This post was originally published on Strategic CS Labs (https://www.strategiccslabs.com/blog/no-your-crm-isnt-enough-why-modern-day-customer-success-teams-need-a-cs-platform).

Let’s say you’re alone in your kitchen with twelve dishes to prepare.

Every stove burner is taken. Your oven is full. And your fridge is occupied by dishes that need to be set.

In this scenario, even Gordon Ramsay would get overwhelmed.

This isn’t a matter of setting up a few alarms to remind you to move, take out, or put things in.

To make 12 dishes (that taste and look good) requires additional help.

A CRM is the little alarm your CS team keeps ignoring. The alarms don’t pinpoint what needs attention, and it definitely doesn’t do anything on your CS team’s behalf. So they’re left chasing around what’s burning, and by doing that, they put all 12 dishes at risk.

What your team needs is a sous chef.

Someone who knows their way around the kitchen, who has your team's back so that things aren’t forgotten, and in some cases, they even step up and make a dish or two from start to finish.

Customer Success Platforms are the sous chefs for modern CS teams.

Bold statement – I know, so let me give you some context. Hi, I’m Diana 👋

I’ve worked as a Customer Success Manager (CSM) at companies with and without a Customer Success Platform (CSP). I was also a CSM who worked for a Customer Success Platform and I’ve consulted CS teams on how to set up and get more value out of their CSPs.

During this time, I’ve not only lived the experience as a CSM but have also seen how 100+ CS teams stagnate or go into hypergrowth, depending on their tech stack.

In this post, I want to reflect on the impact I’ve seen CSPs have on teams to help you make an informed decision if you're shopping around. So let’s get started.

CRM: Scattered Tools v. CSP: Everything In One Place

Okay, so now let’s say you’re a CSM managing 40 accounts.

You have about four client calls per day, which you need to prep for.

If you’re not using a CSP, you’re likely jumping in and out of tools trying to find the information you need. It might look like this:

• CRM (5 minutes): Quick check for basic account info and recent notes. Okay, who are we talking to again? What did we last discuss?
• BI Tool (10 minutes): Diving into adoption metrics. Are they actually using the product? How's that trending?
• Spreadsheet (5 minutes): Maybe checking their health score. Are they healthy? Are they at risk?
• Email (5 minutes): Reviewing past communications. What was the last email thread about? Any open issues?
• Call Recording Tool (10 minutes): Listening to the last call. What were the key takeaways? Any action items I missed?
• [Optional] Internal Communication (5 minutes): Quick chat with a teammate. Hey, any updates on the progress with their professional services package?

That’s 35 - 40 minutes per client, 2.6 hours per day, which is 13 hours of your week or 32% of a 40-hour work week.

Bouncing around tools adds up!

With a CSP, like Vitally, you can easily sync your customer data and tools within minutes so you can centralize things like email, CRM, call recording tools, communication tools like Slack, Zendesk, and BI tools – in one platform.

There’s no context switching, no jumping in and out of 16 tabs, and no piecing together the bigger picture.

The hours saved here can go to the strategic initiatives CS teams have been putting off because they just don’t have the time and/or mental bandwidth to carry them out. This brings me to my next point… Action.

CRM: Stagnant Information v. CSP: Information With Guided Actions

CRMs were built for Sales teams who have a very clear start and finish: turn a prospect into a customer.

That’s why CRMs come prebuilt with tools to help Sales with:

• Lead qualification: Figure out if a prospect is a good fit.
• Pipeline management: Tracking deals through clear stages.
• Forecasting: Predicting future sales based on current opportunities.
• Logging activity: Documenting what has happened to keep track.

These features are here to move a prospect from point A to point B (closed won) and the team is doing all of the heavy lifting along the way. The tool keeps them on track and organized. Once that prospect converts, the CRM has, for the most part, served its primary function.

In Customer Success, while the goal is still revenue-focused, our journey is far more complex. We’re not just closing deals; we’re building long-term relationships, staying on top of evolving customer needs, and adapting to unique circumstances.

This ongoing dynamic process requires a tool that can do more than just log or work, it needs to enable us throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

The crucial difference: A CRM provides a snapshot; a CSP provides a roadmap.

A modern CS team needs actionable intelligence (not a tool for record-keeping). They need a tool that’s going to:

• Provide a holistic customer view: Not just the historical data that’s been manually collected, but the integrated real-time data from other sources like BI tools, Email, Slack, etc.
• Anticipate what will happen: Using predictive analytics to identify potential churn (way before it’s too late) or growth opportunities.
• Allow for tailored customer journeys: It’s not just the ability to create random stages, it’s outlining specific actions and outputs within them like this:

• Automate where needed: Trigger personalized outreach and tasks based on specific criteria.

CSPs can do all of this while also having the basic functions of a CRM. The last point I mentioned is arguably one of the most important capabilities a CS team needs to support their scaling effort.

CRM: What Automation? v. CSP: Automation Forward

Whether a CS team is doing high touch/digital customer success or just incorporating elements of it, it can’t be properly done within a CRM.

Throughout the years, I noticed that the biggest factor preventing CS teams from turning on their high-touch efforts via email platforms came down to one thing: trust.

They weren’t convinced that the emails would fire at the right time, or someone would accidentally get an email that wasn’t meant for them, or that the account was at risk, and now they’re getting an upsell email.

But when you have a tool that houses all of the real-time information you need on an account, you can build segments and criteria that take all of that into account.

While a CRM or an email tool can do basic automation, it lacks the granular control and real-time data integration needed for effective Customer Success automation. Again, it’s built for Sales where automation is typically linear and less dependent on dynamic customer data (i.e., triggering an email sequence when a form is filled regardless of their current level of engagement).

So, how can automation help a CS team? Here are a few examples:

1. Trigger based on real-time behavior, like a dip in their engagement.
2. Create super-targeted onboarding based on different data inputs
3. Collect feedback post-event (like onboarding, business reviews, & renewals)
4. Schedule check-in calls with contacts you haven’t heard from in a while.

To Be Successful, Today’s CS Teams Need the Right Tools

Without them, they often struggle to show their value, spend all their time reacting to problems, and lose customers they could have saved. Having one tool that houses all of the information they need, and arms them with predictable intelligence, sets them up to win. That frees them up to focus on the important, strategic work that leads to growing accounts and increasing revenue.