Salesforce for CS - Any best practices?

Hi Everyone,

I know many of you use SFDC for all things CS related (customer journey maps, reporting, playbooks and automation, etc.) and was looking for any insights or best practices you might be willing to share, and possibly how difficult - or not - it is to get these things rolling.

Here are some things I'm thinking about:

1: Playbooks and automation along the customer journey for specific milestones and goals. For example, a trigger at the end of onboarding sends a usage report to the CSM. Or, if a customer dips below the "healthy benchmark" you've set for DAU or MAU, it triggers a playbook with tasks to take action.

2: Success Plans with visual tracking to goals. Can that even be done in SFDC? With tasks, I assume yes.

3: Building dashboards for all sorts of customer reporting

These are just a few things coming to mind and I'm sure I am leaving things out, but right now we're not using it for CS so not a rush. I've also search GGR for more of this information and found some good things, but would love more details if even possible.

Thank you in advance!

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Comments

Anna Alley

Would definitely love to participate if possible!

Shari Srebnick

This is all great stuff, I knew I could count on the GGR fam to help out!

@Markus Siebeneick - That sounds fantastic! I am going to give Quip a look. As for jumping on a call, I think I may take you up on that. If we did that, would you be open to the idea of me inviting a colleague? It might help me "sell it" better, and could also cover questions they might have.

@Chris Rosa - I'd love to learn more about the playbook and email automation/triggers. We have a team that will build the dashboards, so I think we are ok there. We implemented SFDC last year for Sales, therefore a lot of the training and implementation for the enablement teams has already happened.

It also sounds like Anna would like to join these conversations as well.

Chris Rosa

Hi Shari!

I just went through this in my last role.

1. Playbooks - I would call this account milestone, but yes, you can create email triggers that go to the CSM at certain checkpoints. 14 day usage check post training, or 30 days from closed-won. I set these up for low-touch to go to the AE (since they didn't have CSM support) and high-touch to go to the CSM and AE. You can also track account milestones within an account page and have email triggers based on those. Has the account scheduled training? Have they done a product roadmap review in the last six months? Is their health score/usage dropping below a certain level? You can trigger emails from anything you're tracking in SFDC.

2. Can you define what you mean with success plans? Is this deliverables from the customer or internally?

3. Dashboards are pretty easy to build for admins. You just have to think of what information is important? I built them for both CSM's and leadership so they had a snapshot of all important details. I'm happy to share what I've done!

Greg Aim1

Markus,

I'm very interested to see how in practice the addition of QUIP capabilities into a SFDC only shop could address many of the Salesforce shortcomings I've experienced in the past. It would be great if that addition solved the problems presented.

Though I haven't been able to bend SFDC to address the suggested goals, I have been successful in using SalesForce native to:

1. Manage the renewals process (renewals opportunities created after initial sale, or successful renewal), with dates, amounts, and ARR at-risk (if any) to build into Gross retention forecasts along with Net retention forecasts for current and future quarters.

2. We leveraged Salesforce to help us manage a CSM account based workflow (CSM Assigned, CSM Sentiment, CSM Notes, CSM Next Step & CSM Next Step Date) as a basic workbench to handle basic prioritized actions (plays) and deadlines (priorities). These fields were in addition to logging of emails, tasks, calls of the broader team with the account -- these helped us keep visibility, but we used custom fields to manage CSM activity/workflows.

3. We augmented the above (with feeds from other systems) with Account level aggregated Survey (CSAT/NPS) responses, high level product usage data, to trigger inclusion in reports periodically reviewed to assign activities into the CSM workflows above (who needs to do what next and by when to address, and if not resolved in timely fashion flag/indicate renewal risks).

Anything beyond this (especially towards Shari's original intent) we were not able to accomplish in SalesForce alone. It did buy us time (albeit with super manual processes) until we were able to add a proper CS platform to scale our processes.

-- Greg

Anna Alley

I am also very interested in this thread! We are shifting to Salesforce Lightning and will be rolling out additional Salesforce modules for CS later this year. Similar to Shari, at this time another platform is not an option for us, so I would love to see how people have most effectively used Salesforce!

MarkusS

Hi Shari,

Our team has just made the move to also working in SFDC.
Luckily, at my last contract and now here, I have started implementing QUIP (owned by SFDC - now Salesforce Anywhere).
This is a game changer when using Salesforce as it really allows you to capture all information in ways that SFDC by itself is not good at doing and doesn't require SFDC admin help.
SuccessPlans and Account plans can now live as documents within SFDC and working on action items and/or shared deliverables is possible.
Also, if you get Sales and SE buy in, knowledge transfer is so much easier.
Check out some of the pre-built templates you can start using day one. https://quip.com/templates

Happy to jump on a call and show you (or anyone else within GGR) what I have been doing (the SFDC rep told me that I am already a power users compare to most).

Cheers,
Markus

Shari Srebnick

Thanks, James. Appreciate the detailed response.

I should note here that investing in any other software tools to integrate with SFDC is not an option at this time. If we decide to use it, we will have to use what we have available to us.

For #1, yes, we would be integrating the usage data into SFDC so setting up alerts or triggers shouldn't be an issue. (hopefully).

James Fisher

Hi Shari,

Hopefully I can shed some light on three requirements you are looking to address by leveraging Salesforce for your CS team.

1. Playbooks & Automation: from my experience this is a little tricky in SFDC (Salesforce dot com) right out of the box. There are ways to achieve this goal but to get automated health push notifications & usage notifications you would likely need to be capturing usage data from your product, transforming that data into something that makes senses, and then visualizing through a BI tool of sorts. I have achieved something close to this and would be happy to talk you through it in more depth.

2. Yes, you can achieve this with a blend of tasks and customer-related objects in SFDC. Something like Gainsight could be really helpful here (and could also solve for number 1)

3. This would be the easiest one to achieve. I have built SFDC dashboards for CSMs in the past - I worked on a SMB team where we had 1 dashboard that tracked the key metrics we were measured on and it was incredibly simple yet powerful. You need to be making sure that you capture your client data correctly in Salesforce. There are many workflow that have to be in sync but when it works it works great!

I would suggest defining your goals for the team using SFDC and meeting with your ops team. Getting alignment with Sales is also key. Customer Success often plays second fiddle to Sales when it comes to SFDC so ensuring that your ops team does not have to re-invent the wheel for you can help you realize value quicker...speaking from experience

Let me know if you want to chat - happy to answer anymore questions. Data driven CSMs is one of my favorite things to talk about!

Cheers,
James

Daryl here mentioned using a specific CS tool that "feeds" off of data from Salesforce - I would recommend this as a future goal.

Shari Srebnick

We don't use Slack but many in this community do, so I'm sure someone has more insights on that.

@David Nedohin - Yes, we are likely switching over to SFDC since the Sales team is already using it, and I want to be prepared if that ends up being the final decision. My thought is if I gather some of these best practices now, I can share with my Ops team prior to implementation.

Daryl Colborne

Hi Shari, et. al,
I'm using a tool called Quala.io. I consider it to be our Customer Success CRM. It ties directly into SFDC and allows us to set automations off of trending information by customer. We are non-SaaS and have a very small CS team serving A LOT of customers, so an example of this would be to notify our CSMs and set a milestone when a customer has utilized X% of the licenses they purchased. From there, we can run Success Plans, which have also been introduced into Quala.io.

I'd be happy to chat more about the platform if anyone is interested. It's definitely starting to make my life easier

Regards,

Daryl

CEGonzalez

Great question Shari. I'm interested in the same. How does Slack functionality add to Salesforce's capability to be more of a CS tool?

David Nedohin

Hi Shari, unfortunately I don't anything useful to offer related to your questions, but I wanted to follow up supporting your questions. We have been using one of the main CS software tools, but realized it is a little bit of "square peg - round hole" situation. We will be switching to a combination of Salesforce (which we use for Sales), and Monday.com. I would also really like to hear from others as to what works REALLY well in Salesforce, squarely aligned with the questions you have.