In time for Dreamforce, Certinia has announced the general release of its Customer Success (CS) Cloud solution. CS Cloud is the latest module in the Certinia portfolio. It is a key component of its vision to create a platform for services businesses.
Built on Salesforce, Certinia now offers three core products:
- Professional Services Cloud (its PSA solution)
- ERP Cloud (Its financial Management solution aimed mainly at the mid-market)
- Customer Success (CS) Cloud
The new CS Cloud aims to compete with the leading Customer Success solutions in the market. That statement might seem unlikely to some. However, the CS Cloud has been developed over the last year with the assistance of some significant Beta customers. They include Salesforce, Diabsolut, Dell and Certinia themselves.
Several other enterprise customers have not yet been made public. Both Dell and Salesforce will be presenting with Certinia at Dreamforce.
The time is right for CS Cloud
The announcement came in a blog by Raju Malhotra, Chief Product and Technology Officer. He wrote that according to the World Bank, services represent 66% of the global GDP, exceeding the combination of industry and agriculture.
With the shift to subscription models, organisations must get closer to their customers, foster engagement and loyalty, and see the value of the services that are offered.
Malhotra also states, “Customer success needs to be a company-wide commitment. It cannot be the sole responsibility of any one function (yes, even Customer Success organizations).”
This is where the Certinia solution differentiates from much of the competition. While the CS function can use the CS Module, the rest of the Certinia solution, as well as Salesforce means that it can easily involve Sales, Finance and Professional Services. The Certinia suite of solutions enables customers to make customer success accessible and usable across the whole organisation.
Customer Success is a journey, not a destination.
Looking after customers and ensuring that they renew is not just the responsibility of the Customer Success team. Every touch point that a firm makes with a customer is important, including marketing, sales, professional services, customer service, and customer success. This also includes back office teams such as finance.
The Certinia CS Cloud now allows the CS team to track customer engagement. They can nudge where appropriate and ensure that customer interaction is positive and designed to offer value. The CS Cloud solution has rapidly matured with each recent release, including Spring and Summer 24. Both included significant updates to the platform to enhance its capabilities.
Underpinned by the Salesforce platform, Certinia also leverages Salesforce Einstein’s AI capabilities. It has introduced and will introduce new AI-powered features into the platform far faster than most competitors.
In the Summer release, it introduced segmentation on Health Scores. Organisations can define the metrics that make up the health scorecard and segment them according to industry or customer. The feature enables nuanced health scores relevant to the industry or client.
The advantage of the Salesforce platform is that data from Sales Cloud, Certinia PSA, and Certinia ERP is surfaced into the CS Cloud without the need for integration.
Advanced Capabilities of CS Cloud
Already a mature solution, Certinia pointed out the six core features of the solution:
Monitor Customer Success Performance
CS Cloud equips Customer Success Managers (CSMs) with a powerful dashboard powered by embedded analytics to track playbook usage and effectiveness. The CSM workspace provides a focused view of key account information, including a calendar and task grid to manage critical dates and deliverables.
Tailored account views offer essential insights into opportunities and cases, ensuring your CSMs and the rest of your organization have everything they need to drive success.
Manage Success Plans & Value Objectives
With CS Cloud, you can create and manage success plans aligned with customer business needs. Using customizable templates or automated flows, CSMs can track progress in the Success Tracker UI, record notes, and monitor account history in the Activity Tracker. This proactive approach ensures milestones are met and value is delivered.
Streamline Playbook Management
CS Cloud can help you create, manage, and execute playbooks that drive ideal customer outcomes. The solution offers a dedicated UI for managing playbook tasks and includes a best practice catalogue, enabling teams to replicate successful strategies across accounts.
Optimize Resource Management
Now, you can assign resources to playbook tasks, designate owners for success plans, and request specialists via the PS Cloud Connector. Team management features also enable the reuse of resource configurations across multiple playbooks, enhancing efficiency.
Collaborate with Customers Seamlessly
With Experience Cloud sites, customers can be assigned playbook tasks and work alongside your team to achieve shared goals, aligning everyone on key deliverables.
Leverage the Power of Salesforce
Native to the Salesforce platform, CS Cloud automates the creation of playbooks and tasks based on triggered events, ensuring your organization receives real-time notifications for new assignments and can act swiftly to drive customer success.
Adding another string to its bow
Significant organisations have chosen to work with Certinia during its beta phase. It indicates the potential strength of the new solution, even during the early days.
Jim Roth, President, Customer Success at Salesforce, commented, “Every customer success solution has a connector to Salesforce, but Certinia’s Customer Success Cloud is the only one natively built on Salesforce.
“This solution is ideal for our team because it allows us to leverage our existing integrations and investments in Salesforce, along with Marketing Cloud for notifications, Einstein for AI, Slack for collaboration, and Data Cloud to ensure our Customer Success Managers know everything they should about their accounts.”
As Roth points out, the platform’s cohesiveness is because customers can use a single architecture for many of their operations solutions.
Diabsolut, a Certinia PSA and now a CS Cloud customer, sees other advantages and benefits. Naeem Khalid, Vice President of Customer Success at Diabsolut, commented, “Our biggest challenges were intimately tied together and focused on information management around our customer journey.
“We needed to build a consistent process and have a single source of truth around everything customer-related. Customer Success Cloud has allowed us to build out playbooks focused on having best practice-driven processes, including templates and guides for our CSM team, an automated snapshot of our account health through the customer scorecard, and the ability to tie our PSA implementation to our customer scorecard.
“We now have everything about the project—status, billability, and invoicing—available at a glance, so whether planning conversations with clients or dealing with potential escalations, we’re able to be much more nimble.”
Enterprise Times: What does this mean
With Dreamforce about to start, this could be perfect timing for Certinia to release its new Customer Success solution. Certinia is offering something different from many other PSA or CS vendors. That will appeal to enterprises leveraging the Salesforce platform and considering Customer Success or PSA.
Importantly, the Certinia team is not starting from a standing start. It already has significant customer references. It also has a platform that has been tried and tested by some very large organisations.
Certinia is focused on services organisations with its initial marketing energies. At first glance, it appears to be around technology firms. However, its capabilities indicate that it could have a much broader industry appeal.
Certinia will continue to improve the platform in the coming releases. It will be interesting to see how customers lead its evolution.
