actionable

2. Account Health

3. Playbooks

4. Automate where needed

5. Integrations

6. Segmentation

7. Portfolio

8. Reporting

9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

10. Pricing Model

Who is this guide for?

This Guide to buying a Customer Success Platform is meant for SaaS companies, and can even extend

to other subscription products or services. And within the company, this buyer’s guide is meant for the

following stakeholders.

CEOs and founders

First time or an experienced Customer Success Leader, i.e., Chief Customer Of�cer (CCO), VP of

Customer Success, Director of Customer Success, etc.

Customer Success Manager (CSM)

Disclaimer: We have tried our best to help you make the mostinformed decision and not every (some do) recommendationleads to CustomerSuccessBox as the recommended platform.“

Background

Traditional Customer Success teams emerged out of Traditional Account Managers who were

responsible for managing accounts with $100K+ or even multi million dollar value Annual Contract

Value (ACV).

Traditional managers managed usually about a dozen accounts and thus were majorly �eld success

teams. But there was a huge need to address churn and create upsell opportunities with Low ACV /

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) customers which has led to most of the modern success teams

moving inside (remote) or hybrid (80% inside:: 20% �eld).

Think through what you really need

Before you select a customer success platform, let’s think through what you actually need. Often, we

search for “best customer success software”. However, what might be best for someone else might not

be best for you. So let’s look at the factors you need to consider before selecting a customer success

platform.

1. Team working style (Inside vs Field vs Hybrid Success team)

Although being the most important, this factor is often ignored.

Is your team a �eld success team? Do you have account managers who have to �y out to engage with

customers in one on one meetings?

Or do you have traditional Inside success teams where success managers are inside the of�ce,

communicating via email and phone calls, and also conducting remote trainings and meetings via

Gotomeetings and Zooms of the world?

95% of the time the team is Inside the of�ce and 5-10% of thetime it ventures out on the �eld“

Also, more and more success teams are now hybrid teams where almost 95% of the time the team is

Inside the of�ce and 5-10% of the time it ventures out on the �eld.

2. Scale

We usually fancy enterprise grade solutions without realizing why they are expensive. It’s not based on

the number of features they provide, or their service or their dependability but it largely depends on

the scale of operations.

For example, an Adobe has hundreds of thousands of customers. It obviously needs a platform which

can scale at that level.

However, for anybody else who has say few hundred or even tens of thousands of customers, you don’t

need an enterprise grade level. It’d be an overkill. You have the option of going for new solutions which

are likely not scale ready but have some thought leading features which even the enterprise solutions

might lack.

3. Integrations

A customer success platform without integrations is like �sh without water. Now, an early stage SaaS

startup usually does not have good data inside the CRM. Mostly that data is available in the billing

system. Be it an excel sheet or invoicing system such as Quickbooks or a full scale SaaS subscription

platform such as Chargebee, Zuora, Chargify, etc. The billing system is where the accurate data resides.

This data, such as renewal timelines, amount, license plan, is the primary source of truth. Hence, billing

is the most important integration for any SaaS company.

Overall, a company will need a CRM integration, billing integration, NPS / feedback score integration,

and support/communication integration such as Freshdesk, Zendesk, Intercom.

An important question raised here is, do you need one way or two way integrations? For 99% of use

cases, you do not. For 1% there can be a play, e.g., you may want to create an opportunity in the CRM.

But you need to consider how many opportunities will a CSM create in a day or in a week. Not more

If you have a separate success and support team, then you donot need a support integration.“

than 2-3 in most cases. So, you do not really need a two way integration with a CRM. No need to spend

thousands of dollars extra for that two way integration.

Some customer success platforms have been recommending the ability to respond to a support ticket

from within the success platform. Let us make our stand very clear. We believe that is a wrong strategy,

wrong practice because the moment you get into a ticket closing mentality, you are no longer

proactive. You get into a reactive support mode and that my friend is a very slippery slope. As a

customer success software company we don’t recommend it and we have no plans to build such an

integration.

As a customer success team, all you want is visibility. Even if you are a small team now, in the near

future you will require two different teams. Reactive support teams are SLA driven whereas customer

success is value driven. Success is a long term strategy which drives value to the customer in the long

run even if there is pain in the short term.

4. ARPU (per year)

ARPU or average revenue per user / per account is something you need to consider before buying a

customer success platform. Say, you have a high ARPU of more than $100,000. You have the advantage

of setting up a team which will �y to meet the customers, and one CSM would typically handle 10 or 20

accounts.

On the other hand, if you have an ARPU of $5,000 to $50,000, you will be restricted to serving them

remotely. It will also force you as a company to have 50 to 100 accounts per success manager to justify

a customer success team. Say ARPU of $10,000 x 100 accounts = a customer portfolio of $1million,

which should be a bare minimum requirement for a success manager.

However, there are many of you who have an ARPU ranging anywhere from $1,000 to $10,000. In such

cases, you will have to segment the customers into high paying (close to $10k ARPU) and low paying

(less than $5000). The customers closer to $10,000 in ARPU would enjoy a customer success program.

Whereas, the rest of the accounts could be treated with a self-serve platform with a lot of built-in

automation.

If you are lower than $1000 ARPU, you will be better offbuilding automation within your platform“

And if you are lower than $1000 ARPU, you will be better off building automation within your platform.

5. Accounts per CSM

We have already covered accounts per CSM in ARPU. But this is a necessary criteria. A CSM with 20

accounts as compared to a CSM with 100 accounts will have different expectations from the

technology.

6. Success Strategy (High touch vs Low touch vs Tech touch)

Look at your customer success strategy. What does your customer expect or what does the market

expect?

Are you going to be a high touch success team where you will meet and greet your customers? Or are

you going to be a low touch team and manage remotely? Or are you going to be a 100% tech touch

success team?

What we have been noticing is an increase in the hybrid model of low touch / tech touch.

7. Success Goals

Last but not the least, you need to look at your success goals, both short term and long term. What I

feel is you do not need to look at goals beyond 3 years. It’d be an overkill. As you grow your success

goals will change and mature. Some examples of success goals could be:

Churn or Retention

Expansion Revenue

User Engagement Score for your product

Customer Satisfaction Score / NPS (even though we believe this is a lagging indicator and not a

leading one, as your customer might churn in the �rst 90 days itself)

If you are a low touch / tech touch hybrid combination,CustomerSuccessBox is focused on this market.“

Three Categories of Customer Success Platforms

1. Enterprise Grade Customer Success Platform

First let’s understand what de�nes an Enterprise Grade customer success platform. Does it mean it’s

the oldest platform or does it mean it’s used by enterprises or does it refer to the capability of the

platform from an engineering perspective?

What it means is that Enterprise Grade Platforms are supposed to have a scale no one else can deliver.

For example, think of someone like Adobe with 100,000+ Customer base. This is a phenomenal scale

and requires a platform which can handle data reliably, have all the features plus reporting, to deliver

success at this scale. Enterprise platforms are expensive because of the scale they are built for.

However, for companies doing $100M to multi-billion dollars in revenue, there are two (you know

which ones) choices at maximum. Other platforms, including CustomerSuccessBox won’t be able to

scale to more than 100,000 Customer &and Million of users. (not yet!)

But if you are not enterprise, why should you actually pay for Enterprise Grade platforms?

Enterprise platforms sell only to enterprise level customers. They create the marketing aura

showcasing their thought leadership via large conferences, webinars, etc. Unfortunate but true, the

thought leadership does not re�ect in their innovation. They won’t give you new features regularly, not

because they can’t but because of the scale in question. This might surprise a few of you, but enterprise

platforms have limited number of features and are slow to upgrade (new feature release).

They do have good focus on reporting, but they have limited reporting. Custom reports are usually a

NO or have a huge services fee attached to them unlike Full Scale platforms which we will focus on in

the next category. So, either you like it or you don’t as their scale restricts them to give free custom

reporting. If you are enterprise grade, you will not mind paying the fee for the reports.

Enterprise platforms are usually tightly tied to a few handful of other enterprise grade platforms only

for building integrations, considerably restricting the choice of your current and future ecosystem of

If you are a SaaS business with less than 100,000 customers,with less than 100M revenue, you should not be looking at

such platforms.“

platforms.

If you are enterprise grade, i.e., if you are at 100,000 customers or $100M+ revenue, then you have no

choice but to buy an enterprise grade platform.

But if you are not, then it won’t make any sense for you to opt for an enterprise grade platform. And

overpay for it, especially when you will get slower upgrades and less features.

2. Full Scale Specialized Customer Success Platform

This is a powerful and complete category, best suited for customer centric SaaS (or even non-SaaS)

Startups, Small and Medium size business ($1M – $100M Annual Revenue).

At this scale, you are dealing with 10,000-100,000 customer base, doing $1M – $100M in revenue which

is far less than enterprise grade but you require a lot more features. You are in a growth phase,

surrounded by competition, not established at the enterprise level and need to differentiate in terms of

customer experience which again ties back to customer success. This can be delivered by a full scale

specialized customer success platform.

We will go feature by feature in the next section of this guide. Watch out for that!

Full scale platforms are usually lot less thought leading in comparison, i.e., less marketing aura, no big

conferences, though the content they generate will be thought leading. But they are 10X more

innovative. They lead with new groundbreaking innovative feature add-ons that re�ect in their

product. They are never afraid of trying new features.

For example, CustomerSuccessBox is a specialized platform for INSIDE Customer Success teams which

require an actionable success platform. Hence we have built in capability to email, call, and manage

tasks. This is the kind of example which differentiates a full scale and an enterprise platform.

CustomerSuccessBox belongs to exactly this category, forcompanies upto $100M in revenue.“

Full scale platforms know exactly what value they can deliverbut are restricted by scale.“

Beware: If you come across a solution claiming to be full scale or appearing to full scale but they are a

replica of a larger enterprise solution without the ability to scale or you don’t see innovation, then they

are a me-too platform. We don’t want to waste an entire category on a me-too platform. You will know

one when you see one. If a full scale claims to do everything an enterprise platform does at a cheaper

cost and lower scale, that’s your me-too. Avoid them.

Coming back, full scale offers a huge advantage over a typical enterprise grade platform because of the

advanced and innovative feature set. They can usually deliver promised business impact. You will be

handheld by the team, because you are a lot more important to them. In comparison, unless you are

multi-billion dollar company, you will never get the attention from an enterprise platform.

In terms of pricing, you can easily expect ½ to ¼ or even ⅙ th the price of an Enterprise Grade

platform. But do not let price re�ect their capability. A lot of the times, the price could be the re�ection

of their scale, the number of leads they are getting every month, investor expectations, etc.

For example, we are a lot less priced than regular full-scale solutions. We are a young platform and do

not have enough social proof. But if you doubt our categorization, sign up for a demo right away and let

us prove you wrong.

Full scale solutions are usually a few years from being an enterprise grade offering unless they �nd

their sweet spot and stick there. Their underlying technology goes through stabilization and

optimization, and enables them to deliver at scale. Thus, disrupting the enterprise grade market.

They also offer highly personalized support. Not just the attention from the team, but as a customer

you will enjoy in�uence over the direction of the product. You get to engage directly with the Senior

Management, the CEO and founders of such companies and tend to gain from that relationship. You

will also value both the knowledge and the network you will have access to. The world is smaller than

you think or expect.. and only shrinking faster than ever.

3. Basic Platform

you can easily expect ½ to ¼ or even ⅙ th the price of anEnterprise Grade platform“

We don’t see a compelling case around basic platforms in the customer success world. We don’t need

record keeping in 2018.

There are still a few basic platforms out there which might even call themselves customer success

platforms. They have built some features like task management and added a bunch of email

integrations but that’s all.

You can easily know if it’s a basic platform. The �rst �ve minutes will show you the exact same features

as a full scale but sixth minute onwards, you will see they miss even basic health monitoring, alerts and

milestones. They will be dirt cheap in comparison to full-scale and at best they are specialized record

keeping systems.

Our recommendation here is that if you need a success platform but cannot afford a full scale platform,

you are better off with excel sheets and Trellos of the world.

Key Factors before you pay for a Customer Success Platform

There are 10 key factors or features you should be looking at while considering the platform.

1. Actionable vs Non Actionable

The �rst feature you need to look at is actionability. Do you want the platform to be actionable or not?

We’re assuming many of you are hearing this for the �rst time. Or maybe you have heard the term too

many times.

You need to understand that actionability is a lot about your expectations from the success platform.

Are your expectations limited to analytics, record keeping or just some data? Or do you expect to act

on the data from within the platform? Will there be any action, engagement, communication or any

activity on the platform which will deliver value and meaningful reports to your customers. This is the

core difference between actionable and non-actionable.

And as we said earlier, more and more teams are moving INSIDE and the ARPU per success manager

has reduced as well. So, do you need an actionable platform?

As the role and expectations are evolving, the expectations from a customer success platform are

becoming more mature. People no longer look at a success platform purely from a data point of view.

Keep in mind, that for customer success, data is a beautiful starting point but not the end solution.

Data is mandatory but not suf�cient. Data, at best, will de�ne the problem space but it won’t be able to

solve the problem.

What’s the solution?

The solution space resides in the actionability, the ability to communicate, to manage hundreds of

accounts, the ability to locate the history of the account, the ability to go back in time and see how

health scores changed or how a single action translated into a QBR. You should have a single timeline

which gives the exact history of the account. And that’s why you need an actionable platform.

And considering how we preach, it should not come as a surprise that CustomerSuccessBox is focused

on actionability �rst. This is not an afterthought. Actionability is our choice as a product company

because we are focused on modern INSIDE success managers.

2. Account Health

One of the most important features of any customer success platform is to generate account health.

Account health is not just account health per se but the ability to generate alerts, milestones, etc. But

we want to talk about account health score.

The main question here is what type of scoring do you need. A lot of platforms have been claiming

three types of account scores. One is a risk score, one is a usage score and the other is frequency based

score. And the numbers vary. One might be 78/100 whereas the other may be 49/100. And a CSM

would still be confused. If you want analytics, use a Mixpanel and let the product manager dive in.

We feel the account health score could be a simple green, red or amber indicator. But what de�nes the

score has to be powerful. The presentation does not matter. For example, even if it is simpli�ed to a

single number, the action should be de�ned. As a CSM, you should know what to do about the number.

So, the over detailing with account health numbers is not going to help.

Don’t underestimate the value of account health. It orchestrates the attention of a CSM. So it has to

better do the job. Thus, the red, amber, and green are good enough indicators. For example, if someone

is green and the last call was 2 months back, the success manager knows that it’s still okay to not call.

At CustomerSuccessBox, we have milestones to tell you exactlywhich features of your product have been used. This

immediately translates into action. The success managerknows exactly what to do and the goals are well-de�ned. This

is what we call actionable information.

“

Whereas, if the indicator is red and the call was 3 days back, the CSM knows he has to call again to help

the customer move from red to amber or green.

3. Playbooks

Playbooks are essentially simple processes which de�ne a success manager’s work�ow. There are three

key things to keep in mind here.

The playbooks cannot be for the head of customer success. Playbooks have to be built for the

success managers. They should be able to follow the playbooks and deliver success to the

customers. The traditional hierarchy of having stages, tasks do not work in such a scenario. Let’s

assume an onboarding playbook with 10 stages, 3 tasks per stage and 10 onboarding per month

per success manager. Thus, we are talking about 10 x 3 x 10 = 300 tasks per month per manager

just for onboarding. This is overwhelming for any CSM. We have talked to CSMs and anyone who

is forced by their managers to use such playbooks hates it. And eventually people learn to game

the system and just complete tasks without focusing on the end goal.

We don’t want playbooks to be overwhelming. Playbooks within CustomerSuccessBox are self

explanatory but you don’t have to carve every task out of it. If you want the ability to carve tasks, there

is a separate capability to create tasks for the success managers.

You want the playbooks to very visual in nature. A playbook should not require 5 clicks to get to

the task at hand for a particular account.

We have adopted a very agile, Trello style playbook. But it is not just a to-do list. It has the ability to see

health scores, take action right there and you can measure if the playbook was successful or not.

How do you measure the success of a playbook? Most platforms measure the success by whether

the task was completed within the speci�ed timeline. This is like saying if the student has

attended the class, he/she knows whatever was taught. That doesn’t mean they gained all the

knowledge.

What you need to check is if the business impact has been delivered. Have they adopted the relevant

features of the product during onboarding? Or identi�ed the product champion? Or con�gured the

A playbook should not require 5 clicks to get to the task athand for a particular account“

system?

So a playbook should be non-overwhelming, simple, visual, and measured by real business impact at

the customer end. And these are exactly the principles CustomerSuccessBox’s playbooks are built on.

4. Automate where needed

A lot of times what you see is customer success platforms automating in the IFTTT style. We don’t think

this is suf�cient. Driving product adoption and delivering customer success is not a one rule based

step. This is where majority of the customer success platforms have got it wrong. Automation should

be built in a much more complex campaign like style.

We will be talking about our automation in detail when we release it. In terms of principles, all the users

we have spoken to are not happy with the single rule based automation. It only does 10% of the job.

We are working on something big here which we can’t reveal. Sign up to know more.

5. Integrations

With regards to integrations, you want to factor in two key parameters

Quality of Integrations: Does the platform have the ability to bring in custom �elds? What is the

amount of �exibility the platform offers with respect to bringing in data? For example, can you

bring in data based on rules, and certain �elds within the CRM. You also need to check the

amount of effort required. If it requires a lot of effort at your end, then the quality of integration is

poor because integrating then becomes an additional project.

Do you really need a 2-way integration? As discussed earlier, you don’t usually need a 2-way

integration. But if you do and think it is worth the money, go ahead and spend the extra

thousands of dollars. We have no current plan to build 2-way integrations.

At CustomerSuccessBox, while we have enabled �exibility, wetake care of everything at our end to deliver maximum

�exibility at minimum cost.“

6. Segmentation

We are not talking about record keeping or a CRUD-based system. The data should be automatically

segmented as it comes in via integrations. Hence, accounts should move in and out of segments

automatically.

For example, if a trial account is actively using product features, it should be automatically moved to

the convert segment so that a CSM can act on it and close the deal.

7. Portfolio

Every CSM should be the CEO of their portfolio. Hence, there should be the ability for a one-on-one

relationship between an account and a success manager.

8. Reporting

You need both Account & User level reporting but the ability to zoom into an account should be huge. A

success manager’s job is not to know which feature is being used across all accounts. When a CSM is

talking to an account, he/she should be able to drill down into details about that single account. You

want to know the history, changes, health scores, milestones, activities and every little detail about that

account. In short, you need micro level reporting when it comes to account level reports.

Also, don’t get lost in activity reporting. The number of tasks do not matter in the long run. We are a

�rm believer in not rewarding effort but rewarding results.

As a head of customer success, you might need the team management report to see who is doing what

and if they are completing their tasks. But do not de�ne health as a re�ection of activity. Health has to

be the leading indicator of product adoption and customer success.

9. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS is a lagging indicator of customer success, don’t give over importance to it. The entire idea behind

calculating Account health scores is to get a leading indicator of account health based on real product

adoption and value being delivered via your SaaS application. Clearly this is not the same as NPS.In fact,

a well de�ned customer success program leads to more promoters and increase in your NPS. Since NPS

is not a leading indicator, any business depending on NPS for monitoring health, will probably end up

only reacting to the poor NPS feedback, and won’t be able to act in a proactive manner. Again, there is

no harm in using NPS as a well de�ned feedback mechanism, but just be fully aware of the fact that by

nature since its a ‘feedback’ it �lls the ‘reactive’ side of the dashboard.

10. Pricing Model

While evaluating success platforms, you will notice a lot of the platforms have seat-based pricing

models. Customer success is not limited to the CSMs. It’s a mission for the entire organization. It has to

be carried forward by the CEO all the way down to sales and CSMs. A lot of times, when customers

churn out, it could be the re�ection of product limitation or limitations of other strategies, and not the

lack of a success manager’s abilities. Hence, we believe all stakeholders should have access to a

customer success platform.

We highly encourage using customer success technology during a trial or a proof of concept (POC) as

each trial during the acquisition phase is different. Your sales team could de�nitely use the platform to

deliver value to the trial accounts and convert them to paying customers.

Puneet KatariaPuneet leads CustomerSuccessBox. He is deeply passionate about the three product joys - the joy ofproducing, the joy of selling, and the joy of ownership. His inspirations come from family, friends, mentors,people he works with and from free thinkers like Eric Ries (The Lean Startup), Tim Brown (Change by Design:Design thinking) and many more.

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