7 Best Customer Success Software Tools

Hiring a customer success manager has become as essential as any other manager in a successful business. Sometimes, enterprises employ entire customer success teams to focus on empowering their customers.

And as technology advanced, many teams and independent business owners realized the need for a customer success platform that relieves pressure off their backs and enables them to do more.

In every business I’ve worked in or advised, customer success has played a key role in minimizing customer churn — software can ensure your customer success team can best serve your customers and can accurately report key metrics to the leadership team.

My research team has compiled the information below regarding some of the best customer success software on the market so you can make an informed decision that’ll benefit your company and customers.

Why Your Business Needs Customer Success Software

Customer success is an essential part of ensuring customer satisfaction. By empowering and enabling your customers to find success, you build customer relationships and create an intuitive connection between their goals and your service, which can boost your customer retention rate.

And customer success software can be an invaluable tool to help you achieve this goal. For example, it can reduce customer churn, automate routine tasks, reduce stress on your customer success team, and more.

Moreover, customer success tools can help you collect feedback, study customer data, and other actionable insights, which can help you make more informed business decisions.

Customer Success and Customer Support

Many people confuse customer success with customer support because of their similar wording. But customer support is different because it focuses on helping your customers when they face a problem reactively. On the other hand, customer success focuses on proactive measures.

It would be best to align both departments so that your customers only resort to support requests when they can’t find help through your customer success methods.

For instance, you might have an FAQ section on your website that customers can refer to before making a purchase instead of submitting numerous support tickets.

Key Features in Customer Success Software

Finding the right customer success software for your business can be challenging. So we’ve narrowed it down to three key features you should look for before buying.

• Customer Health Scores and Reporting: Your customer success tool should create customer health scorecards based on multiple metrics, allowing for reporting to a leadership team and internal tracking.
• Integrations: You should be able to integrate with other platforms and services like CRM, CMS, Authentication, and anything else your business uses.
• Scalability: Small businesses often shy away from more extensive software. But if you expect your business to grow, you should be ready to scale.

What Are the Best Customer Success Tools?

The best customer success software depends on your needs, business size, and budget. You can even find free customer success tools that will get you pretty far.

There are plenty of customer success tools available, here are a few of the top platforms:

1. Gainsight: a popular customer success tool, great for mid-sized businesses
2. Strikedeck: robust customer segments, perfect if you have a diverse base
3. ChurnZero: designed to reduce churn and boost the customer lifetime value
4. Custify: also targets B2B SaaS clients and capitalizes on upselling opportunities
5. HubSpot Service Hub: great for aligning customer success with customer support
6. Totango: one of the best free customer success tools, no “freemium” model
7. ClientSuccess: the customer success management tool that focuses primarily on convenience

1. Gainsight

Overview

Gainsight is a prevalent customer success software and a fan-favorite of many medium businesses. It offers a 360-degree view of customer data in different views depending on the customer’s behavior and stats.

Moreover, Gainsight allows you to monitor customer health scores through unique scorecards, which you can customize with your company’s relevant data points.

Top Features

• Customer health scoring: each customer gets a unique health score to help you improve customer satisfaction
• Customer segmentation: create customer segments based on key metrics like user engagement and product usage
• Product engagement: shows who’s getting the most out of product adoption and where you can improve customer engagement
• Churn risk: highlights which customers might not renew their subscriptions or buy your product again
• Scalability: your platform will grow as you gain more customers
• Integrations: extensive support for integrations with other sources and platforms
• Custom metrics: set custom triggers on specific customer interactions

Pricing

Gainsight uses a custom pricing model, to get a quote, you’ll have to contact the Gainsight team with some basic info like your name, location, and company.

The Bottom Line

It’s not hard to see why Gainsight has gained so much popularity. Its numerous features and intuitive user interface make it a well-rounded customer success software.

2. Strikedeck

Overview

We’re moving on from medium business software to Strikedeck, a customer success platform more suited to small-to-mid thriving businesses.

Strikedeck doesn’t lag in features like communication, integrations, and the real-time customer profile overview. However, its most prominent feature is the robust segmentation system.

Top Features

• Customer segmentation: a robust system that allows you to segment customers based on many factors, such as location, utilization, profitability, and more
• Integrations: allows smooth integration with several CRMs, databases, support trackers, product usage trackers, billing platforms, and more.
• 360-degree customer overview: the Strikedeck 360-degree customer success dashboard all the records of all your customers in one place
• Custom triggers: set custom triggers to notify you and your team about essential alerts and events
• Automation: automate mundane and routine tasks like emails, surveys, playbooks, and messages
• Analytics: create and share detailed reports of your customers

Pricing

Strikedeck hasn’t publicly mentioned its pricing details.

The Bottom Line

Strikedeck stands out with plenty of features and capabilities. But if your business has a diverse customer base, you’ll find the segmentation tool a lifesaver.

3. ChurnZero

Overview

As the name suggests, ChurnZero is a platform designed to reduce churn as much as possible. In addition, it’s a real-time customer success software that targets SaaS companies that put their customers at the center of their operations.

With ChurnZero’s customer-centric features and integrations, your customer success team can increase customer retention and monitor the whole customer lifecycle.

Top Features

• Command center: the homepage of the ChurnZero app with an overview of important segments and a scheduler
• Customer health scores: calculates customer engagement and satisfaction and highlights potential churn
• Chatbots: these can be implemented on Slack and Microsoft Teams to see some customer information without having to switch software applications
• In-app walk-throughs: customizable guides you can introduce to your customers through your application
• Customer journeys: see the entire customer lifecycle and set milestones and achievements

Pricing

ChurnZero doesn’t disclose its prices publicly. You’ll have to contact the ChurnZero team for a demo request to get an idea.

The Bottom Line

ChurnZero is a SaaS platform for SaaS businesses with numerous features that can increase customer lifetime value.

4. Custify

Overview

If your customers are other businesses, then Custify should be a strong contender in your list as it targets B2B SaaS companies.

Custify can help your customers sign up through its customer onboarding system, which aims to maximize customer satisfaction.

It also helps you explore your most profitable customers and other upsell opportunities to grow your business.

Top Features

• Automation: set up Custify’s bots to automatically send emails, assign users to your customer success team, notify you about customer behavior, and more
• Alerts: stay in the loop with Custify’s real-time alerts and notifications about customer milestones and problems
• External platforms: Custify’s bots can notify you through the app, email, Slack, or even SMS
• Customer health: define KPIs and monitor as your customers progress through them to improve retention rates
• Visual reports: track all the data points about your customers on Custify’s dashboard

Pricing

Custify doesn’t publish its pricing details. But you can contact them with your details for a custom quote.

The Bottom Line

If your target demographic is other SaaS businesses, then you could try Custify, which is designed for B2B SaaS companies.

5. HubSpot Service Hub

Overview

HubSpot Service Hub may be labeled as customer service software, but that doesn’t mean it can’t double as customer success software. In fact, many customer success managers find their calling with HubSpot’s Service Hub.

HubSpot is very customer-centric and helps with onboarding customers, retention, and support. You can also collect customer feedback using the intuitive feedback tool.

Top Features

• Communication tools: email templates, team email, shared inboxes, calls, live chat, and integrations with Facebook Messenger, Slack, and VoIP providers
• Ticket system: allows your customers to create support tickets that are automatically or manually assigned to team members
• Scheduling: schedule emails and meetings through links
• International currencies: supports seamless transactions and converting between 30 currencies, including USD, EUR, GBP, and AUD
• Surveys: send quick NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys to your customers
• Call transcription: transcribe your English phone calls made over the HubSpot app automatically

Pricing

The basic customer success management software is available for free. Paid bundles include the Starter, Professional, and Enterprise packages at these starting prices (billed annually):

• Starter: $45 per month, two users
• Professional: $450 per month, five users
• Enterprise: $1,200 per month, 10 users

The Bottom Line

If you’re looking for free customer success software to try out, check out HubSpot Service Hub. You can later upgrade to one of its paid bundles to access more features.

6. Totango

Overview

Totango is a robust customer success platform that focuses on the customer journey. There are customer journey templates that work well with a diverse user base.

Even Totango’s free demo feels like a fully-fledged app in its own right, as it only excludes a few of the many features that Totango provides.

Top Features

• Customer health scores: calculates health by considering several metrics and turning them into one value
• Customize your metrics: businesses have different needs, so you can customize your health metrics to suit your company
• Ticketing: optimize customer experience and satisfaction through actionable tickets
• Product usage tracker: see how your customers use your product in real-time based on their accounts, actions, and modules
• Scheduler: plan out your day using Totango’s planner and timeline viewer
• Customer journeys: templates available for every stage in a customer journey to increase engagement and prevent churn

Pricing

Totango offers four packages at these starting prices (billed annually):

• Community: Free
• Starter: $249 per month, two users
• Growth: $1,099 per month, 10 users
• Enterprise: contact for a custom quote, supports multiple customer success teams

The Bottom Line

Totango’s community package is one of the best customer success platforms available for free. And it comes with great features, unlike many “freemium” applications.

7. ClientSuccess

Overview

ClientSuccess is one of the best customer success tools focusing on convenience as it allows you to set everything up and start operating quickly.

Features like pre-built integrations make it easy for customer success teams to set up their workflow without worrying about technicalities. And other features also save time, as I’ll break them down here.

Top Features

• Pre-built integrations: easy integrations with the most popular CRM and customer communications platforms
• Custom API: ClientSuccess offers an extensive API that allows you to source your customer data from other platforms
• All-in-one interface: the intuitive user interface contains everything your team needs in a natural place
• SuccessCycle: a trademark feature that allows you to manage your customers through their whole journey
• SuccessScore: another trademark feature that gives you a thorough analysis of customer health with vital metrics like product adoption and user feedback

Pricing

No public pricing information is available. Contact ClientSuccess for a free demo.

The Bottom Line

ClientSuccess is the best customer success software for convenience. It’s easy to set everything up, and the pre-built integrations save plenty of time.

Wrap Up

With today’s technology, you can make more out of your customer success efforts using helpful tools like automation, segmentation, surveys, and health scores.

There are many customer success apps. Before choosing, you should consider your company size, needs, and budget.

My team found Gainsight to be the most balanced customer success platform. However, you can also try apps that offer a free version, like Totango and ClientSuccess.