Ready for a controversial statement? You don’t need your CRM. Yeah, we said it.
Sure, there is a place for customer relationship management (CRM) technology to help sell products, but if you’re looking to provide truly valuable experiences that will build and grow profitable customer relationships – especially during an economic downturn – then you don’t need a CRM; you need advanced, agile, composable customer success technology.
How Your Customer Success Platform Can Replace Your CRM
Recurring-revenue businesses succeed by nurturing customer relationships over the entire lifecycle. In order to keep customers happy, you need to be collecting as much data as possible, perhaps from multiple different sources, and then analyzing and applying that data to nurture customers, providing them with the resources and value they need when and where they need it.
By definition, a CRM system is a tool for managing the data associated with customer relationships, so it may seem like a good idea to turn to your CRM to help you manage all of this data you’ve collected. However, a traditional CRM focuses just on the transaction stage of the customer relationship rather than cultivating growth across the entire customer journey. And since relationships are truly built after the sale is closed, your CRM will no longer be able to meet your needs as you continue to nurture and grow your customer base.
The right customer success solution, however, will have all of the capabilities you need to satisfy and provide value for your customers throughout their entire lifecycle – from pre-sale to renewal and beyond. By implementing a quality CS platform, you can:
- Gather the business intelligence (BI) you need to truly understand the customer experience.
- Get alerts about important events within the customer’s experience and act on them quickly and easily.
- Set up automated actions to respond to key events.
- Gain critical insights into the health of each customer’s account, making it easier to prevent churn or seize opportunities.
- Receive notifications when customer behavior indicates dissatisfaction.
- Communicate effectively by sending the right messages at the right time.
Double Down on Your Customer Base with Composable CS
During periods of economic instability, your current customer base can be your life raft. In fact, it’s probably the only growth channel you can depend on, so you have to protect it by investing in customer success rather than bleeding money into new logo acquisition.
The traditional customer-acquisition-focused model, on which CRMs are built, starts with marketing and sales, and positions customer success as an afterthought. However, when the market is in downturn, businesses are more cautious with their spending, so your revenue strategy must shift so you can drive growth from within. This shift to customer expansion through driving value doesn’t rely solely on the customer success organization; it’s a shift that should be embraced and implemented by all parts of the company.
Switching to a value-driven model requires implementing a solution that unifies your teams around digital touchpoints, customer health data and analytics, and powerful automation. Attempting to retrofit your CRM to accomplish this strategic initiative is likely an exercise in futility. Instead, you need a solution that is purpose-built for composable customer success.
Composable CS uses uniform, reusable building blocks with specific pre-built capabilities to create and deliver optimal experiences and outcomes for customers. Totango is leading the charge by delivering the industry’s only composable customer success platform. With tools like our modular SuccessBLOCs that feature pre-built tools and templates for every stage of the customer journey and our Customer Experience Canvas, which allows you to design, run, measure and iterate your entire journey from one place, we’ve made composable customer success incredibly easy. Even better, no IT or administrative intervention is required. You can get up and running and start seeing value from day one.
Replace Your CRM with Totango
While a CRM is beneficial for managing and deploying sales data, and helping you to close the initial sale, you need something more to build long-term customer relationships. Let Totango help you go beyond your CRM by providing you with the KPIs, automated workflows, and all of the composable customer success tools you need to support, protect and grow your current customer base in both good and difficult economic times. And if you’re not quite ready to give up that CRM, no problem! We integrate easily with any CRM system to provide everything you need for sustainable, long-term customer relationships that drive satisfaction and growth. Sign up for Totango for free today to get started nurturing and growing your customer relationships.
