Customer Success Platforms Alone Aren’t Enough, Here’s What You’re Missing

Think of your customer journey as an iceberg: the part that you can see only accounts for a fraction of its size, while most of it lies submerged below the surface. Likewise, your customer success platform is the part of the customer journey your team can see, and while your team is focused on this internal platform, the rest of your customer’s struggles with onboarding, ongoing training, and full implementation may be just out of sight.

While customer success platforms do a good job of helping your team internally manage customer accounts, they lack a suitable customer-facing option. Without this external option, your customers are left to manage complex tasks on their own while your customer success managers (CSM) are limited in the service they can offer to each account.

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Here’s where customer interfaces come in. Representing the rest of the ‘iceberg,’ this platform helps your customer success team ensure customers succeed by building tailored infrastructure to productize various programs that achieve business goals. In this post, we’ll take a closer look at customer success platforms, their shortcomings, and how a customer interface can help you manage the full picture of your customer journey.

Understanding Customer Success Platforms

A customer success platform is a software solution that helps businesses manage customer relationships and collect customer data. Customer success platforms help businesses monitor and optimize customer journeys with features such as:

• Customer feedback and surveys
• Onboarding tools
• Data analytics and reporting
• Customer health scores and monitoring
• CRM integrations

While customer success platforms allow companies to track and handle various customer accounts, they often aren’t built to involve the customer with a hands-on approach in all the different stages of a customer journey. Whether it’s tracking an onboarding schedule, building an academy for customers to access self-help resources, or following success plans, these platforms don’t have the ability to properly engage a customer in a way that helps you achieve your business goals.

The Limitations of Customer Success Platforms

Customer success platforms do a lot to connect CSMs with customers and address the problems they’re facing, but when it comes to drilling down deep into the customer experience and improving it from start to finish, these platforms miss the mark. There’s a lack of tools in customer success platforms to directly engage customers and guide them to success.

For customers, these platforms can be challenging for a number of reasons:

• Interactions may be too generic to fit customer’s specific needs
• Communications from service providers can be overwhelming when it comes from different directions like emails, check-ins, and notifications from multiple channels
• A customer success platform’s goal is to help CSMs solve customer issues, while a customer’s goal may be to get the most ROI on a product or service
• When CSMs are overwhelmed with multiple accounts, responses can be delayed, leading to ongoing onboarding challenges and customers feeling undervalued
• Customer success platforms often lack a customer-facing portal to make it easier for customers to see the status of things like their requests, meetings, or their onboarding journey

For a business, analyzing benchmarks such as customer onboarding metrics is one of the best ways to gauge how your customer is adapting to a new software or product. Some of the main onboarding metrics to keep track of include time-to-value (TTV), customer effort score, and onboarding completion rate, among others. , While tracking these metrics is one thing, actively improving them with a customer success platform alone isn’t always achievable. These platforms offer a short-sighted approach to addressing customer issues as they arise but don’t usually offer businesses a way to establish long-term plans to help customers succeed with their products. 

Customer interfaces like EverAfter aim to address this disconnect with a solution that bridges the gap between customer expectations and customer success resources.

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Customer Interface: The Solution You Didn’t Know You Needed

Customer interfaces work adjacently to customer success platforms, helping teams inspire customers directly through a personalized platform. When it comes to customer service, personalization is key. 90% of consumers say they’re willing to spend more with companies that offer personalized customer service.

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With customer interface solutions, companies can build a customized path to customer success with a comprehensive customer-facing platform that helps the customer boost efficiency and productivity with your product. 

Some key benefits of customer interfaces that set it apart from customer success platforms include:

• Companies can streamline customer programs with a range of customer-facing tools like onboarding checklists, digital quarterly business reviews (QBR), instant consultation booking, support ticket submission, and others.
  
  
• Customer interfaces can be highly personalized, with different hubs for each segment, matching specific customer requirements and standardizing the information brought to each one.
  
  
• The productization of programs for onboarding, product configuration, ongoing training, self-help and academy content, and more, allows for a more independent and successful customer and more freed-up resources for your customer service team.
  
  
• Adjustable and scalable customer success tools like customer interfaces can adapt to your team’s needs without increasing headcount or budget.

Enrich Your Customer Journey With EverAfter

Customer interfaces like EverAfter work in tandem with your customer success platform by doing all the heavy lifting when it comes to guiding your customers with a more positive customer experience while your customer success platform continues to help CSMs handle account issues, requests, and feedback internally.

With EverAfter, companies are empowered to prioritize their customer’s needs and preferences by curating an experience through a no-code tailored hub that touches on multiple stages of a customer lifecycle. Here’s how it enhances different phases:

• Prospect stage: With EverAfter, you can deliver personalized demos and trials of your product to your customer in one platform rather than connecting with prospects over various channels like email, video calls, messaging, and more.
  
  
• Customer stage: EverAfter allows you to continue offering tailored support and resources like an academy, checklists, documentation, milestone tracking, and direct communication to help them go live and reduce TTV by up to 30%.
   
• Partner stage: Foster enhanced collaboration and communication with your customers and partners with tools for regular feedback collection, feature requests, webinars, and more

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Success Story: Reducing TTV by 30% with EverAfter

To better illustrate how a customer interface works in action, let’s look at how Spryker, a SaaS provider, leveraged EverAfter to reduce its TTV by 30%. 

Spryker was looking for a way to decrease CSMs’ workloads and standardize how information was communicated to customers. Additionally, the company wanted to streamline its onboarding and automate various customer support processes. 

After implementing EverAfter, Spryker achieved a number of its goals:

• The team had much deeper insights into the onboarding process, replacing eight-week checklists with an onboarding hub that provides visibility into each step and milestone
• EverAfter was able to help the Spryker team streamline communication with its customers through a dedicated hub space where product team members share product updates and insights
• CSMs were able to save a lot of time and cut out manual processes with standardized QBR slides that can be created and customized from content in the hub

Enhancing B2B Customer Success With a Customer Interface

You could be doing everything right with your customer success platform: consolidating customer data, responding to requests right away, and staying on top of your customer’s needs. However, it still may not be enough to guarantee customer success. Customer interface solutions like EverAfter operate as customized customer success software, filling in the gaps that your existing platforms lack by providing an external forum that’s hyper-focused on establishing a cohesive customer experience.

Schedule a demo today with one of our EverAfter experts to see how our B2B customer interface can help you improve your customer journey.