Certinia has officially launched its Customer Success (CS) Cloud following a successful pilot phase involving several leading service delivery organisations, including Salesforce, Diabsolut, and Philips. The new module is designed to integrate seamlessly with Certinia's existing Professional Services (PS) Cloud solution, both of which are built natively on the Salesforce platform.
The primary advantage of CS Cloud is its ability to consolidate diverse functional areas such as Sales, Professional Services, Customer Success, and Support into one unified platform. As customers progress through different phases of their journey, data about them is collated and stored in a single account, enabling comprehensive visibility and fostering collaboration across various departments within an organisation.
Raju Malhotra, the recently appointed Chief Product and Technology Officer at Certinia, remarked on the success of the early adopter program. "The power of this visibility is what converts the customer journey into a true value journey to support the success of both the organisation and its customers," Mr Malhotra stated. He emphasised that CS Cloud, when combined with PS Cloud, helps organisations align around critical metrics such as revenue streams, resource demand, and capacity.
Certinia's release takes place amidst a significant shift in the global economic landscape. "According to the World Bank, services has emerged as the largest and highest-growing segment of the global economy, currently accounting for 66% of global GDP and exceeding industry and agriculture combined," noted Mr Malhotra. He further stated that the rise of recurring revenue models makes it essential to win customer loyalty at every touchpoint and maximise subscription value over time. "Customer success must be a company-wide commitment; it cannot be the sole responsibility of any one function," he added.
CS Cloud offers several advanced features aimed at making customer success a shared mission across an organisation. It equips Customer Success Managers (CSMs) with a powerful dashboard powered by embedded analytics, enabling them to track playbook usage and effectiveness. Additionally, 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 that CSMs and other organisational members have everything they need to drive success.
The platform also includes functionalities for managing success plans and value objectives, facilitating a proactive approach to achieving milestones and delivering value. Customisable templates and automated flows allow organisations to create and manage success plans aligned with customers' business needs. The solution further aids in streamlining playbook management, offering a dedicated user interface for managing tasks and a best practice catalogue for replicating successful strategies across accounts.
Other notable capabilities include optimised resource management and enhanced customer collaboration. Organisations can assign resources to playbook tasks, designate owners for success plans, and request specialists via the PS Cloud Connector. Features such as Experience Cloud sites allow customers to be assigned playbook tasks and work alongside teams to achieve shared goals.
Jim Roth, President of Customer Success at Salesforce, praised the integration, stating, "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."
Naeem Khalid, Vice President of Customer Success at Diabsolut, highlighted the challenges solved by CS Cloud. "Our biggest challenges were intimately tied together and focused on information management around our customer journey. 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," he commented.
Kim McCullough, Lead IT Business Partner, North America at Philips, added, "By combining the strengths of Professional Services Cloud and Customer Success Cloud, we can achieve a new level of customer success with a comprehensive view of the customer journey. With CS Cloud, we anticipate gaining deeper customer insights, enhancing our orchestration of best practices across the organisation, and ultimately creating an exceptional experience for our customers."
