Below we'll list the apps we use and why we use them at Upscope where, over
the last year, we've focused on customer success as a core strategy.
Related: How 7 Companies Calculate their Customer Health
Scores
Also see: Unedited Feedback On Why Cobrowsing Made Support 30%
Faster
Baremetrics for MRR, Churn and more
Baremetrics shows us how much money we're making, how many customers we have
paying us, how many come and go each month and lots more.
It's the heart monitor for SaaS companies.
In more technical terms it helps us watch our MRR, ARR, LTV, Churn and
more.
There are additional features but right now we're using it as a clean and
clear dashboard of our health.
Check out both Baremetrics and their very honest
blog
Intercom for onboarding emails, surveys and live chat
For customers Intercom appears to be a simple chat box.
For companies it's the heart of all their customer communications including
their entire set of onboarding emails and their help centre.
To explain it another way we don't use email to communicate with customers
anymore, it's all done via Intercom.
We use it for chatting to customers as a team, for sending sequences of
onboarding emails, for educating customers via our help centre and it's linked
into other systems like our admin panel.
We use it daily.
How does it act as a customer success tool? Here's a list of 12 great ways
to use Intercom as your customer success
tool
Vitally for customer health scores and customer success sequences
This is a core tool for our customer success manager.
We didn't start off with a customer health system but now we we can't live
without one.
What does it do for us?
Rather than make assumptions about who likes Upscope, we have a customer
score made of a number of factors that show a customer's health. This helps us
with knowing the following:
-
We know who our top users are.
-
We know who is going to cancel because the health score is low.
-
We know which new clients have successfully implemented and started to use
the service and so might be excellent sources of testimonials.
If you'd like to learn more about how our health score works then see how 7
companies have calculated their customer health score
which includes Upscope.
Learn more about Vitally here
SEMRush for understanding customer context
In terms of customer success this might seem an odd addition but it will give
you an insight into your customer that few other tools can.
You can see their website's traffic, how people reach it, what they advertise
and what keywords they themselves target. You can also point it at your own
website to see your own traffic and it will give a you clue as to what
customers search before asking you questions. You can do this all with
SEMRush.
It'll give you a clue as to their motives and aims faster than a 100
questions.
See how big your customer or your competitor's
traffic
is and then learn lots more about them.
Upscope for seeing what customers see
Upscope is for seeing what customers see, instantly, without downloads.
Not only can you see what they see but also use your mouse on THEIR screen to
browse with them, as if you're sitting right there.
Upscope is no-download interactive screen
sharing for one to one onboarding and
support.
It helps customers subscribe, stay, use the app more and talk about you
positively.
See why customer success and account managers are using
cobrowsing
Calendly
Calendly has 2 million monthly users.
It saves us all the pain of scheduling meetings.
We offer demos and customers can sign up and choose a time and it
automatically checks our calendars for availability and books them in with one
of us.
This is how it always should have been.
We set our availability and people can book times with us. It just works.
You've probably already heard of it or are already using it and if you're not
then give it a go, I can't recommend it enough.
Schedule meetings in a few clicks with Calendly
Uberconference and Google meet
Uberconference and Google
meet are some of the free tools we use for video
conferencing. Uberconference has a paid version but right now the free version
works fine for our needs.
We've got a process set up with Calendly where anyone booking a meeting gets
an automatic link to our Uberconference or Google Meet profile. This saves us
from the back and forth 'where and when' conversation.
We use them regularly to chat to existing and prospective clients.
Camtasia
We've used Camtasia extensively in recording and re-recording videos to help
explain the product or specific features.
Many people don't want to have onboarding conversations with team members,
they just want a video or simple instructions. Camtasia videos are one way to
do that.
Our customer success manager has become quite a specialist in the various cool
effects it allows and even I, with my basic skills, can create an "ok" looking
video.
If you don't want to go through layers of management to create a video that
your customers need, use Camtasia and be patient for the first day.
Camtasia is a Techsmith product. Get it
here.
Slack
Slack might be a team communications tool but it's also our special
notifications centre.
Having tied it into some of our other systems, we get notifications of
incoming demos, upgrades, cancellations and other things we might need to
react to quickly.
For example, we don't get many cancellations and the churn rate is relatively
low thankfully. We've set up a notification for cancellations and if someone
does cancel, we'll look into their history and figure out if they were someone
who really did use the product. If they did, then it's worth following up with
them to understand why they cancelled.
Atom
This will look like an odd addition to the list.
Atom is a text editor used by programmers. It's listed
here because our customer success manager learned to code in the first 3
weeks she was here.
If you want to learn those skills then see the exact simple steps on how our
customer success manager learned to
code
We believe team members, especially those in charge of customer success, enjoy
learning technical skills so they can confidently talk to and understand our
clients.
It's a very simple but powerful process.
Any new team member now, with a little initial guidance, learns HTML, CSS,
Javascript and how to connect to an API via Codeacademy. They then have to
build their own site from the ground up using Atom.
Other tools we use though not stricly customer success focused
We use Ghost for our blog and include customer success posts
All customer success lessons learned are blog posts. All customer success
research conducted is a blog post. Your list of customer success tools and how
you use them is a blog post. Read a customer success book? Write a summary of
it and how it applies to you. Heard a good set of podcasts? Write up why
they're good and what you learned.
We moved our blog to Ghost, from Medium as it gives us
more control over posts, analytics and ads. Everything we learn can be a new
blog post within Ghost. This can not only bring in new leads for the company
but also help explain our work to other people in the company and also help
clarify our thinking.
Sometimes writing the first paragraph that structures the rest of the post is
the hardest to do so check out some content writing tips
here.
Statuspage
Statuspage is a rapid way of letting customers know
if your app is down or if parts of it are having problems. It's default for
many SaaS apps.
See how to build an MRR growth machine using VOIP, co-browsing and
calendly
If you're wondering if you've got your pricing correct then see 25 companies
show you their best SaaS pricing
models
