Making the Switch: How to Evaluate a New Customer Success Platform

In order to effectively optimize, scale and provide your customers with the best experiences possible, you need to have a high-quality customer success platform. But what do you do when the platform you’ve been using goes out of business? Or when you realize that the one you have just isn’t working for you anymore? You don’t want to lose the momentum you’ve been building, but sometimes a switch is necessary, so it’s important to find a platform that makes it easy for you to jump right in and start seeing results quickly.

If you find yourself in a situation where you need to switch to a new CS platform, there are several things to consider before making your decision. Let’s take a look at a few ways to evaluate a new platform to ensure you make the right choice.

What to Consider in Your Evaluation

As with any new technology solution or tool, you need to make sure you are asking the right questions and looking for the right features when evaluating a new customer success platform. When you start your evaluation process, don’t forget to ask these crucial questions:

Does it have the features I need?

If you’ve been working in another platform for a while, then you should already have an idea of the features that are important to you and those that aren’t. If you’re not sure, however, some important features to consider in a customer success platform are:

• Product analytics and adoption: See what customers are doing, where they are getting value and where they need assistance
• Customer 360: Ability to connect all platforms in your techstack into one centralized customer data platform
• Segmentation and personalization: Segment users in order to personalize digital engagements and increase value
• Customer Retention: Easily view customer health and receive alerts for at-risk customers
• Dynamic engagement: Ability to orchestrate human and digital CS resources to provide optimal customer experiences
• Journey visualization and orchestration: Design, build, run, measure and scale customer’s experience at every stage of the journey
• Growth: Facilitate growth and scale as your company grows in both functionality and price

Will it work for my team?

A CS platform will only work if it works for your team. Even if it has all of the features that you want and need, if it’s too complicated, takes too long to set up and start using, or can’t be easily customized to meet your goals and needs, then it’s not worth the investment. To ensure that the solution will work for your team before you make a significant commitment of time and/or money, see if the platform offers a free trial, or even better, a freemium option (you can sign up for ours here!). It’s also important to evaluate whether the platform is agile and flexible enough to grow in conjunction with your company. You don’t want to invest in a new solution only to outgrow it in a few years.   

Is it well-respected?

It’s important to verify whether or not the solution you choose is well-respected within the industry. A good way to evaluate this is to check independent customer review sites such as G2 and TrustRadius to read unbiased and insightful reviews by verified, real customers to see what they have found useful or frustrating about each platform. These types of sites also often give awards to platforms for things like highest customer satisfaction and user adoption rates, which can be a good indicator of a platform’s strengths.

Can I get up and running quickly with little to no effort?

If you have found yourself in a situation where you need to switch to a new CS platform, Totango is here to help. Our goal is to contribute to and elevate the customer success community as a whole by providing tools, solutions and resources that are easy-to-use, customizable and scalable, empowering companies to reach their CS goals as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Our solution is intuitive and offers pre-built CS modules to help manage onboarding projects, detect risk, manage your NPS process, automate your customer campaigns/communication, and so much more, so you and your team can transition quickly and smoothly. 

We know business is dynamic and we want to help our CS community thrive. We encourage you to try Totango for free today so you can kick-start your move and avoid missing a beat.