How Our Customer Success Team Uses a CRM

But features are just a small part of the equation.

What really matters is how your team uses them to set up and maintain that success. After all, best-in-class capabilities are pointless if you’re not using them to their potential, right?

Many companies have trouble getting acclimated and finding a steady rhythm with their CRM. Others have trouble getting buy-in and full cooperation from different players in the organization.

Fortunately, there are a few ground-level steps you can take to ensure that your CRM is fully integrated, used, and embraced across the company. (If you're curious about how CRM has evolved, check this out.)

To illustrate some of these best practices, I’m going to give you a peek into how we do things here at Copper. Let’s look at four ways that our Customer Success (CS) team uses a CRM.

When used properly, activity types can tell a rich story about each of your customers. From onboarding comments to system updates to notes taken by sales reps or account managers, a wealth of information is available to you in just a few clicks.

In addition to seeing how many and what types of interactions you’ve had with each customer, each activity lets you record in-depth notes about what took place during each of those conversations. This is especially helpful when multiple team members need to access the same customer’s information, or if you need to unexpectedly switch key points of contact from your company.

By default, Copper's platform offers three activity types: phone calls, meetings, and to-dos. If you have more client interactions than these, you can also create custom activity types like "training" and "demos."

For example, our team’s account executives take detailed notes during each demo, like what types of solutions the customer is currently using and the biggest obstacles their organization faces. Then, when the prospect becomes a customer, this valuable information is inherited by the Customer Success team.

With this detailed data on hand, we’re able to provide more personalized, actionable, and proactive support.

Most CS teams are familiar with Zendesk—it's a leading customer support ticketing solution that gives you immediate insight into both outstanding and resolved customer service issues.

The good news for us is that we don’t need to deploy and use Zendesk as an independent ticketing software. The dynamic two-way integration between Zendesk and Copper allows our CS team to access a complete view of interactions that a customer or lead has had with the business.

For example, Copper’s native Zendesk integration allows us to have conversations that are more meaningful, relevant, and productive. Any of us can view new, pending, on hold, solved, closed, and open tickets associated with a customer or lead in the “related” section of their CRM record.

This holistic view of support information gives us the power to prioritize customer feedback and collaborate with internal teams to fulfill customer expectations.

As a result, our Customer Success managers or support team can handle any issues directly with the customer, prioritize their concerns, and assure them of software upgrades, bug fixes, and issues solved.

Like I mentioned before: a snazzy CRM platform is nothing without a concerted, systemized, and streamlined effort to use it.

One of the biggest obstacles to this is having to make sure that everyone is on the same page. How can you be certain that you see the activities and tasks that are relevant to you—without drowning in the clutter of everyone else’s daily responsibilities?

Cue Copper’s collaboration features like @-mentioning, customer and seller moment visibility, and real-time sales help from your team.

These features are hands-down some of the most commonly used by our teams here at Copper. For example, we look at up-to-the-minute insights that show the real-time status of a customer’s account, as well as what our team members have talked about with them in the past.

The @-mention feature is one of the fastest and most efficient ways to make sure that a team member is looped into the right conversations. That’s why we use them dozens of times a day.

You can @ any of your team members on an activity, which then sends them a notification however they choose to receive them: via the Copper app on desktop, its mobile version, and/or email.

Organization and efficiency are some of the biggest pain points for SMBs who are looking for a new CRM. If you’ve felt this pain before, you’ve likely experienced the disorganization and inefficiency that leads to prospects, customers, and tasks slipping through the cracks.

This is especially painful when you have the right tools, but your company’s flow is somehow still not the well-oiled machine you’ve been dreaming of.

Smooth, orchestrated handoffs are just one of the amazing outcomes when we're using Copper to create reliable, repeatable, and airtight internal processes.

As our sales team works through the sales process, they collect key information (that CS will use later) from each prospect via data fields and activity types.

Just like activity types, data fields are fully customizable so that all the most important details for your organization and team members are always front-and-center.

You can create custom fields under Leads, People, Companies, Opportunities, Projects, and Tasks. These fields include:

• Date fields
• Number fields
• Checkboxes
• URLs
• Percentages
• Currencies
• Tags
• Connect fields
• Text areas for keywords or paragraphs
• Single and multi-select dropdowns

If and when each prospect becomes a customer, we create a new customer record from all of that existing data and pass it on to the onboarding team.

The close of a new business opportunity then gives our onboarding team everything they need to know to kick off the implementation phase of the customer lifecycle.

Having the right CRM—with the right internal processes in place to leverage all its shiny new features—is critical for staying competitive and exceeding our company’s goals quarter after quarter.

Once you have these key elements, everything else will fall into place.

If you’re looking for a clean, customizable, and user-friendly CRM with all the right features to finally get buy-in from your CS team, Copper just might be your solution. We’ve got a 14-day free trial, so why not give it a try?

Want to learn more? See how Charles (now our Director of Strategic Customer Success!) approaches relationships with customers: