Why you don’t need a CS platform (yet)

You just got a new job at a great new startup, and you’ve been tasked with building the Customer Success organization from scratch. It’s a huge project with the goal of scaling the client base and Customer Success team. With that in mind, you’d think you’ll probably need some sort of CS specific software to help you with this big initiative, right? Wrong (probably).

CS platforms can be incredibly valuable tools (you can read about some of my recommendations) but they require a strong foundation of strategy, client base, and clean CRM data to reap the benefits, and make the time and financial investment worth it.

When I joined my current company, the CS team was about 5 people, across 2 countries. My predecessor had purchased Strikedeck, and spent 8 months trying to implement it. When I joined, I quickly did an evaluation and cut the software from our books. My bosses were concerned about my plan, because I didn’t mention any software to replace it. Over the next 2 years we cleaned up our Salesforce data (mostly), developed a Revenue Operations team, scaled the CS team to 22 across 7 countries, and developed a deeper understanding of our ICP and health benchmarking. It was only then that we budgeted for a CS platform, and embarked on an RFP journey. While we probably didn’t need to wait the full 2 years, it took a lot of time, energy and commitment to data integrity in our CRM (Salesforce), before we felt confident that a CS Platform would offer any incremental value. What we understood was that any platform would be one step away from the source of the data (Salesforce), and if it was wrong, it would get us further away from cleaning that data up. Furthermore, our understanding of how customers use our platform (Mixpanel), our Customer Support team has begun to scale (Intercom), and our coordination with Product has increased (Jira). All these additional elements helped us understand what was actually going to be important when selecting a CS platform, rather than having the software guide our priorities.

While we still have inaccuracies that sneak through, but they are the exceptions to the rule, so we’re able to more easily identify when things are wrong, and deal with the cleanup.

Have you ever purchased a software too early and regretted it?