You’ve researched the Salesforce platform and deemed it to work best for you and your organization. Your sales team has already used it but can you extend it to the post-sales teams?
Any successful business depends on its customers’ success. It’s the magic ingredient that turns clients into devoted followers, lowers customer churn, and spurs exponential growth. However, in the data-driven world of today, the gut feeling and sparse data that drove old customer success and account management strategies are beginning to feel like training wheels on a bike: they get you there, but they don’t fully maximize your potential.
Can I use Salesforce for customer success?
Salesforce plays a critical role in your organization’s success because it provides an efficient and central platform that helps your company manage customer data, streamline the communications, and provide insights for personalized customer interaction.
Of course you can use salesforce for customer success and infact, many large enterprises customize their salesforce instance for customer success teams. It comes with significant cost and maintenance effort, but it also makes salesforce the single source of truth for both sales and post sales teams.
When organisations scale the ladder of 50M ARR or more, it’s no longer a luxury but a necessity to have a single source of customer data, so that it can effectively understand the impact of the various initiatives and investments.
Challenges while using Salesforce for Customer Success
Salesforce for customer success has been an afterthought as CRM is mainly designed for leads and opportunity management. While post sales teams like customer success and service teams have a different need – revenue retention and expansion management, customer insights and playbooks automation features. Many enterprises have gone ahead and invested in projects to customize and build on top of Salesforce. While this is a good way to star, it is limited and costly. It’s limited by the experience of the team and they are not exposed to the best practices of Customer Success developments. It’s also costly not just as a development one-time cost but also need to continuously maintain and update.
AppEQ is a purpose built plugin which work well within Salesforce platform to give additional capabilities like In-app Account Summary, Dashboards, Notifications and Alerts through Messages and Popups for Customer Success and Account Management teams.
Use Integrations to Get All Your Customer Data in One Place
The days are past, in which marketing teams had to work in silos and were always at the same throat at every opportunity. Suzie Blaszkiewicz, CRM marketing analyst at GetApp, says integration with customer support apps helps streamline customer interactions. Typical examples of streamlined integrations are: your marketing teams use HubSpot Marketing Software, your sales team uses Salesforce, your customer service team uses Zendesk, your product analytics are in Mixpanel or Amplitude. With out of the box and easy integration support from AppEQ, it is easy and seamless to be able to see data and insights from other systems.
The Salesforce Advantage: Your Customer Success Command Center
Salesforce is more than just a customer relationship management system.It serves as your main hub for all things customer-related. Consider it your mission control centre, where you can monitor all client interactions, examine the larger picture, and spot possible obstacles before they destroy your customer relationships.
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 a organization strategy to help in scaling faster growth.
1. Customer Journey in one place
Customer journey notes , activities right from marketing to sales to customer success in one place.
2. Team Collaboration
Imagine ability for cross departmental collaboration due to increased transparency and data access. When you have a ABM team looking at expansion of existing customers, it becomes imperative to have key customer information easily accessible for better collaboration, which leads to increased expansion revenue. Imagine a world of increased collaboration between marketing, sales and customer success teams 🙂 – yes, a true collaborative Customer Success Plan. yep !- higher Net Revenue Retention (NRR).
3. At Risk Signals from Low Engagement
Identify at risk customers from low engagement with your organization and product. This will help in increasing customer retention and drive proactive actions from your teams
4. Renewal Management in Salesforce
Renewal management along with right forecasting methods. This also ensure that overall revenue from different departments can be seen in the same report and platform.
5. Automated Playbook Triggers
Imagine having a library of best practices for every customer scenario. AppEQ’s playbook functionality equips your team with data-driven action plans, ensuring everyone is on the same page and delivering exceptional customer experiences consistently.
Higher customer satisfaction leads to more revenue through retention and expansion. Having the right professional services component can help not just in retention but also driving more value for customer success. To achieve above, enterprises will need to invest effort to customize and maintain your Salesforce instance. However with AppEQ plugin, you can supercharge 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: Better experience layer on top of existing applications like Inbox, Helpdesk, Your product or In-house tools, leading to better compliance and proactive customer actions.
Dashboarding and Distribution: Ability to design dashboards with superior BI capability and trends, along with in-app distribution and notifications based on role, individuals. Once you have designed, users can directly access from AppEQ’s widgets which appear on Inbox, Salesforce and other applications.
Notifications and Pop-ups : Admins and Managers can notify CSM/AMs to take actions by providing the right data at that right time , right place.
AI Assisted Templates : Hyper personalized engagement through email assist to CSM/AM, driving up customer engagement and personalized support.
AppEQ helps your organization unlock the key customer data and insights from existing enterprize applications and amplify it by making it accessible ‘in-the-moment‘ of requirement – on existing applications and workflows.
How easy is it to get product usage analytics data into Salesforce?
AppEQ bridges the gap between product analytics tools (like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Pendo) and Salesforce, allowing companies to leverage user behavior data for informed decision-making within their CRM platform.
Having product usage within the CRM helps CSM/AM to catch early signals for churn or potential upsell/cross sell opportunities. However it’s been difficult to get the product usage data into Salesforce due to high integration effort.
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:
1. Creates a Holistic Customer View
CRMs traditionally store customer contact information, sales history, and support interactions. Product analytics data adds another layer, revealing how customers actually interact with your product. This combined view allows you to understand not just “who” your customers are, but also “how” they engage with your product, leading to more informed customer relationship management.
2. Enables Proactive Customer Success
By seeing how customers use your product (frequently used features, areas of struggle), you can identify potential roadblocks and intervene before they lead to churn. For example, a customer success rep might see a user abandoning a critical workflow and reach out with personalized support.
3. Facilitates Targeted Communication and Upselling
Product analytics data within the CRM reveals which features resonate with specific customer segments. Sales and marketing teams can leverage this to tailor messaging and promotions. Imagine a logistics company seeing a customer underutilizing advanced route optimization features – they can target them with specific campaigns highlighting its benefits.
4. Improves Product Development and Roadmap
Product analytics data exposes user behavior patterns and feature usage. By seeing which features are underutilized or causing friction, product managers can prioritize improvements and development efforts based on real user needs. This data-driven approach ensures product development aligns with customer requirements, leading to higher adoption and satisfaction.
5. Streamlines Collaboration and Efficiency
Having product analytics data readily available within the CRM eliminates the need to switch between platforms. Teams like customer success, sales, and product can work together seamlessly with a unified view of the customer, leading to faster decision-making and improved workflow.
In essence, integrating product analytics data with your CRM bridges the gap between customer acquisition and customer success. It empowers you to understand customer behavior, personalize interactions, and ultimately build stronger, more profitable customer relationships.
Quantifiable Results and Customer Success Bliss
The true measure of a company’ success lies in results, and Salesforce with AppEQ is a guaranteed recipe for customer success magic. Studies show that businesses using Salesforce experience significant improvements in customer retention, satisfaction, and lifetime value. But here’s the secret sauce: AppEQ amplifies these benefits even further.
Imagine reducing customer churn by a staggering percentage, boasting sky-high customer satisfaction scores, and witnessing your customer lifetime value soar to new heights. That’s the power of a data-driven, proactive customer success strategy fueled by the industry most dynamic duo of Salesforce and AppEQ.
Ready to Unleash the Power using AppEQ?
We understand that every customer is unique, and a cookie-cutter approach just won’t cut it. That’s why AppEQ doesn’t just offer a one-size-fits-all solution. We work closely with you to understand your specific customer success goals and processes and tailor our solution to perfectly fit your needs.
Contact AppEQ today and let’s explore how we can help you leverage the power of Salesforce to create an unparalleled customer experience that keeps your customers not just satisfied, but wildly enthusiastic brand advocates. We’re confident that once you experience the AppEQ difference, you’ll wonder how you ever managed customer success without it.
