This is a guest post by Angelina harper, a tech writer at Really Simple Systems interested in cloud technology, digital marketing, and ephemeral content. You can find her most beloved articles on her Twitter account.

Thanks to the realization that retaining existing customers is five times less expensive than obtaining new ones, businesses began exploring ways to improve the success rate of their customer interactions. This is termed customer success. What we wanted to find out is: How do you optimize customer success?

To answer this, we turn our attention to SaaS (Software as a Service) tools, begging the question: What are the top SaaS customer success tools out there?

SaaS customer success tools are an integral component of the modern business tech stack. These tools enable a business to understand what their customers want in terms of service, so they can provide it in an automatic fashion via the tool.

Customer success tools generate positive customer experiences at scale. SaaS companies often need to scale their customer success operations, and their software solutions should reflect this.

With that being said, customer success is a relatively new concept, and many businesses are still learning how to tackle it effectively.

In this Process Street article, we will present you with our top 5 customer success SaaS tools. But before all of that, let’s find out exactly what customer success is and why it is important:

• What is customer success?
• Customer success best practices
• How to improve your customer success process?
• SaaS tools: The most efficient customer success tools

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This is a guest article by Alexa Lemzy – customer support manager and blog author at TextMagic, a bulk SMS solution for business. She helps businesses take advantage of mobile and spends hours reading tons of content about customer retention and business workflows.

Modern consumers are used to having the option to contact businesses on social media and other public forums as well as traditional contact methods. What’s more, customers are sharing their opinions and interactions across the internet and social media more than ever. Today, customer service is a major part of your brand image.

This has blurred the lines between marketing and customer service. Consumers want your business to be consistent from marketing and sales to customer support.

Great customer service is also an effective form of marketing, keeping existing users loyal and attracting new leads.

Strengthening the relationship between marketing and customer service can have a big impact on customer satisfaction. By creating processes for collaboration and feedback, you can increase retention while attracting new clients.

In this article for Process Street, we’re going to look at a series of factors which you have to get right to provide a unified marketing and customer service strategy:

• Customer service reps act as brand ambassadors
• Bring customer support into your social media strategy
• Gain product marketing insights from customer service integration
• Excellent customer service is an underrated marketing channel
• Holistic approaches to customer interactions means consistent communication
• Keep customer service in the loop with marketing promotions
• Better inform your audience personas
• Get content ideas and inspiration direct from customer needs
• Understand whether you’re setting the right expectations
• Improve your customer service strategy with Process Street

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This is a guest post from Mercer Smith-Looper. Mercer is the Head of Support at Appcues, a writer for Supported Content, a yoga fanatic, and strives to make the world a little bit happier one customer at a time.

There will always be people in this world that want something from you. Whether you are a business, an individual, or a group, people are needy.

Most company inboxes have a significant number of feature requests. Some of them make a lot of sense and some of them are probably pretty out there.

But whether customers are asking for something that you already have on your roadmap, or something that isn’t even tangentially related to your product, you still owe it to your customers to respond.

In this article, we’ll cover:

• Why is a customer feedback system important?
• How to improve customer feedback with BPM?
• What does a sustainable customer feedback process look like?
• How to use Process Street to streamline your customer feedback process

So, let’s get started!
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“Everyone who works here is a jerk. It smells terribly bad and the manager is an a**hole.” – Vanessa, TrustPilot

As a business owner, how would you respond to this review? Fight back and tell the customer they’re wrong? Ignore it and hope it goes away? Or apologize profusely and kill them with kindness?

In a world where 70% of consumers look at multiple review sites and read a whopping 10 reviews before choosing a local business, review management needs to be a crucial part of your business success plan.

But with 63% of businesses not checking or responding to their online reviews, we at Process Street, have written this post to help you understand the impact and importance of managing your online reviews.

This post will tell you everything you need to know about review management, including the following topics:

• What is review management?
• Where did review management begin?
• How important is review management?
• How to respond to reviews
• How to get more reviews
• When to ask for reviews
• How to monitor reviews
• How to use Process Street to manage online reviews

We will also give you access to 14 super-charged templates that will actively help you manage your online reviews. If you’re in a hurry, feel free to jump straight into them:

1. Asking Valuable Customers for Feedback Checklist
2. Customer Service Representative Performance Review Checklist
3. Individual Review Feedback Analysis Process Checklist
4. How to Ask for a Review from a High Touch Client Checklist
5. How to Get Google Reviews from Top Customers Checklist
6. How to Get Reviews on Amazon With a Personal Touch Checklist
7. How to Respond to Google Reviews Process Checklist
8. How to Respond to Yelp Reviews Process Checklist
9. Monitor Reviews Set-up Checklist
10. Positive Review Response Process Checklist
11. Product Review Process Checklist
12. Reply to eBay Feedback Process Checklist
13. Responding to Negative Reviews Process
14. Social Listening Strategy Process Checklist

If you’re curious about what these templates look like, check out this embedded Social Listening Strategy Process Checklist here, or scroll down to find them all embedded.

But if you’ve got time, grab yourself a cuppa and let’s get started!

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This is a guest post from Shawn Mike. Shawn has been working with writing challenging clients for over five years. His educational background in the technical field and business studies has given him the edge to write on many topics. He occasionally writes blog articles for Dynamologic Solutions.

According to statistics, it is claimed that US organizations suffer a loss of $62 billion a year thanks to unsatisfactory customer service.

Customer service represents your secondary acquisition test, beyond actually getting that customer on board in the first place.

It’s very much a short-term game of conflict resolution, and your business depends mainly on how you deal with customer feedback and requests.

For maximum lifetime value, you need to consider how to synergize customer service with customer success.

It must be kept in mind that customers are the heart of every business and should be at the top of your priority list.

Satisfied customers help increase sales and build brand identity and reports claim that 77% of customers are estimated to recommend a brand or business to a friend depending on how good their experience with your product is.

Which is why focusing on keeping your customer base satisfied with great service and excellent products can go a long way in improving your sales.

Nowadays, consumers expect more than just a great product. They need you to guide them through the perfect experience. A better customer experience equals a greater lifetime value expectancy.

This article is all about figuring out the best way to analyze and improve customer experience by automating a lot of the manual work that can get in the way.

We’ll focus on:

• Understanding customer success
• Difference between customer service and customer success
• How to improve your customer success strategy
• Benefits of customer success automation
• How to successfully automate customer success
• Example customer success process template

Read on to learn more about how to optimize your customer success strategy. There’s even a free Ebook for you at the end of it!
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This is a guest post from Brayn Wills, knowledge management manager at ProProfs. He is responsible for creating unique and relevant content on knowledge base tools and keeping track of the latest developments in the realm of knowledge management. In his free time, he is either reading a new book or exploring offbeat destinations.

When customers deal with businesses, they expect a great experience. This means that some kind of customer support needs to be available to them, around the clock.

Of course, providing quality customer support with real human agents managing helpdesks 24/7 is an expensive proposition.

On the other hand, companies need to make it easy for customers to access information to solve common queries – this is a vital factor in the journey towards consistent, high-quality customer satisfaction.

Many organizations are now implementing customer self-service via traditional and online platforms to ensure that neither the business nor the customer suffers.

This helps them to deliver a double whammy of maintaining their overheads while improving their efficiency in customer service, both of which result in improved customer experience.

With the adoption of digital services, self-service is gradually minimizing the burden on live agents too. It is also allowing businesses to successfully meet customer expectations with regards to servicing queries in a more timely and regulated fashion.

However, going overboard with the automation of customer support self-service can be a risky move for businesses. While it may help in curbing expenses, it may take an adverse toll on customer satisfaction and the overall reputation of the business. Therefore, the key is to hit the right balance between man and machine.

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This is a guest post from Kyriaki Raouna, a Content Writer at LearnWorlds writing about marketing and elearning. She is an experienced career consultant and a content writer for SaaS.

User onboarding is one of the hottest topics of discussion amongst SaaS companies. You start thinking about it on day zero of your launch and continuously improving onboarding as your business grows.

Welcoming and educating users on the use of your product is a priority for software businesses, and while you scale, you will want to automate the onboarding process.

In fact, the quicker you do so, the better. Customer onboarding is a huge opportunity for every SaaS. Especially if you are working to increase sales and reduce churn rates.

When onboarding is combined with customer education, it becomes the ALPHA and OMEGA of activating users and ending up with loyal customers who are experts in your product and advocate for you.

Indeed, the biggest software companies with a highly valued brands use education as marketing and for user onboarding, but more on this later…

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This is a guest post from Rhiza Oyos, the inbound marketing manager at Spiralytics.

Customers relationships are the lifeblood of every SaaS business. However, regardless of their years of operation, there are moments when these relationships can — for better or worse — dramatically change

A customer’s experience is everything. It helps SaaS companies attract customers, retain them, and generate referrals

So, businesses who understand the importance of customer experience end up winning the race and beating the competition. In particular, winning companies are those that understand the human factors and emotions at play in experience, design, and production.

Harley Manning in a 2012 article for Fast Company writes:

“In other words, if you want that next sale, if you want good word of mouth, and if you want to keep your customers, it’s unlikely that anything else you do matters more than delivering a superior experience”

Experience is all about moments.

In designing an exemplary customer experience, businesses should know about the four moments of truth that can help them get ahead.

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It’s no secret that attracting, satisfying, and retaining customers is becoming increasingly challenging.

The sheer amount of choice and demand for fast, flawless service demands businesses to formulate and execute effective ways to deliver excellent customer experiences.

Without acknowledging the importance of the customer experience at every touchpoint, companies miss out on great opportunities to develop a strong brand identity; opportunities that cannot afford to be missed in a business environment where first impressions are pivotal.

A slew of recent research studies provides us with the data to support this perceived demand to enhance customer experiences.

McKinsey research found that 70 percent of buying experiences are based on how the customer feels they are being treated—and a large part of that has to do with showing the customer you (as the brand) care about them, and value their business.

It’s also been found that 58% of consumers are willing to spend more on companies that provide excellent customer service throughout the buying process.

To cap it off, the Digital Marketing Trends Report by Econsultancy and Adobe asked companies to indicate the single most exciting opportunity for their organization in the upcoming year – and, yes indeed, customer experience came out on top.

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A buggy Netflix account. A defective iPhone. Faulty B2B software.

There’s nothing more frustrating than when products and services encounter issues, or when they simply don’t work at all.

Consumers expect the products and services they buy to perform properly. After all, they’ve handed over their hard-earned money to the vendor in exchange for goods.

Who do consumers turn to for assistance? Customer support.

However, a customer-facing employee can only carry out excellent service if they’re onboarded correctly, fully trained, taught how to interact with customers, and given regular feedback on their performance.

If consumers aren’t impressed with their experience, they can churn immediately and leave negative reviews in their wake. Should the churn rate increase and harmful reviews accumulate, it could be the death knell of an entire business.

At Process Street, we know about – and strongly believe in – effective customer support. In fact, we operate a policy where each new employee must undergo a period of customer support experience, which amounts to a few weeks in total.

That’s why we created these 17 free templates for other teams.

The process templates featured in this free template pack will help strengthen any customer-facing team’s ability to perform successfully. From new employee training checklists to performance reviews, churn reduction checklists to a guide on responding to negative reviews, we’ve got your workflows covered.

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