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5 Outstanding Ways to Use Salesforce for Customer Success

Using Salesforce for Customer Success and Account Management Teams

You’ve researched the Salesforce platform and deemed it to work best for you. Having an online presence has helped you connect and gain more visitors. Your data collected on leads is turned into customers. Your customers can cancel after a month. But they aren’t interested here. You can even use your competitors to get their clients out of your mouth! You must keep your customers engaged even after you lose a customer who is always changing his mind.

Any successful firm relies on its clients’ success. It’s the secret ingredient that transforms customers into loyal followers, reduces customer churn, and drives exponential growth. However, in today’s data-driven world, the gut instinct and limited data that drove classic customer success and account management techniques are beginning to seem like training wheels on a bike: they get you there, but they don’t completely optimize your capabilities. Salesforce plays a critical role in transforming customer success strategies by serving as a central hub for customer data, streamlining communication, offering valuable insights for customized customer interactions, and enabling the tracking of customer behavior and preferences for proactive and personalized support. Engaging with Salesforce community members can significantly enhance issue resolution speed, with 90% of members experiencing a marked improvement, showcasing the value of leveraging the Salesforce Community for insights and support in achieving customer success.

Can I use Salesforce for customer success?

Yes, Salesforce CRM for Customer Success

Salesforce is a significant component of customer success because it provides an efficient and central platform for customers to manage data, simplify communications, and get insights for tailored customer interactions. Likewise, this allows tracking customer behaviour and preferences to enable proactive and personal customer care.

Of course, you can use Salesforce for customer success, and many major organizations have customized their Salesforce instances for customer success teams, adopting it as a best practice. It incurs considerable costs and maintenance work, but it also establishes Salesforce as the one source of truth for both sales and post-sales teams.

When an organization reaches 50 million ARR or more, having a single source of customer data becomes a need rather than a luxury, allowing it to properly analyze the impact of various efforts and expenditures.

Challenges while using Salesforce for Customer Success

Salesforce for customer success has been an afterthought, since CRM is primarily intended for improved lead and opportunity management. Post-sales teams, such as customer success and service teams, require various tools such as revenue retention management, customer analytics, and automation playbooks. Many companies have engaged in efforts to adapt and develop on top of Salesforce. While this is an excellent method to get started, it is restricted and expensive. It is constrained by the team’s experience, and they have not been exposed to best practices for Customer Success development. It is extremely expensive, not just in terms of development costs, but also in terms of ongoing maintenance and updates. Read more challenges shared by actual users on this article.

One CRM for Sales and Post Sales - Pros and Cons

AppEQ is a purpose-built plugin that integrates easily with the Salesforce platform to deliver additional capabilities such as in-app account summary, dashboards, notifications, and alerts via messages and popups to Customer Success and Account Management teams.

Use Integrations to Get All Your Customer Data in One Place

Out of box integrations with AppEQ

The days of teams working in isolation and always fighting over every opportunity are over. Suzie Blaszkiewicz, CRM marketing analyst at GetApp, explains that integrating with customer support applications helps to simplify customer interactions. Marketing teams utilizing HubSpot Marketing Software, sales teams using Salesforce, customer service teams using Zendesk, and product analytics using Mixpanel or Amplitude are common instances of streamlined connectivity. AppEQ provides out-of-the-box integration functionality, making it simple and smooth to view data and insights from other systems.

Integrating customer support applications is essential for better understanding and meeting customer needs, ensuring personalized experiences and value addition through attentive listening and small, personal touches.

The Salesforce Advantage: Your Customer Success Command Center

Salesforce is more than simply a CRM solution. It acts as your primary center for anything customer-related, enabling businesses to create a more personalized experience for their customers through sophisticated data analysis and tailored interactions. Consider it your mission control center, where you can monitor all client contacts, assess the big picture, and identify any roadblocks before they derail your customer relations. By using Salesforce for tracking customer behavior and preferences, companies can provide proactive and customized personalized support, enhancing customer satisfaction and success.

Having a single source of truth starts with having a robust CRM for both Sales and Post Sales teams. More and more teams are looking to establish SSOT as an organization strategy to help in scaling faster growth.

Can Zendesk Integrate with Salesforce?

1. Customer Journey in one place

Customer journey notes and activities, from marketing through sales to customer success, are consolidated in one place, allowing for the effective management and personalization of customer interactions. Salesforce plays a crucial role in this process by streamlining communication and integrating all customer interactions along the journey. This consolidation helps in analyzing customer data, optimizing efficiency, personalizing messages, and ultimately achieving customer success and customer retention.

2. Team Collaboration

Imagine the potential for cross-departmental collaboration as a result of enhanced openness and data availability. When an ABM team is trying to expand with current clients, it is critical to have vital customer information conveniently available for improved cooperation, which leads to more expansion revenue. Imagine a future where marketing, sales, and customer success teams work together more closely: a real collaborative Customer Success Plan. Yes!- greater Net Revenue Retention (NRR).

3. At Risk Signals from Low Engagement

Identify at-risk clients based on their poor involvement with your business and product. This will assist to increase client retention and promote proactive action from your staff.

4. Renewal Management in Salesforce

Renewal management combined with appropriate forecasting methodologies. This also ensures that total income from many departments may be shown in the same report and platform.

5. Automated Playbook Triggers

Consider creating a library of best practices for each client scenario. AppEQ’s playbook feature provides your team with data-driven action plans, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and consistently delivers excellent client experiences.

Higher customer satisfaction generates more money through retention and expansion. Having the correct professional services component may help with retention while also delivering greater value for customer success. To accomplish the aforementioned goals, businesses must invest time and resources in customizing and maintaining their Salesforce instance. However, with the AppEQ plugin, you can optimize your CRM for customer success.

The AppEQ Factor: Supercharge Your Salesforce for Customer Success

Here’s how AppEQ takes your customer success game to the next level:

  • Integration: AppEQ provides out of the box integration support for many of the enterprise applications.

  • Experience In-App Layer: Improved experience layer on top of current apps such as Inbox, Helpdesk, Your product, or in-house solutions, resulting in increased compliance and proactive customer actions.

  • Dashboarding and Distribution: The ability to create dashboards with advanced BI capabilities and trends, as well as in-app distribution and notifications depending on role and person. Once developed, users may have immediate access via AppEQ’s widgets, which show in Inbox, Salesforce, and other programs.

  • Notifications and Pop-ups: Administrators and managers may alert CSM/AMs to take action by giving the appropriate data at the proper time and place.

  • AI-Assisted Templates: Highly tailored engagement via email assistance to CSM/AM, increasing customer engagement and providing individualized support.

AppEQ - empowering your teams on the existing applications with customer insights and actions

AppEQ enables your business to extract essential consumer data and insights from current enterprise apps and magnify them by making them available ‘in-the-moment’ of need – on existing applications and processes.

How easy is it to get product usage analytics data into Salesforce?

AppEQ connects product analytics solutions (such as Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Pendo) with Salesforce, enabling businesses to use user behavior data to make smart decisions within their CRM platform.

Customizable product usage dashboard from Mixpanel

Having product usage into the CRM allows CSM/AM to detect early signs of attrition or possible upsell/cross sell possibilities. However, the considerable integration effort has made it difficult to collect product consumption statistics into Salesforce. A Salesforce account plays a crucial role in this integration, facilitating the management and analysis of customer data for success, highlighting its importance in leveraging product usage analytics effectively.

Why is it important to get product usage analytics data into Salesforce?

Here’s why having product analytics data accessible within a CRM is crucial for businesses: Utilizing product usage analytics data in Salesforce can be instrumental in creating and managing success plans to ensure customer satisfaction and retention.

1. Creates a Holistic Customer View

CRM systems often retain customer contact information, sales history, and support interactions. Product analytics data offers another dimension by demonstrating how customers engage with your product. This unified perspective enables you to understand not just “who” your clients are, but also “how” they interact with your product, resulting in better educated customer relationship management.

2. Enables Proactive Customer Success

By seeing how consumers use your product (commonly utilized features, areas of difficulty), you may detect possible barriers and act before they cause churn. Salesforce enables customer success teams to offer personalized support by tracking customer behavior and preferences, allowing for proactive and customized interactions. For example, a customer success representative may see a user abandoning a vital workflow and reach out with specialized assistance, ensuring a tailored approach to achieving customer success.

3. Facilitates Targeted Communication and Upselling

Product analytics data in the CRM demonstrates which aspects appeal to certain client categories. Sales and marketing departments can use this to adjust messages and promotions. Consider a logistics provider that notices a client is underutilizing sophisticated route optimization tools; they might target them with special advertisements emphasizing the benefits.

4. Improves Product Development and Roadmap

Product analytics data reveals trends in user behavior and feature usage. By identifying which features are underused or generating friction, product managers may prioritize changes and development efforts based on actual user needs. This data-driven strategy ensures that product development matches with client needs, resulting in increased adoption and satisfaction.

5. Streamlines Collaboration and Efficiency

Product analytics data is readily available within the CRM, eliminating the need to transfer systems. Teams such as customer success, sales, and product can collaborate seamlessly with a single perspective of the customer, resulting in quicker decision-making and better workflow.

In essence, incorporating product analytics data into your CRM closes the gap between customer acquisition and customer success. It allows you to better analyze consumer behavior, personalize conversations, and ultimately establish stronger, more lucrative customer relationships.

Quantifiable Results and Customer Satisfaction Bliss

The fundamental measure of a company’s success is its outcomes, and Salesforce plus AppEQ is a certain recipe for customer success magic. According to studies, Salesforce helps firms boost customer retention, happiness, and lifetime value. But here’s the secret sauce: AppEQ boosts these advantages even further.

Imagine cutting customer turnover by a stunning proportion, achieving sky-high customer satisfaction scores, and seeing your client lifetime value skyrocket. That is the power of a data-driven, proactive customer success strategy enabled by the industry’s most dynamic duo: Salesforce and AppEQ.

Ready to Unleash the Power using AppEQ?

We recognize that each organization is unique, and a one-size-fits-all strategy will not work. This is why AppEQ doesn’t provide a one-size-fits-all solution. We collaborate closely with you to understand your particular customer success goals and procedures, and we personalize our solution to meet your requirements.

Contact AppEQ now to see how we can help you use Salesforce to build an unmatched customer experience that turns your customers into wildly passionate brand evangelists. We believe that after you’ve seen the AppEQ difference, you’ll wonder how you ever managed customer success without it.

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Picture of Shashwat Mishra

Shashwat Mishra

SaaS enthusiast with extensive experience in driving revenues for some great unicorns of the Indian startup ecosystem. I firmly believe in getting on the ground, understanding the pulse of the market and the consumer and driving strategic sales through long-term, value-driven relationship building. Always open to unlearn and relearn.

What is AppEQ? 

 

AppEQ is a lightweight customer data activation plugin that brings customer data like product usage data/trends right at CSM’s fingertips , on their existing applications like Inbox/CRM /CSP /HelpDesk. We integrate data directly from product analytics like Pendo, Mixpanel, Amplitude and CRM like Salesforce, Hubspot etc. 

Our capability to bring this within your existing applications through our in-app widgets  leads to much higher adoption  and implementation time of 1 week or less

Book a demo with Shaswat

Every Enterprise requirements are different. Understand how Customer Data and Insights Activation can help drive more revenue through a personalized demo with Shashwat

Customer Data Insights Activation In-the-Moment

Customer Data & Insights Activation

 
One-click Integration  
In-app Customer 360 
Account Task Management 
Notification & Playbook Automation 
In-the-Moment Insights
Early Warning Signals
Customizable Dashboard 
Email Assist …

Built for Customer Success and Account Management teams to drive retention revenue and growth without the complexities of traditional Customer Success Platforms. No more back and forth between teams and systems.

To know more, request a Demo