Customer success software helps a company keep the customers it already has. It gives each customer account a health score, built from how much the customer uses the product, how many support tickets it raises and how it answers surveys. It then warns the account manager which customers may leave. An account manager is the employee responsible for one group of customers.
This software is used mainly by companies that sell software to other businesses by subscription, for example by the year. For such a company, the first sale is only the start. The customer must renew every year, and many customers also add more users over time. If a customer does not renew, the company loses that income. The share of customers who leave is called churn. Customer success, a discipline that grew up with SaaS, tries to find unhappy customers early, while there is still time to help them.
The health score combines several signals. Usage: how many of the customer's staff log in each week, and which features they use. Support: how many tickets the customer raised in the help desk, and how serious they were. Surveys: how the customer answered questions such as "how likely are you to recommend us?" Billing: whether invoices from subscription billing are paid on time. The company decides how much weight each signal gets. The software adds them up into one score, often out of 100, and shows the trend.
Consider a Chennai company that sells HR software to 800 businesses. One of its customers is a hospital chain, which renews in three months. In January, the chain's health score was 82. By March, it has fallen to 41. The software shows why. Weekly logins have fallen by 60%. The chain has raised nine tickets about the attendance module in a month. Its HR head rated the product 3 out of 10 in the latest survey. The software alerts the chain's account manager and creates a task for her. She calls the HR head and learns that the attendance module does not handle the chain's night shifts. The company sets up the night-shift rules, and the customer's team gets two training sessions. By renewal time, the score is back to 70, and the chain renews.
Customer success software also runs guides inside the product and online communities of users, which help customers learn the product without raising tickets. Its first stage, the setup of a new customer, is often run in customer onboarding software.
How is customer success different from the help desk? The help desk responds when a customer writes in with a problem. Customer success looks for problems before the customer writes in, or before the customer quietly leaves. The account records themselves are kept in the customer relationship management (CRM) system. Feedback from many customers together is read by customer experience management (CXM) software.