Certinia adds Customer Success Cloud to its lineup

Certinia, formerly FinancialForce, is expanding its professional services-focused ERP with the general availability of Customer Success Cloud this week.

CS Cloud, along with Certinia's flagship product Professional Services (PS) Cloud, is built on the Salesforce platform. Its general availability comes just ahead of Salesforce's annual user show Dreamforce.

The intent of CS Cloud, which has been in development for about 18 months, is to provide customers with an organizational view of customer relationships, according to the company. While PS Cloud has capabilities to manage and track project metric, CS Cloud provides similar capabilities for managing ongoing customer relationships.

It's positioned as an adjacent product to PS Cloud primarily because of customers' increasing focus on the ongoing importance of customer success, said Raju Malhotra, chief product and technology officer at Certinia.

"The goal is to help customers with the data connectivity from PS Cloud and extend that to the CS organization, so effectively the overall organization is able to focus on the customer success, not just the few [customer success managers] CSMs," he said. "They now have the visibility, the playbooks, the success plans and all the tools they need to help their customers in deploying their technology and the services that they purchased."

One of CS Cloud's central features is an Account Health Score dashboard that provides CSMs with a single view of how all their accounts are performing. Other capabilities include customer account playbooks and success tracking that are designed to enable and monitor CSM business objectives such as setting goals, selling products and services and tracking deployment success, Malhotra said.

The Account Health Score dashboard takes data from different data sources -- products that sold, how much of that was deployed, how much of that was actually used -- and combines that into a score card, he said.

"This helps the organization to be very clear about where they are succeeding [and] where they need to do more work," Malhotra said.

The general availability of CS Cloud follows Certinia's summer release in August, which included new updates for PS Cloud. These include the ability to scale project and resource management; a UX update that provides users with a spreadsheet-like capability for project estimating; new generative AI functionality via Salesforce Einstein Copilot; and new financial management functions for general ledger, accounts receivable and tax reporting management.

PS Cloud and CS Cloud are sold as separately licensed products, with pricing available from the company.