At Provident CRM, our team of Customer Success Managers operates across the solutions that we work with (monday.com and SugarCRM). They offer our clients solution-specific expertise, to guide them at each step of their journey in generating maximum value from their chosen platform.
Having a familiar, go-to guide for CRM and business process management queries is essential to enable you to achieve the outcomes you’re aiming for with your platform. Given they’ll take the time to get to know you and your business, your Customer Success Manager becomes uniquely placed to advise on how best to reach your targets by utilising your digital solution. Now, that might sound a little like Customer Support. Customer Success is different, though, which we’ll unpack below. We’ll also explore what makes Customer Success an indispensable resource on your technology journey, how working with a Customer Success Manager loops into this, and three key signs and stages that indicate it’s a good time to seek out a Customer Success Manager.
As Head of Customer Success at Provident CRM, my role is to create and oversee plans for each of our clients alongside our wider Customer Success team. Shaping the best way that we can bring you more value from your chosen digital solution, whether it’s brand new or undergoing a revamp, and tailoring your software’s features and capabilities to deliver on your business needs, as well as for your employees as individuals.
So let’s talk Customer Success, shall we?
Similar titles, key differences! Customer Support exists to help you out with ad hoc queries and solve technical issues (the system’s down, there’s a bug, or you’re seeing an error message when trying to create a dashboard or report, for example). You’ll generate a ticket with your issue, and your solution provider’s Customer Support team will open it, check it out, and solve it as quickly as possible. The faster the better, to meet your SLA — so there’s no time, room or expectation for creating a relationship.
That’s where Customer Success comes in. We proactively and strategically help our clients to leverage their solutions to their full potential on an ongoing basis. Right from roll-out, we’re there to ensure the solution helps them meet their goals. Becoming a go-to resource to guide on best practices and the ideal route ahead, regardless of whether there’s an issue or not. On hand, always, to open up new possibilities and keep honing your experience with your selected solution. If you are experiencing a technical issue, we can also facilitate putting you in touch with the right team to fix it. As your main point of contact, we can field all queries, issues and requests, as a trusted partner in making your system work for you. All the while, the in-depth knowledge that we develop of your business needs, processes and use cases ensures we can offer tailored advice, fast and for the long term.
To optimally boost your business with it, you need to know your system inside and out. This involves shaping a success plan that unites your business aims with your digital solution’s capabilities and features, and ensuring your teams know how to use it to get to where they need to go. To position you for all this, your Customer Success Manager will get to know your business in detail: pain points, concrete goals and aspirations. A practical, manageable timeline and plan will follow, which your Customer Success Manager will frequently follow up on to ensure the smooth implementation of enhancements and tweaks. This open, regular communication and exchange of ideas are crucial to you seeing maximum gains from your platform, across business performance, efficiency, productivity, and more.
You’ll likely have gone to a great deal of effort to find the right solution for your business needs. So, naturally, you’ll need a Customer Success Manager who knows that specific platform in depth: its potential, advantages and any limitations. With this knowledge, they’ll be able to guide you to bring in the right combinations of features for your use cases (across HR, marketing and sales, for example). Accounting for these teams’ varying blockages, processes and goals, all within your chosen platform; developing the automations, integrations and smoother communication channels that they need.
Our Customer Success experts will contribute knowledge specific to your chosen platform and also to your sector and industry. This enables them to guide you on best practices, impactful workflows and features to refresh or introduce, as well as on how to get your teams on board. Essentially, supporting you to get the most out of your technology, with your specific market and business needs always front of mind.
Digital solutions evolve fast, continually releasing new features and updates. It can be tricky to stay on top of these opportunities: sifting through all the new releases to find those relevant to your business, identifying how they’ll work into your processes, and ensuring roll-outs happen in parallel to your day-to-day continuing to run smoothly. Your Customer Success Manager will take this off your hands, connecting the dots between the latest releases and your business needs to keep your solution optimised. As your company grows and changes, too, this ability to utilise the latest features is key. New teams, markets, verticals, customer data sets, and so on often bring along with them requirements for additions and expansions within your software. While you’re at capacity handling it all, your Customer Success Manager can handle the platform side of things! Organising the training needed for your new people to utilise your system, and keeping usage levels and returns from your solution high.
A Customer Success Manager is your main point of communication, strategic mapping and problem-solving for all things related to your CRM and business process management system. They’re there, overall, to guide you and your company to success, via a plan customised to the nuances of your business.
The worst-case scenario: What can happen without Customer Success?
Someone within your company has bought a CRM (a significant investment). It works out-of-the-box, but your employees have no guidance on the how and what of the system, nor on how to tailor it to your company processes. Figuring this out without expert support can be painstaking, and you won’t see the rapid return on your investment that you’d have hoped for. Of course, you’ll have the ticket-based support from your particular solution’s agents that we touched on above. Yet it’s not possible to build a personal, go-to relationship there, with a familiar face who knows your use cases.
You’re left figuring it out independently — which can result in patchy, duplicate workflows and data sets within your CRM, as everyone tries to add their bit. Generating more of the confusion you’re trying to avoid, rather than the clarity you were aiming to enable with your software. As things become increasingly complex, your employees are likely to disengage with a platform that’s simply not delivering for them. Usage drops, and you end up wasting money on a would-be smart investment.
The best-case scenario: What can you achieve with Customer Success?
You’re set up with a game plan as soon as you introduce your solution. Your Customer Success Manager knows your company’s unique hurdles, strengths and milestones to hit. Your teams get the training and ongoing support from a dedicated, platform-expert sidekick. This is what they need to utilise your platform to its maximum, leveraging it to deliver on both personal and wider business goals. They can save time with tailored automations and integrations and — crucially — smoothly transition to new communication flows, evolving beyond silos that may have caused headaches previously.
Fundamentally, they’ll be able (and want!) to use the technologies that you’ve invested in, enabling them to bring your business the returns they’re designed to.
Customer Success is your way there.
Small companies can rapidly grow, particularly in the tech space. New and evolving processes and workflows, as well as new teams, departments and branches, mean expert guidance is handy to keep your CRM system clear, manageable and set up to best serve your needs. You’ll also likely want to look at automating processes as you grow. A Customer Success Manager can enable you to access this key efficiency boost. Likewise, it’s often a relief to have a trusted, go-to resource to turn to who’s likely supported companies to work through similar growth challenges. Providing you with experience, knowledge and practical pointers to smooth your path to greater goals.
It’s often a company employee or manager who brings up the idea of implementing a digital solution and oversees the purchase. But what happens when it comes to customising it to your business needs and ways of working, evolving it and onboarding and training your people over the months and years ahead? These are no mean feats. As such, the guidance, support and best-practice tips that a Customer Success Manager will offer are a real help.
After investing in your digital solution, the last thing you want to see is underwhelming uptake. That’s just not the return on investment you’re aiming for! A Customer Success Manager can support you to identify and resolve sticking points, to ultimately boost software usage across your teams. Through guidance, training, feature demos or simply having their questions answered, your people will soon be able to see and feel your technology’s value in their daily work.
Your chosen solution will likely offer a Customer Success add-on, usually at a higher cost tier. At Provident CRM, we take a solution-agnostic approach within our partner platform scope, offering our Customer Success packages regardless of the tier you’re committed to with your selected platform. This enables you to gain Customer Success as a standalone package, in tandem with your platform provider.
We’ve designed our Customer Success packages to partner with our clients throughout your technology experience. The ultimate aim? Ensuring successful product adoption and satisfaction for your teams, via a customised success plan built to suit your goals. Working with us, your (dedicated) Customer Success Manager becomes a highly useful go-between in your relationship with your solution provider (HubSpot, monday.com, and so on). No need to speak to someone different in their support team every time you open a ticket, re-explaining your issues. Instead, we’ll facilitate communication channels and clarity, elevating your account beyond the usual client-provider relationship.
It’s obvious but worth saying: at Provident CRM, our customer’s success is our success. It’s a central value of ours and it guides our work to see clients fly once their platform is rolled out.
The depth and breadth of our experience across sectors, companies and use cases enable us to contribute valuable knowledge to ensure you gain maximum benefit from your digital solution. Getting to the root of your needs and hurdles, understanding your end customers, and passing on the tools you need to utilise your technology to deliver on their expectations.
