B2B Connection

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Customer Success Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Customer Success Software Customer Success Software is designed to help companies decrease churn and increase upsell. The goal is to get visibility into the status of customers’ relationships with your products and services, and keep them engaged. Customer Success Software centralizes customer data, and analyzes that data to identify potential problems and opportunities. It also helps manage communication with customers. Some tools recommend or facilitate manual outreach. Others send automated messages based on product usage and other customer attributes. This helps customer success managers (CSMs), account managers, and support professionals stay organized while handling more customers at a time. Features, integrations, and cost vary widely. If you’re evaluating different options for customer success software, be clear about your use case. Do you need an end-to-end solution for customer […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Nonprofit CRM Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Nonprofit Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) Software Nonprofit Constituent Relationship Management (CRM) software organizes and centralizes constituent data for nonprofit organizations. Constituents can include donors, staff, volunteers, event attendees, board members, and sponsors. Nonprofits use these products to help raise funds, manage pledges, send marketing emails, and review metrics. Nonprofit CRM software may also include collaboration features, analytics and reporting tools, workflow and task assignment, and finance management capability. When evaluating nonprofit CRM software, buyers should consider their budget, including how their constituent size will impact the price of each solution. Some products have a user limit per tier, while others charge on a per-constituent basis. It’s also important to evaluate the organization’s expected growth rate. If the organization plans to expand heavily in the future, make sure to […]

We are hearing a lot about the customer experience these days – and the idea is here to stay. The only way a company can give customers a great experience is through knowing their preferences first. Of course, every company is going to have different customers with a different set of motivations and expectations. Customers in all fields are experiencing similar large scale changes in technology and purchasing patterns.   Every year we see new trends emerge as technology evolves and buyer journeys shift. We are now well underway into 2019 — it’s time to look at where customer preferences are heading. Omnichannel Experiences Make Customer Experiences Seamless Customers expect businesses to keep up with their reality—they can find reviews, marketing content, and competitor pricing and inventory across all their devices. They expect to see these things in-store as well. B2C customers both “showroom” and “webroom shop,” meaning that they either look at products in-store and then make an online purchase or vice versa. Customers want the best prices and quality of products, but they also want their digital and physical worlds to interact. Companies that integrate these customer realities together give customers a better experience. Omnichannel shopping is when […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software CRM software helps users store, organize, use, and share customer information. Common features of CRM software include contact organization, sales pipeline management, email templates, and automatic logging for contact interactions. Many CRM products include additional features, such as sales and marketing automation, customer support systems, and data analytics. Sales and marketing teams use CRM software to keep track of contact information, manage the flow of prospects through the sales pipeline, and maintain consistent communication with leads and customers. By doing so, sales and marketing teams can centralize contact data collection and streamline the sales cycle.   In the past quarter more than 23,600 professionals used TrustRadius to evaluate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) products—at least 2,172 of them were from enterprise companies […]

TrustRadius Top Rated Today, we awarded the 2019 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Survey & Forms Building Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are the most trusted in the industry because they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user feedback and satisfaction scores. Top Rated awards are the voice of the market and are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Survey & Forms Building Tools Survey & forms building tools help users design and distribute surveys, collect responses, and analyze online survey results. Some products may focus more on survey design and include a range of survey question types and logic, while other tools may focus more on reporting and offer advanced statistical results analysis. These tools have a wide application and are used across industries for things like customer satisfaction surveys, employee feedback surveys, and market / academic research. Common survey & forms building tools features include various survey formats (e.g. online, print, or phone), survey templates and layouts, response collection, question types to choose from (e.g. multiple choice, single select, sliding scale, matrix questions, open-text), question logic options (e.g. conditional, branching, random), and results […]

We have all been there – waiting on a line to reach customer support. Whether you needed to solve a problem with your banker, airline, or online purchase, your first step was to call customer support. This has been a predictable part of our customer experience. However, in the SaaS community, customer support has evolved. Companies have transformed their customer support agents into customer success teams. Not sure what the difference between customer support and customer success is? The rest of this article will dive into what customer success and customer support are and how they are different. From there, we’ll take a deeper look at what customer success is all about – and why it may be one of the most important things for your business. What is Customer Support? Customer support is the service a company provides clients with when they have questions or complaints about a product. When there is a ticket that needs to be resolved, team representatives are on it. Customer support is continually utilized throughout the entire customer lifecycle – from planning and implementation to maintenance and upgrades. Once associated with call centers, customer support now spans many digital channels, including email, phone, instant […]

E-commerce is as much about the experience customers have to interact with your brand’s site as it is about the product and price. There are a lot of options for consumers shopping online. Creating an experience that prioritizes convenience, trust, familiarity, and efficiency is key to running a successful e-commerce business. Whether you are working on creating a new experience from scratch, or you want to revamp your current strategies, we’ve put together twelve ways to create a customer-centric e-commerce experience. 1. Give mobile the respect it deserves People are using their mobile devices to make online purchases more and more. Because of this fact, it’s crucial to make designing your mobile experience a top priority. Your best approach is to build a mobile layout for your website and then adapt it for the desktop experience. If you take the opposite approach, you’ll find yourself having to remove features in order to fit everything into the smaller screen. Another good strategy for creating a smooth mobile shopping experience is to let customers checkout using their social media account. Encourage your users to sign in using their social media credentials, rather than creating a whole new account on your site and manually […]

Solid customer relationships are fundamental to your business success. That’s why choosing the best customer relationship management (CRM) solution is necessary. CRM platforms give your business customer-centric tools to harness healthy relationships and drive profit growth. The goal of using a CRM  is to offer a unified face to customers and provide them a great experience every time they interact with you. CRM software helps you find new leads, organize contacts, track and analyze customer interactions, and give you the tools you need to effectively engage with your client base. In 2018, CRM systems are table stakes for a smooth marketing, sales, and customer service operation. But you don’t want to pay for a complex CRM if you don’t have the resources to use it to its full potential. You also don’t want an overly simple CRM to hold you back from getting smarter about customer engagement. If you don’t have a CRM solution yet, or you’re looking to simplify (or upgrade) your current system, it’s time to investigate which options will best suit your business. Salesforce is one of the most well-known CRM solutions. We will take a look at what this software features and why it is popular. […]

The adoption of mobile device usage since 2011 is nothing short of a revolution. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 95% of Americans own a cell phone and 77% own smartphones. This is up from 35% in 2011. As our comfort with cell phones increases, so does our dependency. This past March, Pew reported that 26% of American adults go online “almost constantly” up from 21% in 2015. The vast majority of us (77%) go online daily, with 43% going online several times a day and 8% going online about once a day. Wide mobile adoption crosses multiple demographics. Americans ages 30 to 49 are now as likely as younger adults to use the internet almost constantly. Additionally, the share of “constant” internet users ages 50 to 64 has risen from 12% to 17% since 2015. This widespread adoption of mobile naturally has implications for the way we search for products and services in our professional lives. It also affects how B2B marketers can reach buyers. This constant connectivity provides new opportunities for marketers to connect with B2B buyers who consume and interact with online content at all hours of the day. The Modern B2B Shopper Research from […]

These days, small businesses and enterprises alike depend on software tools for everything from HR and management to customer engagement. Survey and form building tools can be extremely helpful to businesses of all shapes and sizes. Tools like SurveyMonkey let companies easily create and distribute surveys. Some companies may need a survey for internal purposes – to establish employee preferences for overtime, for example. Others may want to use a form building tool to engage with their customers and target audience, either to collect contact information or to conduct market research. The best survey and form building tools go beyond the creation and publication of surveys. They also let companies analyze survey responses and report on their findings. Some may even act as a comprehensive research platform for marketing, sales or HR departments. The most common use cases include customer satisfaction surveys, employee feedback surveys, and overarching research studies. Whatever the use case, these business tools should let users directly edit format, appearance, content/questions, design, logic, and flow. Most of the Top Rated tools listed below include the capability for analytics and reporting, integration with CRM or marketing tools, automated publication, and flexible admin permissions. SurveyMonkey is one of the […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Customer Success Management Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right customer success software based on your needs and current industry trends. Overall Top Rated Gainsight Pendo.io Intercom Totango ClientSuccess Top Rated by Mid-Sized Companies Gainsight Pendo.io Intercom ClientSuccess Top Rated by Small Businesses Pendo.io Woopra What is customer success management software? Customer success management (CSM) software is designed to give you the tools you need to assess customer health, drive retention, and build brand advocacy. Through a deeper understanding of how your customers are using your subscription products or services, CSM solutions can help you identify low engagement customers who may be at risk of canceling, so that you can intervene proactively to keep their business. Likewise, these systems can help you identify customers who are very active, where there may be an opportunity to upsell them on more capabilities or ask them to share their experience […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Help Desk Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right help desk software based on your needs and current industry trends. Overall Top Rated Spiceworks Salesforce Service Cloud Freshdesk Oracle Service Cloud TeamSupport LiveAgent Top Rated by Mid-Size Companies Spiceworks Salesforce Service Cloud Freshdesk Oracle Service Cloud TeamSupport LiveAgent Top Rated by Small Businesses Freshdesk TeamSupport LiveAgent Kayako What is help desk software? Help desk software, which may sometimes also be referred to as customer service, service desk, or customer support software, provides the tools you need to organize your customer service activities and consolidate your interactions into a singular, ticket-based system. This software can help you create one place where customers can request help from support agents or find answers on their own in a self-service knowledge base. Many help desks integrate with CRM, live chat software, and phone systems to create a suite of tools to […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Survey and Form Building Tools. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. Here are the winners in each segment, listed in order of research frequency on TrustRadius. We have also provided insights on how to pick the right survey tool based on your needs and current industry trends. Overall Top Rated Qualtrics Google Forms Typeform Formstack GetFeedback FormAssembly AskNicely Top Rated by Enterprises Qualtrics Google Forms Inquisium FormAssembly Top Rated by Mid-Sized Companies Qualtrics Typeform Formstack QuestionPro AskNicely Top Rated by Small Businesses Qualtrics Wufoo Typeform FormAssembly AskNicely What are survey tools? Survey and form building tools allow you to create and distribute online questionnaires and analyze responses and feedback. Typically, web forms are used to gather information which will be stored in a database for analysis. Using the form building features, you can create and format customized surveys to send via email or embed on your website. More robust survey platforms include tools to distribute surveys, collect responses, and analyze results built in. There are also survey tools that simply allow for data […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Customer Relationship Management Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. They are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, site traffic, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Software supports an approach to customer interactions in which businesses record the entire customer journey from the first point of contact to after a sale. CRM products aim to optimize marketing, sales, and customer service efforts by providing a central database–or a “single source of truth”–with features to track, monitor, and analyze people, companies, and activities/communications. Since this is a very established space, vendors’ value propositions all sound pretty similar. However, CRM products tend to be geared towards companies of different sizes (with different needs for user permissions and database size), and differ vastly in terms of price, reporting capabilities, integrations, and user-friendliness. Reviews from other organizations like your own can provide helpful insight, especially since user adoption is key to reaping the benefits of a CRM system. Here are the winners: Overall Top Rated Salesforce With 1,776 ratings […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Customer Experience Management Platforms. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. They are not influenced by analyst opinion, the vendor’s company size, popularity, site traffic, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Customer Experience Management (CXM or CEM) Platforms take a myriad of approaches to improving interactions with customers–from collecting and analyzing customer feedback, to unifying customer data across channels/touchpoints and providing personalized content–so products in this category do not have directly comparable features. Their core competencies range from surveys to help desks, A/B testing and personalization, usability testing, and user onboarding. But they all share the goal of helping you increase customer satisfaction and foster a positive relationship with your brand. Different tools may be right for you depending on whether your focus is the pre-purchase experience, the post-purchase experience, or both, and whether you plan to execute CXM initiatives that are more productized or more service-based. Reviews can help you dig in to really understand which products are being used by companies of different sizes and industries, and by different departments and roles […]

Today, we awarded the 2018 TrustRadius Top Rated badges for Nonprofit Constituent Relationship Management Software. The TrustRadius Top Rated awards are unique in that they are an unbiased reflection of customer sentiment, based solely on user satisfaction scores. They are not influenced by analyst opinion, company size, popularity, site traffic, or status as a TrustRadius customer. Traditionally, many nonprofits have used proprietary or home-grown databases or Excel spreadsheets to manage fundraising and donor relations. Nonprofit Constituent Relationship Management Software allows nonprofit staff to view and manage all relationships affecting the mission of the organization including volunteers, members, affiliates, partner organizations, and the board, in addition to donors. These systems store constituent data in one centralized location ensuring comprehensive planning and consistent messaging across all constituents. Although the general value proposition is similar across all products in the category, products differ significantly in price point and level of complexity. Here are the winners: Overall Top Rated Raiser’s Edge NXT Raiser’s Edge NXT is a cloud version of Blackbaud’s well-known Raiser’s Edge fundraising platform. The platform does not yet have feature parity with the original Raiser’s Edge platform, but has advantages in terms of usability and analytics, both of which are frequently […]

At Dreamforce, we talked to Rip Gerber, Vlocity CMO, about how Vlocity can help companies become more efficient and increase customer satisfaction by delivering an industry-specific CRM layer that eliminates the phantom costs of developing on Salesforce. Vlocity has four solutions: government, telecommunications, insurance, and healthcare. Each cloud-based app is native to Salesforce, and extends the CRM platform with very specific business process applications for those verticals. These apps replace custom-built solutions, which Gerber explained are increasingly costly to maintain over time. Vlocity was founded in 2014 by experts on industry customized CRM software, who earned their stripes implementing on-premise Siebel systems. The company is backed not by venture capital, but by strategic investments from Salesforce and Accenture. Give us an introduction to Vlocity—who are you as a company, and what do you do? Vlocity is an Industry Cloud company. We deliver cloud and mobile software that embeds industry-specific functionality and processes, built in partnership with Salesforce. We enable companies to deliver an omnichannel experience, achieve greater sales and service agility, and capture faster value from the cloud. Vlocity is industry cloud apps built on the Salesforce platform. Our verticals are communications, public sector, insurance, and health insurance. We’re 100% native […]

  The brand-new TrustMaps for Survey Tools are here, which means buyers can now use dynamic filters to find the best products for their company size. Dynamic TrustMaps rank products based on real-time user satisfaction ratings and evaluation frequency among SMBs and enterprises. Users of survey tools have shared 107 ratings and 187 in-depth reviews, spanning a broad range of products, use cases, and opinions. Buyers can now quickly locate the survey tools most highly rated and widely adopted by companies of similar size, and therefore most closely aligned to their needs. To understand what users are saying about specific product features and other use case parameters, check out our review base here. “Companies are increasingly looking to both customer and employee satisfaction as a key part of remaining competitive. Online survey platforms enable their research, but different feature sets are important depending on the use case,” said Vinay Bhagat, CEO of TrustRadius. “Users running customer satisfaction surveys might need CRM integration and in-depth customer profiling, whereas those gathering ‘360-degree’ employee feedback might need advanced branching logic with anonymity. Our Survey Tools TrustMaps™ and store of in-depth reviews help prospective buyers identify the best-fit solutions based on their specific needs.” Each TrustMap™ depicts […]

  We sat down with the CEO of Totango, Guy Nirpaz, to learn more about their platform and the importance and future of Customer Success. What’s the Founding story of Totango? GN: Our name, Totango, is derived from the saying, “it takes two to tango,” referring to you and your customers.  Our story began when we started thinking about the amazing phenomenon of Cloud and SaaS, and how digital distribution has led to a model where your relationship with customers is often more remote and it is easy for them to leave. We became very intrigued with helping companies retain and grow their customer base. What’s your approach to customer success? GN: In the digital subscription model, you don’t have the same customer relationship as in the on-premise days, so the question becomes how do you know if they are finding success with your product? It starts with usage stats to know if your customers are using the product in the right way. You need to know what motivates them and if they are seeing value. We built our product to understand the value a customer is getting and built a feedback loop so that the company can understand what is […]

In our latest Buyer’s Guide to CRM Software, users among all market segments – small businesses, mid-size companies and enterprises – have picked Salesforce as a top rated CRM software. Salesforce is also the most frequently evaluated software on TrustRadius. Products with large customer bases or high growth momentum are usually evaluated more frequently. However, in our Buyer’s Guide to CRM Software we have also seen a few new highly rated CRM tools. For those considering purchasing a CRM or switching from your current CRM, is Salesforce a sound investment given the highly rated alternatives? We asked five experts: “Do you see anything shifting in Salesforce’s position i.e, more dominant, less dominant, or more focused on a particular segment?” Here are four main takeaways from their responses: The CRM software market is largely untapped, with many companies still using email or homegrown solutions. Most experts agree that Salesforce dominates the CRM space. However, there are too many categories within CRM for Salesforce to claim leadership in all of them. Salesforce has been shifting focus to the enterprise, and expanding beyond CRM to become a software development platform. A tool that is highly focused and helps companies give valuable context to each customer interaction is going […]