Is your CSP built with the customer in mind? 

Think about your Customer Success Platform. When you chose it, what did you want to make sure it could do for your team, and by extension, your customer base? Did you select it because it came with a long list of features? Were the bells and whistles impressive to you? Now that you’ve been using it for some time, would you consider the platform to be customer-friendly? 

A Customer Success Platform can be deemed customer-friendly when it helps the CSM do their job. However, not all CSPs accomplish this goal. It’s easy to get caught in the trap of thinking your platform is customer-friendly when the feature list is a mile long, or when the sales team ticks all the right boxes in the RFP. So, how can you tell for sure?

When operating the platform with customers in mind, observe these six proof points. The ease or difficulty you experience with each point will show you how friendly your CSP really is. As they say, the proof is in the pudding. ‍

Proof points for your Customer Success Platform 

Usability‍

Think about a route you travel often, whether it’s to get to work or head to a family member’s house. You’ve been on the same route for long enough that you have it all memorized. Anything that was once confusing or surprising is now old hat. That may be how a super user on your team interprets your CSP. The once quirky, clunky, or downright confusing parts now feel familiar and may seem easier to them. However, to the average user, or perhaps to new members of your team, these usability problems can cause major slowdowns in productivity. 

You can identify the problem of usability relatively easily. If your team is spending more time on figuring out how to navigate the tool instead of working with customers in proactive ways, such as taking notes on feature requests, usability is costing you precious time and money. 

You can’t afford to skimp in this area. 79% of users say that usability is the most important part of a site or an app. Your CSP is no different. Say it takes someone on your team an average of 5 minutes of searching around to get to what they need every day. In a year, that’s almost 22 hours of time gone missing dealing with usability problems per team member. What new business could they have brought in, or what customers could they have retained, if they were able to put those 22 hours to better use? ‍

Customizability ‍

Any platform that responds to suggestions of change with, “Well, this is the way we’ve always done things” is a business that is not ready to adapt to new ways of working. If you are unable to adapt the tool to what you need to best cater to customers, your services run the risk of falling short. Without the ability to customize a platform to what makes the most sense for your customer base, you may miss valuable insights or fail to see concerning customer health metrics. The platform you use should be able to evolve as your business evolves and you receive feedback from customers on what they need. 

Being locked into a specific way of working can mean your current customer base abandons you for a company they feel better responds to their needs. Ask for feedback via email, make a point to take notes on requests, and use a platform that can help you customize accordingly. ‍

Implementation Speed‍

If it takes a long time for your team to integrate data and configure the platform, appropriate implementation could take months or even years. The faster you can turn data into actionable insights, and the easier it is to make changes to the platform based on feedback, the more effectively you can solve your customer’s problems (and see them to begin with). 

If you are using an alternative to a true CSP, this can make implementation speed even slower. Trying to fit a square peg in a round hole requires quite a bit of time-consuming sanding. Any workarounds you need to do to get the platform configured the way you need it can slow down implementation significantly. ‍

Data Integration ‍

A customer-friendly CSP needs a consistently strong and easy-to-implement data flow. If you are forced to use a 3rd-party CSV upload tool or have broken API connections, you’re slowing your process down. Any obstacles on the path to clean and fast data integration affect your efficiency, it will in turn prevent your customers from receiving the kind of service they would like to have quickly. 

Your CSP should easily integrate with your database, giving you access to the answers you need in no time flat. If you have a several steps-long process to get what you need, it’s probably time to shop around. ‍

Ongoing Administration ‍

Is your team able to self-manage your platform, or is it impossible? If you need help making changes, do you need to purchase professional service hours and endure highly complex configuration? 

Any ongoing changes, new templates or processes, and other alterations that need a full-time admin can keep your platform from being as friendly to your team, and by extension, your customers, as you’d like it to be. The more your team is empowered to make changes independently, the more time they’ll save, and the more comfortable they’ll be in the tool. ‍

Cross-Functional Access‍

Finally, anything that prohibits additional users, especially from cross-functional areas, can mean the eventual death of the platform if it cannot be widely internally adopted. Seat-based pricing or licensing means that adding users across other teams can be cost-prohibitive or outside of the CS budget scope. 

The more users you can get on the platform, the more potential champions you have for the tool. Plus, when you have more visibility on customers across your company, you have more chances for a user to see something that others may have missed. If your CSP makes it costly to add new users, it can die on the vine.

Looking for a Customer Service Platform that better matches the way you want to work? Catalyst offers data integration, customizable features, cross-functional visibility, and workflow efficiency, all on a user-friendly and customer-friendly platform. 

Sound good? We thought so.