The document discusses tools to help manage the customer lifecycle from awareness to advocacy. It identifies 12 tools to help with key stages: awareness (Hootsuite, WordPress), engagement (Insightly, Salesforce CRM), evaluation (Hubspot, Mopinion), purchase (Apple Business Chat, OptinMonster, PayPal), post-purchase (Process Street, Churn Zero), and advocacy (Influitive, GrowthSurf). Each tool is described briefly with its features and pricing. The goal is to understand and guide customers through each stage to maximize customer lifetime value and retention.

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October 13, 2021
Customer Lifecycle Software Stack: 12 Tools to Help You
Raise Profits by 75%
process.st/customer-lifecycle-software-stack
Jane Courtnell
October 13, 2021
The customer lifecycle begins with awareness and matures to advocacy, from the first
interaction with your brand, to an evangelized super-user who raves about and recommends
your product to friends, family and associates.
This Process Street article focuses on the customer lifecycle management – how to
understand the different stages of the customer’s lifecycle, and guide them from initial
awareness to long-term advocacy, with the help of tech.
Optimal customer lifecycle management is vital as this can maximize customer lifetime value
(CLV) by boosting customer retention. This, in turn, will bolster your bottom-line by:
1. Selling to an existing customer base: There’s a 60-70% chance of selling to an
existing customer base relative to a 5-20% chance of selling to new prospects.
2. Increasing customer retention: A mere 5% increase in customer retention is
enough to raise a company’s profits by 75%.

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Getting customer lifecycle management right can be tough. To help you, we’ve put together
this list of essential tools to complete your customer lifecycle software stack, for optimal
customer lifecycle management.
Each tool is chosen as per the customer lifecycle stage it’s best used for. Each customer
lifecycle stage will have differing aims, which means it’s vital you use the right tools to meet
your objectives. For this article, we’ve done the work for you.
Let’s dive right in!
Understanding the customer lifecycle in detail
Customers pass through several stages as they interact with your brand. These stages make
up the customer lifecycle, and are as follows:
1. Awareness 💡: This is the first stage of the customer lifecycle. During this stage, the
prospect recognizes they have a problem and have an impulse to act and solve this
problem. They see your offering as a potential solution.
2. Engagement 🧐: Once your customers are aware of you, they’ll start to seek out your
marketing content by following you on social media, signing up to your email, checking
out your blog, etc. They’ll also start to pay attention to what others are saying about
your brand. Your prospects are engaging with you.
3. Evaluation : Once your customers have identified their problem to be solved,
they’ll research the best solution. During this evaluation phase, customers will be
comparing you to your competitors. Customers can use online, word-of-mouth,
showrooms, sale representatives, or other sources of information.
4. Purchase 🥇: This is crunch time. Your prospect has made their final decision. And
because you employ effective customer lifecycle management techniques, your
prospects have chosen you over your competitors.
5. Post-purchase 💰: Once your customers have made their purchase, the hard work
doesn’t stop there. You want to retain your customers, and to do that you need to use
the right post-purchase strategies. This means delivering an exceptional customer
experience. This stage is all about preventing customer churn.
6. Advocacy : Advocacy is about getting your existing customers to positively talk
about your brand and offering. At this stage, you’ll want to cement your relationship
with your customers. You should continue to provide a high-quality, supporting service,
plus nurture a connection with proactive engagement. Your aim is to create an
emotional bond with your customers. If you do this well, you’ll see your customers
jumping back into the purchasing stages of their lifecycle, upgrading their purchases,
and encouraging others to do the same.
You want to move your customers from the awareness stage to the advocacy stage in as little
time as possible. There are a plethora of software tools out there to help you do this. With
this in mind, we’ve scoured the software space to find the best tools you should use for each

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customer lifecycle stage.
Without further ado, let’s jump straight to it!
Customer lifecycle software to help build brand awareness 💡
Prospects enter the customer lifecycle at the awareness stage. During this stage, you must
have a clear idea about where your target audience spends most of their time. If we take the
average American, they spend 6 hours a day online. This means the process of identifying,
reaching, and analyzing your target audience’s online activity should be trouble-free.
Below are tools to help you during this awareness stage.
Use Hootsuite for social media management
Source
Social media marketing is a useful interruptive marketing style that helps build brand
awareness. Use Hootsuite to help you with your social media marketing strategy.
Hootsuite has over 200,000 paid accounts and millions of users across the globe. The
platform is used for social media management. Users can schedule posts across multiple
social media accounts to build brand awareness. Once more, Hootsuite allows you to find,
distribute, manage and optimize your social content.
💡Features:
Social media analytics
Campaign optimization

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Social ads and social engagement
Follower analysis
Post-performance
💵Pricing:
A free trial is available. A professional plan starts at $53.00 per user per month. A team plan
starts at $135.00 per user per month. A business plan starts at $708.00 per user per month.
Sign up for Hootsuite today!
Use WordPress for your content marketing strategy
Source
Creating free and useful content is intent-driven marketing, and should be used alongside
your interruptive marketing initiatives. Content marketing is intent-driven because your
customers are searching for the information you’re providing for free. Use WordPress to
support your content marketing strategy.
WordPress is a popular website and blog-building platform. WordPress a is free and open-
source software that gives you website ownership. You can customize your WordPress site to
how you want by changing the theme, adding customer WordPress plugins and unique apps.
💡Features:
Content authoring
Content scheduling
Branding/themes

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
Plug-ins/Widgets/Apps
💵Pricing:
Free version available. Personal plan at $4 per user per month. Premium plan at $9 per user
per month.
Sign up for WordPress today!
Customer lifecycle software to promote customer engagement 🧐
When your customers become aware of your brand, they’ll want to engage with you if your
product or service is relevant to their interests. A blog and social media marketing are both
useful here, but there are other additional methods – and supporting software – you can use
to build engagement.
Use Insightly for contact management
Source
Insightly offers top customer engagement solutions by integrating activities such as contact
management, sales management, opportunities, and task tracking.
With these activities interconnected, your team has a holistic view of each opportunity or
contact, meaning you can anticipate the needs of your customers and deliver superior
customer experiences.

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With Insightly, you can automate various marketing activities and help deliver great content
to the customer. This content gives a personalized feel for increased engagement. Insightly
offers a centralized platform to store customer-centric data to track the customer journey.
💡Features:
Contact and account management
Task/activity management
Lead management
Customer support portal
Social collaboration features
Reporting and forecasting
💵Pricing:
CRM pricing starts at $29 per user per month. Professional plan at $49 per user per month.
Enterprise plan at $99 per user per month.
Sign up for Insightly today!
Use Salesforce CRM for a 360-degree view of each customer
Source
Salesforce CRM promotes customer engagement by creating a 360-degree view of each
customer. This means you’ll be able to see a customer’s activity, how they’ve engaged with
your marketing efforts in the past, and other insights powered by artificial intelligence (AI).

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Salesforce will even tell you the right moment to engage with your customer because timing
is everything. Plus, a lot of this outreach is automated taking a load off your team’s plate.
💡Features:
Contact and account management
Customer contract management
Product and price list management
Lead management
Campaign management
💵Pricing:
Pricing ranges from $25 per user per month to over $300 per user per month.
Sign up for Salesforce CRM today!
Customer lifecycle software to ease customer evaluation
The evaluation stage is the last stage before your customers purchase your company’s
products or services. Customers are comparing your product to your competition, and asking
the following questions:
What’s unique about your product?
Does your company provide any sort of guarantee to minimize risk for customers?
What are the additional details that move the needle for a customer to make the
purchase?
Use HubSpot to understand your customers better

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Source
Thinking about the above-listed questions, you can use HubSpot as an out-of-the-box
feedback tool to easily capture qualitative and quantitative feedback and understand your
customers better.
With this important customer information, you’ll learn what brand attributes hold you back
during the evaluation phase (e.g., maybe your product doesn’t have a unique selling point
(USP), or maybe your customers feel the purchase is too risky).
Hubspot Customer Feedback helps you use Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to measure
customer loyalty over time. Send Customer Effort Score (CES) surveys to understand how
easy it is for customers to get the support they need, or distribute customer satisfaction (CST)
surveys to understand how satisfied your customers are.
💡Features:
Contact and account management
Opportunity and pipeline management
Desktop integration
Lead management
Email marketing
💵Pricing:
Starter plan at $51.75 per user per month. Professional plan at $891 per user per month.
Enterprise plan at $3,573 per user per month.
Sign up for Hubspot Customer Feedback today!

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Use Mopinion to listen to your customers’ voice
Source
To help your customers through the evaluation phase and guide them to choose your offering
over your competitors, you need to listen to what your customers have to say.
Mopinion is designed to help you listen to your customers, to find out what they want and
need in today’s complex and digitized world.
Collect and analyze feedback from websites, mobile apps, and email campaigns in real-time.
With Mopinion’s easy-to-use interface, you can build, design, and configure feedback forms
how you like. Once more, you can target feedback forms to specific groups of prospects to
gain insight into why they’re not converting and making a purchase.
💡Features:
Brand design consistency
Feedback collection
Device responsiveness
Feedback aggregation
💵Pricing:
Growth plan at $232 per user per month. Turbo plan at $582 per user per month.
Sign up for Mopinion today!

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Customer lifecycle software to help your customers make a
purchase 🥇
It’s easy to think that once your customers have made a purchase, your job is done. This
thinking is incorrect, as it’s at the purchase stage where your work begins.
You want to simplify the purchasing process, and listed below are the tools to help you do
that.
Use Apple Business Chat to speed up the purchasing process
Source
With Apple Business Chat, customers can get answers to their questions, schedule
appointments, resolve issues, and make purchases without leaving the messenger.
Let’s say you have a prospect in the engagement stage, and they use Apple Business Chat to
get in touch. You can engage the customer, and lead them straight through to the purchasing
stage in one platform. What a simple and easy process.
Once more, you can connect Apple Business Chat to your Apple Pay account, streamlining
the process further, moving from customer engagement to payment and purchase.
While using Apple Pay, prospects are sent list picker prompts allowing the customer to select
one or more items, such as products or locations. This again helps your prospects come to a
purchase decision and select additional items for this purchase.
💡Features:

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Apple Pay connection
List picker prompts
Ability to send chat URL website links
Time picker to prompt the user to pick available slots
💵Pricing:
Apple Business Chat is available with a Sunshine Conversation plan starting at $495 per user
per month.
Sign up for Apple Business Chat today!
Use OptinMonster to quickly generate leads
Source
OptinMonster is a cloud-based solution for lead generation and marketing automation. Users
can create A/B tests for a range of custom opt-in forms without the need for coding. Create
unique campaigns or offers based on the location and behavior of visitors, allowing you to
segment their email list based on subscriber interest and website interactions.
OptinMonster allows you to compare different form variations to find the layout, headlines,
content, style, and opt-in trigger that generates the most conversions.
OptinMonster is designed for you to grow your email list, get more leads and increase sales.
💡Features:
Geo-location tagging
User behavior tracking

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Convert images to link to an opt-in form
No-code drag and drop builder
Campaign templates
💵Pricing:
The basic plan at $9 per user per month. Plus plan at $19 per user per month. Pro plan at
$29 per user per month.
Sign up for OptinMonster today!
Expand your payment options with PayPal
Source
Studies show offering multiple payment options can boost revenue by 30%. So, adding
PayPal as a payment option for your customers seems like a no-brainer.
PayPal is a popular payment processing platform with features for in-person and online
transactions. PayPal offers a global service featuring invoice, mobile, and recurring payment
in 100 currencies. PayPal comes with an embeddable Buy-now button. Clicking this button
allows the customer to sign into their PayPal account and purchase the item automatically.
This quickens the purchasing process and diversifies the payment options you provide.
💡Features:
Online payment acceptance
Bill me later
Barcode scanning

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Online invoicing
Shopping cart
PCI compliance
Inventory tracking
Virtual terminal
💵Pricing:
No free trial is available. Selling on a website, through an invoice, or via email costs 4.4% +
$0.30. Selling on eBay costs 3.9% +$0.30. International sales apply currency conversion
fees.
Sign up for PayPal today!
Customer lifecycle software tools for post-purchase customer
management 💰
The post-purchase stage of customer lifecycle management aims to increase CLV and retain
your customers. In this section, we present the tools to help you do that.
Use Process Street to deliver exceptional customer experiences
Source
Process Street is a no-code solution for documenting your business operations to reduce
error, improve efficiency and create consistency. These benefits transcend to your customer
success operations, improving customer experiences.
With Process Street‘s customer success software, you can:

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Standardize your approach to customer success: By using Process Street’s no-
code workflow builder, you can create templates for your team to follow for them to
handle issues and opportunities in the best possible way.
Lighten your customer success workload: Eradicate manual tasks and connect
your workflows to the platforms you use daily using Process Street‘s Automation and
Webhook features.
Handle multiple customers in one process: Simplify your processes by using
Process Street’s Conditional Logic feature when building templates.
Make the best decisions for your customers: Use Process Street’s Approvals
feature to make sure all customer success documents and decisions are run by your
Customer Success Manager. Make decisions on the move, and provide feedback from
where you are with one quick click.
💡Features:
Task progress monitoring
Rules-based workflows
Template management
Third-party integrations
Workflow management
Customizable reports and templates
💵Pricing:
Free plan available. Pro plan at $25 per user per month. Enterprise plan available on a
quotation basis.
Sign up for Process Street today!
Use Churn Zero to increase customer retention

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Source
Churn Zero is a real-time customer success platform that helps subscription businesses fight
customer churn during the post-purchase phase. The Churn Zero platform is uniquely
designed to integrate with CRM systems. By doing so, Churn Zero:
1. Helps businesses understand how their customers use their product/service.
2. Assesses customer health and the likelihood a customer will renew product/service
subscriptions.
3. Gives businesses the means to automate and personalize the customer experience
through timely and relevant touchpoints.
💡Features:
Customer health scores
Customer profiles and segments
Customer monitoring
Reporting and dashboards
Playbooks
💵Pricing:
There’s no pricing information available. You can request a demo here.
Sign up for Churn Zero today!
Customer lifecycle software tools to promote customer advocacy

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Once your customers have purchased your offering, and they are satisfied with the
experience, you then want them to be pillars of your brand. Customer advocates are those
that spend the most money, bring in customers and shout about your brand from the
rooftops. This is the final stage of the customer lifecycle, and below are the tools to use
during this stage.
Use Influitive to build a community of advocates
Source
Influitive allows you to build a community of advocates and invite your customers,
developers, partners, and employees to complete challenges, referrals, product reviews,
social media posts, plus more. As your customers complete these personalized challenges –
which you can target at specific groups – they earn points, badges, and move through
different levels.
You can easily visualize and report on the customer activities completed and the ROI of those
activities by integrating Influitive with your CRM – like Salesforce.
💡Features:
Social network integration
Contact sync
Customer engagement
Downloadable reports
Qualitative solutions
Social media integration
💵Pricing:

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Customer advocacy plans starting at $1,499 per month.
Sign up for Influitive today!
Use GrowthSurf to focus on the referral aspect of advocacy
Source
Use GrowthSurf to focus on the referral side of brand advocacy. GrowthSurf is a leading
software that allows you to set up, automate, and track all of your brand advocates using
GrowthSurf’s simple and effective referral system.
With GrowthSurf you can launch a customer-to-customer referral program to incentivize
word-of-mouth referrals and grow organically.
💡Features:
Activity dashboard and tracking
Affiliate marketing
Alerts/notifications
Campaign analytics, management, and planning
Customizable branding
💵Pricing:
Startup plan at $200 per month for 10,000 participants. Business plan at $400 per month
for 25,000 participants. Elite plan at $600 per month for 75,000 participants.
Sign up for GrowthSurf today!

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Integrate your customer lifecycle software apps together using
Process Street
The applications mentioned in this article are uniquely designed to serve one stage of your
customer’s lifecycle. As mentioned, Process Street is an excellent app for delivering
exceptional customer experiences. But Process Street has another brilliant use case when it
comes to customer lifecycle management.
Each stage in a customer’s lifecycle is linked, meaning stages should not be considered in
isolation. Customer movement is fluid from one stage to the next, and customers can even
move backward, and jump stages. What you need is a means of linking these customer
lifecycle stages and the applications used in each. And to do that, you can turn to your
business processes.
At the core of your business, there are processes. These processes form a network, linking
teams, departments, and tasks. By documenting your business processes, you’ll have full
transparency of who is doing what and when.
In terms of customer lifecycle management, you can use your documented processes to track
a customer’s movement between the lifecycle stages, and interact with the relevant
applications when needed. For this interaction, you can integrate Process Street with other
customer lifecycle applications using the third-party integration tool Zapier.
With these integrations, customer information is securely stored in a Process Street workflow
and passed back and forth between this workflow and your customer lifecycle applications.
For more information on how to set up these integrations, visit our Integrations help page.