糖心Vlog

While acquiring a new customer is an exciting milestone, smart SaaS companies know that customers need proactive support after the deal is signed. If you want your customers to see value in your product and keep buying from you, you’re going to have to prioritize customer success at your SaaS company.

It’s estimated that roughly is driven from existing customers, which means that creating a strategy to support your customers post-sale is critical to your business. This is especially true for Software-as-a-Service, or SaaS, companies, since new software tools often come with a learning curve for users.

So how do you solve this challenge? By creating a dedicated customer success function at your company.

The SaaS industry is booming, with a valuation in 2024, largely led by enterprise companies’ increased adoption of software. If you’re in the SaaS space, you know as well as I do that competition is fierce and customer expectations are higher than ever.

As companies look to consolidate their and cut products that aren’t driving value, a customer success strategy helps prevent your company from being next on the chopping block.

Table of Contents

• What is customer success in SaaS?
• Why Customer Success Matters in SaaS
• Metrics That Your Customer Success Team Should Track
• The Roles You Need on Your Customer Success Team
• Tools for Customer Success in SaaS

What is customer success in SaaS?

Customer success in SaaS is the discipline of proactively setting customers up for success with a new product or offering, with the goal of retaining and expanding their business. This is done through intentional onboarding, training, relationship-building, and support. This methodology differs from traditional customer support in that it’s designed to be proactive rather than just responding to customer requests. A rep works with the customer as soon as they buy your product in order to create a plan for success.

Effective customer success teams work to help their customers see from the product or service they’re using, effectively impacting the organization’s revenue through renewal and expansion.

While some startups might handle customer success through account management or customer support, SaaS companies have steadily moved towards implementing dedicated customer success departments within their organization.

骋补颈苍蝉颈驳丑迟’蝉 reported that 81% of B2B companies have a customer success function established, and as , the post-sale experience has become more important than ever.

The bottom line is that customer success functions are no longer just about customer happiness and value realization — they’re now a gateway to revenue.

Why Customer Success Matters in SaaS

Most SaaS products aren’t cheap, and customers are making an investment when they purchase a software tool. If customers find the tool difficult to use or they aren’t seeing value with it, they’re unlikely to renew or purchase more with your company. In fact, that over half of customers will just stop using a product that they don’t understand.

Throughout my 14 years in the customer success space, lack of value realization has always been a top churn reason. Having a dedicated customer success team allows you to directly impact the customer’s by showing them how to get the most out of their purchase.

I personally think the biggest value of SaaS customer success teams is their ability to offer customers personalized and strategic guidance. This goes beyond just showing customers “how” to use your product, and instead focuses on understanding the challenges they’re facing and highlighting what your product can do to solve them.

By building relationships with your customers and understanding their goals or desired within your product, you can offer tailored suggestions for new ways to leverage the product or ways to improve their results with it.

This strategy cements your product as a “need to have” instead of a “nice to have,” which I can confirm makes the renewal conversation much easier to facilitate. Having a dedicated customer success team helps your company avoid churn and also creates expansion opportunities for your business.

Need more convincing? ChurnZero’s reports a direct correlation between the work of customer success teams and higher (NRR). This report showed that companies with dedicated customer success functions had higher NRR than those without dedicated customer success teams, proving the financial benefits of customer success strategies.

6 Components of Customer Success in SaaS

While every customer success program will look different, I suggest integrating these six core components. In each of these stages, you’ll be creating frameworks and strategies that create a positive customer experience, reduce churn, and create potential for revenue expansion.

1. Onboarding

Onboarding is typically where clients first interact with customer success after a sales handoff, and this is a critical part of the customer journey. During onboarding, customer success teams set up user accounts, assist with data migration, and often complete one-on-one training and user support.

In the onboarding stage, you’re teaching your customer “how to fish” while also helping them set the foundations for a successful product implementation. Successful onboarding is critical for product adoption and customer happiness, and that a robust onboarding process can significantly reduce churn.

In this stage, it’s important to identify your customer’s goals and objectives, as well as understand what success looks like for them. I recommend doing a kickoff call with the customer to help uncover this information if it wasn’t already provided to you in the sales handoff.

Pro tip: In larger organizations, I’ve seen Onboarding (or Implementation) exist outside of customer success, yet they still work closely with the customer success team. For example, your Onboarding team may do a kickoff call for a new customer and invite the dedicated customer success manager (CSM) to it, even though that CSM may not take over the relationship for a few months. This helps the CSM stay aligned with the customer’s goals and allows them to understand what the customer expects success to look like.

2. Success Planning

Success planning is a critical part of any customer success team, as it shows your customer how your product is helping them meet their goals. A success plan defines your customer’s objectives and lays out how you plan to meet them.

When you create a success plan for your customer, you’re creating dual accountability. This document outlines what the customer wants to achieve with your product, how they’ll achieve it, and which stakeholders from both your company and theirs are responsible for each item.

Having an active success plan in place makes the renewal conversation much easier to have, since you’ll have a list of the customer’s goals and how your product has helped achieve them. It might even help you with expansion and upsell as well, if your customers’ goals could be achieved through an upgraded plan or additional feature purchase.

To create a success plan, you’ll want to do the following:

• Ask your customers about their pain points and identify their goals with your product. If your company has defined use cases or ROI outcomes, you could ask your customer which ones they identify with the most.
• Create a plan that includes your recommendations for achieving each of their goals or desired outcomes. This is where customer success’s strategic guidance really shines!
• Outline which stakeholders should be involved for each goal.
• Define which KPIs you’ll use to measure progress.
• I also suggest adding timelines for goal completion, even if they’re just rough estimates (i.e., Q1, Q2, etc.). This can help your customer prioritize their goals, and it also holds them accountable for their part of the success plan.

If you’re just starting out, don’t overthink the format or tools that you use to create this. I’ve used everything from PowerPoint slides to Excel documents. Just make sure they’re easy to edit on a regular basis and can be shared with customers.

Pro tip: When it comes to setting KPI’s and measuring success, don’t be afraid to push back on your customers’ expectations, or suggest a phased approach if they have a lofty goal.

I once had a customer who wanted to increase their pipeline by over 20% in just a few months. I had to have some tough conversations with them about what they could realistically expect to achieve in that time frame. Leveraging data and our internal benchmarks helped me set expectations with them for what we could reasonably achieve in that timeframe.

Here’s a sample success plan for inspiration:

3. Quarterly Business Reviews

In the post-sale experience, customer touchpoints are everything. Once your customer is out of onboarding and has gone live with your product, you’ll need to make time regularly to check in with them. This is your opportunity to build the relationship, grow the success plan, and foster product adoption.

This regular touchpoint gives you the opportunity to check in on the success plan, present success metrics, and uncover any new goals or priorities your customers may have. I’ve seen customer meeting entitlements look different across the board, like meeting with enterprise-level customers once a month (an MBR) and commercial segment customers once a quarter (QBR).

I’ve seen a lot of chatter in the market about what makes a great (or a terrible) QBR, but at the end of the day, I think it comes down to tailoring the call to what your customer needs. In my experience, the best QBRs are a blend of reporting on relevant metrics (relevant being the keyword), updating your customer on any important feature releases, and having an actual conversation with them.

This QBR is not only your time to report on the success plan KPIs, but it’s also the perfect opportunity to understand what your customer is currently prioritizing. Take the time to ask them questions about what they’re working on for the next quarter, or if there have been any changes in their organization. Make sure you’re not just reporting metrics for the sake of reporting them, or you’ll likely start to see your customer skipping or canceling their meetings with you.

Your customers want to have a conversation with you, and as their strategic partner, it’s your job to guide them on what to do next to get even more out of their purchase. Come to these calls ready with recommendations on how they can take their product usage to the next level and continue crushing their goals.

Finally, if the customer’s C-suite attends these calls, make sure you prepare a call that’s high-level enough to interest them. Ask strategic questions that show interest in the company and its challenges and successes.

Pro tip: Each interaction with your customer should provide value to them, so don’t be afraid to ask your customer if the QBR was a good use of their time. I once had a customer tell me in a meeting, “This data is fine, I just don’t know what I’m supposed to do with it.”

This immediately set off a red flag for me and made me realize that this interaction was not providing value to the customer, so I worked to understand what data they did care about receiving regularly.

Looking for inspiration? Matik offers a (form fill required).

4. Playbooks

Every customer success team should have a playbook outlining best practices for customer success at the company. Playbooks are repeatable and scalable frameworks or procedures for teams to use in customer interactions, and can include procedures, templates, benchmarks, and even scripts to follow.

When used strategically, they help your customer success team scale by providing a consistent experience to your customer base. These playbooks can be for both proactive and reactive customer interactions.

Here’s an example of how I’ve used both proactive and reactive playbooks in customer success.

Proactive: A playbook (or checklist) outlining what to do once a new customer is assigned to a customer success teammate, such as sending an email introduction to the customer, scheduling a kickoff call, and building the kickoff slide deck.

Reactive: A playbook that outlines what the account team should do when a customer submits a negative NPS score, such as emailing the customer directly using a template outlined in the playbook.

I also suggest creating “save play” playbooks to address at-risk customers and to try and save the account from churning. In order to use these most effectively, you’ll need to be within your accounts.

I’ve seen save plays organized by risk reasons, such as “lack of champion or sponsor,” “low ROI,” “low product usage,” etc. Once you’ve identified which churn risks require a save play, work with your leadership team to determine what the best next steps are.

Your save play action plans might be something like having a CS director reach out to a customer (or their boss) when your main POC is being unresponsive. Or, if the account has more advanced risk, you might have a save play that outlines “make goods” or offers you can leverage to try to save the account.

Pro tip: When building your playbooks, be sure to include templates, relevant benchmarks, and internal stakeholder information to make the process easy for your teams to follow.

5. Self-service Content

Data that today’s customers want to self-serve, and they expect the companies they work with to offer robust self-service resources. While customer success is built on personal relationships, self-service content is an important supplement to one-on-one support.

Examples of common self-service customer content include technical knowledge bases, product training modules or courses, dedicated user guides, and online peer communities. Connecting an to your knowledge base is another great way to offer self-service options to customers.

Once you have the foundational self-service resources built, I suggest taking it up a notch and scaling your customer success team’s strategic guidance. You can do this by creating on-demand resources that highlight additional product use cases, outline best practice guidance, and show customers how to take their product usage to the next level.

Real-life example: In my role, our customer success team leads webinars focused on best practices, and our cross-functional teams have created best practice guides that live in our community hub. This type of resourcing goes beyond just the “what” or “how” to do something in our product, and instead shows customers the art of the possible.

When your self-service content is robust, your customer success team’s interactions with customers can be focused on account strategy and success planning instead of answering customer support questions.

Pro tip: When scaling self-service resources to include customer success guidance, try to make the resource feel like it’s coming from a CSM. Think about the conversations that you’re having with customers and try to produce content that reflects those conversations. For example, be sure to include recommendations for customers and highlight the value they’ll see in adopting your recommendations.

6. Feedback Loops

Customer success team members are often at the forefront of customer conversations, and they can play a key role in flagging recurring product issues for product teams. Creating a standardized feedback loop is a win–win: Brands improve their software, and customers feel a higher level of trust when changes are implemented.

Launching recurring Voice of Customer (VoC) programs like NPS and CSAT is an easy way to get started with a feedback loop, but you’ll need to create a plan to get those customer insights to the right team (and to follow up with the customer so they know you hear them).

My company includes a spot in our user community for customers to submit product feedback and suggestions, and that feedback gets funneled to the appropriate product teams.

You’re also likely to hear feedback naturally through conversations with customers. Create a plan to submit and track that organic feedback, like through an internal feedback form, so the appropriate internal stakeholders can receive those customer insights in a timely manner.

Customer feedback loops are critical for any business looking for long-term success. By listening to your customers and directing their feedback to the right places, you ensure your company is building and scaling in a way that meets your customers’ needs.

Metrics That Your Customer Success Team Should Track

The metrics your customer success team tracks will vary greatly from the metrics your customer support team is tracking, and for good reason. Your support team is on the front lines and is often reactive in their support, whereas your customer success team is operating in a proactive manner.

Customer success team metrics will focus less on individual interactions and more on the holistic customer experience. Metrics that show customer satisfaction, value realization, likelihood to renew, and propensity to expand are the measures you’re looking for here.

Here’s a list of foundational customer success metrics that your team should be tracking.

Customer Retention Rate

Customer retention rate (CRR) tells you what percentage of customers stick with your business over a certain period of time, like a quarter or a year. If that number is on the lower side, it might be a sign that something’s off with your product, service, or business model.

To identify your customer retention rate, start by subtracting the number of new customers you gained during that period from the total number of customers you had at the end. Then, divide that number by how many customers you had at the beginning of the period. Finally, multiply by 100 to get your retention rate as a percentage.

Not sure what a good customer retention rate looks like? While it varies by industry, reported as of this year that SaaS companies average about a 90% retention.

I’ve definitely been in CSM roles when it was a challenge to get to 80% CRR, so seeing a 90% average CRR for this year is a positive sign that after a very rough decline over the last three years.

Customer Churn

Customer churn rate is basically the opposite of your retention rate — it tells you what percentage of customers stop doing business with you over a certain period of time.

Churn will always be a high priority for customer success teams, and as a customer success manager, this is the metric that always kept me up at night.

That’s why I find it so interesting that that CS leaders ranked churn as the second most important priority this year, versus being number one last year. The study projects that this shift points to a more stable economic environment, which I found encouraging.

To calculate your customer churn rate, just use the formula below.

Customer Satisfaction Score (CSAT)

Many companies use short surveys that ask customers to rate their satisfaction with a product, feature, or interaction on a simple number scale — usually from 1 to 5 or 1 to 10. This approach works well because it’s fast for customers to complete, easy for teams to analyze, and provides a quick snapshot of how people feel about their experience.

You can calculate your customer satisfaction score (CSAT) from survey results with the formula below.

For example, 75 positive responses out of 125 total survey responses would give you a CSAT of 60%. Studies have found gaps in the customer satisfaction expressed by executive buyers and end users, so make sure you survey a mix of people.

Product Adoption

It’s common sense that if customers aren’t using your product, they’re not going to want to keep paying for it. Monitoring how often your product is used can help predict potential churn.

There are multiple ways to measure product adoption, and no one knows your product better than you do. This means you’ll want to really consider what product adoption means when it comes to potential churn. One product may lean on monthly active users (MAU) as a predictor, while another product might track in-product task completion or key milestones.

I’ve seen this done in a variety of different ways, but here are a few common product adoption metrics to get you started:

• Monthly or daily active users.
• Percentage of users reaching a key milestone.
• Time-to-value.
• Average session duration.
• Task abandonment rate.

Work with your product and analytics team to decide which product adoption features are the most critical to track, and then ensure your customer success team has insight into how their customers are performing against this metric.

Pro tip: In one of my previous roles, we tracked product adoption and adoption sophistication. This meant that we were looking at foundational product adoption (like monthly active users, number of chatbots published, etc.), but we were also looking at whether or not our customers were deploying advanced use cases with our product.

As a CSM, this was really helpful because if I spotted customers with lower product sophistication, I could suggest more advanced use cases in my quarterly business reviews with them and encourage them to further adopt the platform.

Tracking this metric also allowed us to later identify that customers who used our more advanced features had lower churn rates.

Customer Lifetime Value (CLV)

Customer lifetime value is an estimate of the total revenue a company can expect to earn from a customer over the entire span of their relationship.

For example, if a customer has a $50,000 annual contract that lasts 10 years, their CLV would be $500,000. This metric helps businesses understand the long-term value of each customer and measure the return on investment for their customer acquisition and retention efforts.

Digging into your CLV can also help you understand which qualities make a customer have the propensity to expand. For example, data might show that your enterprise customers who spend a certain amount of ARR and use a specific feature of your product might be more likely to upgrade or buy more from you.

Pro tip: In one of my prior roles, we tagged the customers who fell into the “propensity to expand” category in our CRM so that every function in our organization knew to prioritize their experience. We also leveraged this segmentation to create tailored initiatives to help drive that expansion effort.

Net Revenue Retention (NRR)

Net revenue retention (NRR) takes customer retention a step further by looking not just at how many customers you keep, but how much revenue you retain from them over time. It captures a more complete picture of growth by factoring in cancellations, upgrades, and downgrades.

In other words, NRR shows whether your existing customer base is generating more or less revenue compared to the previous period. A high NRR means your business is growing through strong retention, upsells, and cross-sells — all from your existing customers.

I mentioned earlier that churn dropped to second place in what right now, and that’s because NRR moved up to the number one spot.

You can calculate net revenue retention using this formula:

For example, if you started the month with $100,000 in recurring revenue, gained $20,000 from upsells and expansions, and lost $10,000 from churn and downgrades, your NRR would be:

($100,000 + $20,000 – $10,000) ÷ $100,000 = 1.1 or 110%

That means your existing customer base generated 10% more revenue compared to the previous month — even before adding any new customers.

When it comes to setting an NRR goal, anything above 100% is considered good because it shows consistent revenue growth from existing customers and a low churn rate.

Customer Health

A is a predictive metric that assesses the customer’s engagement and satisfaction. The customer health score acts as a leading indicator to predict customer behavior, such as churn risk or potential for growth, making it a crucial tool for customer success teams to spot account risk early and intervene.

A customer health score is typically made up of a variety of inputs that become weighted by importance. A typical health score may include factors such as product adoption, MAU or login frequency, number of open support tickets, whether or not the account has a champion or executive sponsor, and customer feedback like NPS or CSAT submissions.

Based on the weighted inputs you design, the customer health score typically equates to color-coded categories, such as red, yellow, or green. With this type of data, your customer success teams will have regular insight into their accounts and can understand what levers they need to influence to help their customers be more likely to renew (or expand!).

Customer health scores allow your teams to spot account risk early and run save plays and mitigation strategies to try and save the account from churning.

You can also segment your customers by their health score and create specific strategies to target them. Be sure to track the progress of those targeted initiatives so you can see what’s working and what isn’t across different health score categories.

While your customer success team’s goals should always be to move more accounts into green, don’t underestimate the impact of moving accounts out of red and into yellow. As a tenured CSM, I can attest to the fact that moving those individual levers in the customer health score is a marathon, not a sprint!

This is why it’s critical to have your customer success teams regularly reviewing customer health scores as part of their account planning process.

Account Risk

Once you start measuring your customers’ health, you can quickly identify customers who may be at risk of churning. As I mentioned above, your customer health score is a great way to spot risk early on and run mitigation strategies to try and save the account from churning.

As a customer success team member, you may also recognize risk organically in your accounts outside of the customer health score. I’ll admit that I’ve had perfectly healthy “green” customers churn seemingly out of nowhere.

Create a plan to assess risk in your accounts organically, like asking pointed questions during a QBR or paying attention to if your customer begins canceling their meetings with you.

Other risk factors to look out for include:

• The loss of your champion or executive buyer (turnover in general).
• Merger & acquisition at the customer’s company.
• Budget cuts or a reduction-in-force at your customer’s company.
• Product incompatibility or core feature friction.
• Lack of engagement or frustration from your main point of contact.

Spotting risk in an account is important, but it won’t help your team if you don’t track it. Create a risk management framework that includes risk types, reasons, leading metrics, and risk playbooks.

Your risk categories might tie together the level of risk with the level of expansion potential. For example:

• High risk/High expansion.
• High risk/Low expansion.
• Low risk/High expansion.
• Low risk/Low expansion.

By labeling at-risk accounts in your with a standardized risk category, you can make more strategic decisions, spot themes in account risk, and create targeted initiatives to address risk at scale. For example, I’d be prioritizing my high-risk/high-expansion accounts with a targeted mitigation strategy.

Pro tip: Labeling at-risk accounts in your CRM also helps you spot themes across your department, which can be critical for hitting goals like NRR and GRR. For example, you might recognize that one customer segment (commercial, for example) has more at-risk accounts. Or you might notice that your pooled or non-assigned CSM accounts have the most risk (this is common).

By segmenting your customers in this way, you gain visibility into which specific areas of your customer success department may need additional support in order to reduce account risk.

Now that we’ve covered the foundational components of building a customer success function, I want to highlight which roles you’ll want to hire for on your customer success team.

The Roles You Need on Your Customer Success Team

As more SaaS companies invest in customer success, they’ll need to create teams that can build the systems, relationships, and resources needed to create great experiences and keep customers coming back.

No matter their specific role, customer success professionals should be empathetic problem-solvers who understand both the technical side of a product and the broader business goals it supports. Strong communication skills are also essential — not just for helping customers, but for working closely with other teams across the organization.

I’ve created a list of the foundational roles you’ll want to include in your customer success department, as well as a bonus role for you to consider.

Implementation Managers

Implementation managers (also known as onboarding managers) guide new customers through the steps to set up their accounts, migrate their data, and learn how to use the SaaS platform.

Part coach, part project manager, and part data technician, implementation managers need communication skills and technical knowledge to be successful. Implementation managers deliver the “first impression” for your customer success team, since they’re the first team to work with the customer after the deal is signed.

It’s common for implementation managers to receive positive feedback from the customers they support since they’re so hands-on and knowledgeable. The level of expertise they carry builds trust with customers and helps them feel like they’re set up for success with your product offering.

Customer Success Manager (CSM)

SaaS customer success managers take ownership of a portfolio of clients and are responsible for their success and retention. CSMs interface with customers to define goal outcomes, create success plans, and coach and train users on the software.

While it can vary, CSMs are usually incentivized around upsells and renewals. Depending on the company’s structure, they may even own the contract process if there is no dedicated renewals team.

A CSM’s goal is to build relationships with customers, offer strategic guidance, and help them get the most out of their purchase. This proactive support directly impacts renewal and retention rates.

As SaaS companies work to do “more with less,” we’re seeing an increased interest in building scaled CSM teams and leveraging the “pooled CSM” model. Both of these roles are still formally CSMs, but there are key differences in how they manage and engage their customers.

What’s a scaled CSM?

A scaled CSM is still responsible for a dedicated book of business, but the difference is that they manage a volume book of customers. Whereas a traditional CSM might manage anywhere from 10 to 100 customers, a scaled CSM could manage upwards of 300 customers at a time. They do this by operating a lower-touch model of proactive engagement with their customers, and they rely on more digital-touch strategies.

For example, when you can’t possibly meet with 300 customers in person, you’ll need to leverage data to identify your at-risk accounts and try to engage them. A scaled CSM also needs to scale their strategic guidance through asynchronous resources, like how-to videos and user guides.

What’s a pooled-CSM model?

A pooled-CSM model is where a pool of CSMs manages a large book of customers without dedicated account ownership. This model allows CSMs to manage a larger customer base by responding to customer inquiries as they come in and leveraging automation to deploy customer engagement strategies at scale.

This model is typically more reactive and involves engaging with customers when they reach out for help. However, with the right insights (like a risk detection strategy), even pooled-CSMs can take a proactive approach to engaging at-risk customers.

Both of these models can be challenging and often end up being the segment with the most at-risk customers due to a lack of personalized guidance. If you’re looking into one of these models, make sure you have robust customer education resources in place and look for automation tools that can create a personalized customer experience at scale. ( is a great tool that I’ve personally used!)

Customer Success Operations Manager

Customer success operations, or CS Ops for short, is a fast-growing discipline within customer success. Unlike customer-facing CSMs, customer success operations managers manage the internal workflows and processes that make customer success units successful.

Customer success operations managers monitor customer usage, forecast revenue, implement workflows and tools, and manage data and KPIs.

Consider your CS Ops as the “wizard behind the curtain” in your customer success organization. You’ll need their expertise to build reporting dashboards, sync data between systems, create and build your customer health score, and build operational processes to help your team manage their daily workload.

VP of Customer Success

A VP of customer success leads customer success and customer success operations for a SaaS brand. VPs are responsible for setting the vision for customer success at a company, hiring a team, and stepping in to coach CSMs on key accounts.

The VP of customer success also serves as the “champion” within your organization for the CS team. They can go to internal leadership teams and advocate for things like additional headcount, new software tools, or improved cross-functional processes.

Chief Customer Officer

A Chief Customer Officer, or CCO, leads all customer functions for a company, including customer support and customer success. CCOs hold a seat at the leadership table and advocate for customer success priorities amidst discussions with product, engineering, and sales.

Bonus Role: Digital Customer Success Program Manager

While a digital customer success program manager isn’t always brought on board right away, I wanted to list it here and talk about the immense value this role can provide (and why I think more companies should be bringing this role on in the early stages!).

A digital CS program manager focuses on developing, running, and improving scalable customer success programs entirely through digital channels such as email, in-app messaging, and online communities.

This role is focused on driving customer adoption and retention through engaging content and automated interactions. A digital CS program manager leverages data, customer behavior, and segmentation strategies to optimize the customer journey, increase customer health, and reduce churn.

Digital CS program managers are often brought on to support low-touch or pooled customer segments, since the volume of customers in those segments outpaces the amount of in-person support that can be delivered. However, digital CS programs shouldn’t be limited to just one customer segment and should instead be built with a holistic approach to customer engagement.

Don’t wait until your team is struggling with scaling customer success to bring in a digital CS function. As , “Digital Customer Success (DCS) is no longer a side project. It is a cornerstone of modern CS strategies.” Their yearly index reported a 15% increase in digital CS as a priority for customer success organizations, proving that digital CS continues to grow in importance as companies scale.

Pro tip: If you’re interested in learning more about digital CS, I recommend checking out .

Tools for Customer Success in SaaS

To drive results at scale, customer success teams need tools that let them track, manage, and communicate with customers. Here are some tools every team should have in their customer success tech stack.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software

The most important software for a customer success team is a comprehensive CRM solution. A CRM allows SaaS brands to integrate sales, customer success, and customer support all in one place.

Unlike standalone email or ticketing tools, a CRM allows customer success teams to see a full history of each customer’s communications, interactions, and support tickets — and respond within the system. This helps CSMs to understand the full context of a customer’s experience when supporting them.

Examples of CRM software:

• HubSpot
• Salesforce
• Zoho CRM
• Freshsales
• Pipedrive

Support Ticketing Software

To resolve customer requests in a timely fashion, SaaS brands need to track, assign, and manage support requests. While customer support may manage the day-to-day technical support requests, it’s important for CSMs to see the help tickets their customers log to help them mitigate frustrations.

Examples of support ticketing software:

• HubSpot Help Desk
• Zendesk
• Sprinklr
• Help Scout

Chat Software

While having a basic chatbot on your company website used to be a differentiator, chatbots have now become table stakes. that 987 million people are using chatbots today, and about chatbot interactions remains overwhelmingly positive.

Customers have higher expectations but also are engaging with companies more — creating opportunities for brands to win their loyalty. That means that if you’re not leveraging a chatbot today, you’re missing out on the chance to engage customers via a channel that feels convenient to them.

Chat software for customer support integrates multiple chat channels into a single, unified inbox for easy communications management.

Examples of chat software:

• HubSpot Service Hub
• LiveChat
• Zoho Desk
• Zendesk Support

Learning Management Software (LMS)

Many SaaS brands offer their customers training pathways to help their customers learn and adopt their software. A good LMS can set custom pathways for customers, gamify learning, and boost customer satisfaction.

Examples of LMS software:

• TalentLMS
• SAP Litmos
• UserGuiding
• Lessonly by Seismic

Boost customer satisfaction and retention with customer success.

The SaaS landscape is to see significant growth over the next five to 10 years, which means that competition will continue to increase and customers will likely become more expensive to acquire. Implementing a customer success function at your company ensures your company is ahead of the growth curve and is well prepared to keep and grow your current customer base.

By leveraging customer success, you prioritize creating an excellent customer experience by helping customers get the most out of their purchase. But the benefits don’t stop there — you’re also setting the foundation for higher customer loyalty, better retention rates, and increased expansion revenue.

Whether you’re building or scaling your SaaS customer success function, using the strategies we’ve discussed here will help you create a proactive, data-driven customer success program.

Free Customer Service Metrics Calculator

Calculate your business's key metrics and KPIs for customer support, service, and success with this free template.

• Customer Acquisition Cost
• Customer Lifetime Value
• Customer Satisfaction Score
• And More!

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