Deliver Outstanding Customer Outcomes

Certinia Customer Success Cloud uniquely provides a complete, coordinated picture of the entire customer lifecycle. If you’re a customer success manager, you know that achieving complete visibility into the entire customer lifecycle has been, to date, a somewhat elusive goal. And without a coordinated picture of the entire customer lifecycle, defining what customer success even looks like for your organization becomes difficult.

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Customer success is largely defined by achieving the kind of loyalty that brings a customer back for more. However, without properly managing the customer lifecycle, customer success remains elusive. But there’s good news! Certinia recently introduced a game-changing solution called Customer Success Cloud, which helps organizations orchestrate customer success and achieve that desired customer loyalty.

Introducing Customer Success Cloud–There’s an App for That!

At a high level, Customer Success Cloud simplifies and systematizes all customer success activities, providing a repeatable, predictable way to gain total control over customer success initiatives. That sounds great, right? But we understand you want more than just sound bites. So let’s delve into how Customer Success Cloud can achieve all that.

Firstly, consider a typical customer journey. As illustrated in the diagram below, the key components include:

  • Generating and managing the lead until they become an opportunity
  • Moving the opportunity into Sales Cloud
  • Utilizing CPQ software to generate an estimate for services and create a strong proposal
  • Using Professional Services Cloud to execute the delivery of those services

But what happens after the service has been delivered and the customer is implemented? As indicated in the diagram, this is where Customer Success Cloud becomes critical.

A Natural Complement to Professional Services Automation Capabilities

Professional Services Automation from Certinia, built on the Salesforce platform, provides a complete, customer-centric view of your business on the cloud, connecting your entire organization end-to-end. With Customer Success Cloud, we leverage one of the core capabilities developed in our Professional Services Cloud in a new way to drive customer success – obtaining that broad view of the entire organization.

From a resources standpoint, this visibility ensures all stakeholders engaged with a customer relationship are kept informed of all activities through a super simple task structure.

Benefits of Enterprise-wide Visibility into Customer Success

The reality of customer success management at any organization is that there are multiple participants beyond the CSM. With a broad view into the customer relationship, it’s easier than ever to expand the team that’s involved with customer success, whether to include an account executive, salesperson, support person, or someone from the product organization who is brought in to do an escalation.

What if you’re working on a playbook and there’s a change at the executive level? With broad visibility across the organization, CSMs are able to see the change and edit an existing playbook or create a new one if needed. Immediate knowledge of executive changes provides a lot of flexibility to bring something new into the customer relationship and continue to execute seamlessly.

We’ve talked before about revenue leakage at organizations, and often one primary reason is being unaware of changes in the customer lifecycle such as product upgrades, add-ons, renewals, or subscription alterations. Not only does a CSM have a 360-degree view of the customer’s account and opportunities, but customer success leaders also gain that insight and can drill down into all of the revenue opportunities associated with that customer.

If an event occurs outside of Customer Success Cloud, it can be automatically integrated into the platform. For example, a satisfaction survey is conducted in which the score dips below a specified number. Customer Success Cloud automatically alerts the CSM who can then create a playbook to take action and perform a course correction with the customer. Even more impressive is the time reduction your organization can experience from the survey execution to action being taken. What could normally take 2-3 months takes a matter of days, resulting in faster intervention with the customer relationship.

Measuring Customer Success Goes Beyond Sales

Customer Success Cloud is a platform created to support all aspects of what customer success really is. Sales are a great measure of success, but they are only one measure and by no means the only measure that defines the success of your customer relationships.

When we developed Customer Success Cloud, we took deep consideration of the following definitions of customer success and made sure to address them in the platform with intuitive features and functionality.

  • Customer success is an exceptional customer relationship in which the customer returns to your business again and again, expands their relationship with your business, and evangelizes your business to others within their sphere of influence.

Customer Success Cloud drives those relationships with detailed customer information and account visibility beyond just the customer success management team.

  • Customer success is knowing you have the right customer success manager assigned to the right customer.

If you have a customer in the electricity business and a CSM who has experience in that industry, CS leaders are able to see those distinctions and make meaningful customer assignments.

  • Customer success is about driving self-service, ensuring the experience you provide is exactly what the customer is looking for.

Customer Success Cloud empowers CSMs to deliver what customers want and need in a way that works for each individual customer.

  • Customer success is being able to deftly address and manage scenarios that come up that may be outside of what’s “normal” or expected; for example, an executive change, or a merger & acquisition, either of which would change the customer relationship to a certain degree.

Customer Success Cloud playbooks ensure that you can standardize the leading practices your organization follows to drive success and that the entire CS team has access to those practices.

  • Customer success is clearly defined by many different activities and measures, but broadly, it is anything you can do to support your customers in their journey and make them successful.

Consider all potential triggers for action to be taken with a customer, such as an opportunity closing, which signals the need for onboarding, or a subscription renewal, which signals the need to review pricing. There are numerous triggers for which you can create playbooks using Customer Service Cloud.

Customer Success Cloud is intended to promote a proactive approach to your organization’s customer relationships. Whether you review your customer relationships annually or monthly, the platform enables you to keep track of the relationship’s progress and ensure you’re staying up to date in the process.

Customer success is an evolving field with a multitude of opportunities to drive the customer experience and outcomes. Organizations will increasingly focus on customer success in the coming years as the pieces of the customer relationship puzzle come together, and Customer Success Cloud is one significant step forward in bringing clarity to this formerly elusive area of business.

Learn more about how Customer Success Cloud can help your business drive exceptional customer relationships and, consequently, elevate your business. Our single-platform solution runs on the Salesforce cloud and helps you put your customers at the center of everything you do.

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