Customer Success software democratizes customer data so that every department can make more customer-centric decisions. Hunter Montgomery, CMO of ChurnZero, dives into the benefits that marketing professionals can realize with access to their company’s Customer Success platform.
As marketers, we do our best to understand and relate to our customers’ needs and challenges. However, we can only be as customer-centric as the information we have. It’s why we lean heavily on other teams and talk directly with customers as often as possible. Customer insights are often hard to come by, especially in volatile times when everyone is doing more with less and execution matters more than exploration.Â
Today, B2B marketers are tapping into a new stream of insights derived directly from customers through the Customer Success teams who manage them and the platforms they use to do it. Your company’s Customer Success platform, or CSP, is used primarily to manage your customers’ experience towards greater adoption, value, retention, account expansion, and recurring revenue. However, it’s also a powerful tool for data-driven marketing teams using CSP data to surface customer advocates, leverage customer pain points for decision-making, discover wins and trends to shape content strategies, and much more.Â
If your Customer Success team hasn’t yet equipped you with a custom CSP dashboard for marketing insights, here are three reasons to request one. Â
1.Take The Work Out Of Identifying New Customer Champions
It’s often hard to find customers willing to help you with case studies, advocacy, or marketing research because it requires asking Customer Success or another team for help. To make things harder, we often need customers who fit a particular profile based on industry, location, or size.Â
It’s often a long shot for us and a chore for other teams.Â
With a CSP dashboard, however, it only takes a quick digital search to find your ideal customer interviewees. It’s easy to find the customers with the best health scores and then segment them using industry, company size, location, account longevity, NPS® or other survey scores to build a shortlist. With this data at your fingertips, all you’ll need from your CS team is to vet the shortlist and make some introductions.Â
2. Know More About What Your Customers Value Most, And When
With access to CSP data that tracks the entire customer journey down to task-level detail, marketing leaders can make strategic and tactical marketing decisions with extra confidence.Â
Do you know which product features your customers use most right now? Your CSP does, which makes it an essential reference source for messaging and campaign development, for example. By reducing the guesswork around what you should be talking about, your CSP data gets you to the “howâ€, “where,†and “when†aspects of campaign development faster.Â
Your platform’s in-depth data can also help you identify ‘power users’ to segment and survey or find patterns around when your most successful customers are happiest and most likely to advocate for your business. Whether you’re developing a new creative or implementing a new program, your CSP provides a new source of valuable truth.Â
3. Enhance Marketing’s ROI To Your Company
While marketing might interest customers in a product or service, Customer Success gets customers to stay. While both roles are critical, today’s executives understand that it’s less expensive to generate recurring revenue through retention and expansion than through acquisition.Â
With CS platform data, however, marketing teams can power new initiatives that give them a direct hand in expansion and acquisition. These could include reference programs that integrate data from sites like G2 or TrustRadius, or cross-departmental partnerships that “level up†your company’s customer marketing to the same level as your prospect marketing. Marketers can partner with Customer Success to build better customer personas, for example, or to run targeted campaigns that help their CS team achieve ambitious adoption or expansion goals.Â
An organization where the marketing department leverages the data from a CS platform will have a significant advantage over an organization not using it. With this critical customer data, marketers can better serve their entire customer portfolio. You’ll become more competitive in your industry, more effective in your strategy, and better able to show your C-suite how marketing contributes to the bottom line.
How have you leveraged Customer Success software to drive better outcomes? Share with us on FacebookOpens a new window , TwitterOpens a new window , and LinkedInOpens a new window . We’d love to hear from you!Â
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