The Challenges

As V12Software welcomed more clients, the team started to look into how to make onboarding, consultation, and retention a closed loop in order to achieve customer success efficiently and at scale.

• In need of greater transparency: Previously, customer data was tracked separately in different places, making it difficult to track sales and customer progress holistically. This made it harder to make informed decisions, and also created hurdles for sales and customer success teams to know how they perform over a period of time.

  
  

• Missing the opportunity to rise above: With sales information spread across different platforms and siloed from each other, each group in the sales team risked operating in a vacuum. It not only hindered the ability to optimize sales performance but also created blind spots that could make it easy to overlook opportunities for improvement.

  
  

• Better ways to focus on a book of business: Both the advisors and their managers on the customer success team sought more flexibility in browsing and analyzing customer portfolios without distracting the team with countless views. They needed a solution that would allow them to focus on their own customers while being able to update client status centrally.

The Solutions

The V12Software team initially tried Slack and ClickUp as alternatives for internal communication and customer success management but had difficulties receiving reminders, notifications, and reports directly in their chat feed without additional integration. With the help of Lark's customer success team, the team built a customer management hub using Lark Base from scratch.

A unified customer management hub

For V12Software, customer success hinges on understanding customer goals, responding to requests promptly, and proactively identifying needs to ensure a smooth flow from onboarding to retention. To achieve this, Mona consolidated sales and customer success teams' workspace into Lark Base, centralizing sales leads, onboarding status, follow-up dates, and key information.

• The sales team can conveniently submit new deals through the form view in Lark Base, whether in the office or on the go. The automated workflow will also calculate commissions based on deal type and promotions, returning a real-time total for sales leaders to refer to. With sales data centralized, each leader in the team can easily track their group's performance separately. They can also compare progress across different groups to identify areas for improvement. This allows the team to continuously optimize their sales strategy and drive better results.

  
  

  

• The customer success team can key in and track customer onboarding and follow-ups efficiently in Base; in addition, each group under the customer success team can view records only related to them through custom permissions, and each advisor on the team can further create private views only available to themselves to organize clients easily.

  
  

  

With all customer success records organized in one place, the team can gain the transparency needed to continuously make improvements. "What I like a lot on top of the ability to create different dashboards so easily is that we can also access the dashboards directly in chats," says Mona, "it really helps our teams and the managers stay on top of how they are doing, and actually makes the number useful for the team." In Lark, the dashboards created for each team are further added as a tab for the teams to view charts within a group chat, and discuss needed actions in order to improve the numbers.

Free up teams for more customer work

In Lark Base, the V12Software team has established automated processes, allowing sales and customer success teams to work more closely with a customer. When a new sale is made, the automated workflow will add the customer into the marketing advisors' workspace, so that the customer success team knows there are new customers that urgently need to be onboarded. With the automated workflow in place, the sales team no longer needs to manually remind the customer success team and hold multiple meetings to ensure a smooth transition.

In addition, the customer success team boosts punctuality by turning on reminders for key dates in a few clicks, so that they can follow up with customers on their status on time upon receiving the reminder through Lark's Messenger.

With a unified customer management hub in place, the sales and customer success teams at V12Software have more time to focus on onboarding, following up with customers, and improving customer success, and are able to gain a better understanding on how each team performs comparatively in order to capture the opportunity to rise above.