Buying Customer Success Software? Who Needs to Be Involved?

Implementing a Customer Success platform will resonate across the business so the CEO should make the ultimate call on where to invest but who else should have oversight of or influence on the decision …

Head of Customer Success: Too often enterprise software implementations fail as purchasing and implementation decisions are made by committee and the final product is unusable. So, while those listed below should have some influence, the Head of Customer Success needs to ensure the resulting implemented solution fits their vision for how Customer Success is practiced at the company.

Customer Success Managers: Yes, the users need a voice! Otherwise you may end up with an unusable white elephant that is no reflection of how Customer Success is practiced day-to-day.

Chief Financial Officer: Will want to understand the up-front costs of the solution, any ongoing or indirect costs/savings and calculate the potential return-on-investment prior to a solution being selected.

Head of IT: Needs to know how much IT support will be required as part of the implementation process? Data will need to be passed into a Customer Success platform, does the vendor have their own API, Tracking codes, pre-built integrations to your existing business applications? How much of your developer time will be required to set up and maintain any integrations.

Also, is the solution secure & scalable? As with any Customer Success application, it will ingest some of your customers’ data. Does the vendor have the required certifications? GDPR, HIPAA, ISO etc.

Product Lead: Will this solution have an impact on how you disseminate product knowledge, educate customers on new or upcoming features and/or capture voice-of-customer feedback?

Head of Sales: How do you expect this solution to impact revenue expansion. Can you use it to identify expansion opportunities to pass to sales? Can sales get access to the intelligence (account health scoring etc.) that will be available within the CS platform, either through a push integration with the CRM they use or potentially via free or low cost read-only licenses.

Head of Support: Will this give greater visibility of cases across the business and increase collaboration and resolution rates? Can the platform ingest ticket data and track support metrics against other key business metrics, ensuring Support can focus their energies in the right areas.

Head of Marketing: Will this platform help with references, reviews and generate ‘2nd order’ word-of-mouth lead flow? Is there a way for it to automate the capture of NPS scoring or request reviews based on the health, profile or behavior of the users?

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