Steering a customer success team is no easy task. These teams are the driving force behind ensuring customers are happy and making the most of their buys. But, in this complex landscape of customer success metrics, data analysis, and onboarding processes, finding practical solutions is necessary. Delivering value to customers can become challenging without the right tools.
That’s where customer success management tools come in. Using these tools isn’t just about getting things done – they also prevent mistakes and keep things running smoothly. As your business and customer base grow, these tools become crucial. They ensure everyone in your team is on the same page, working towards common goals. So, what are the best customer success tools?
Evolution of Customer Success
Before discussing the best customer success software, let’s start by tracing the evolution of customer success. This will give us context when discussing the best customer success software options.
Customer Success has undergone two evolutions and is currently amid a third. Here is a brief history of these evolutions:
- Support + Early adoption
- Customer Value Focus
- Scale + Digital
1. Support + Early Adoption
Technology companies originally focused on implementation and customer support. Buying software generally required a high upfront cost, so customers were a bit ‘trapped’ in that software.
There were two primary functions of what we would now call customer success – Implementation and Support. Customers had to get started with software, and support focused on technical know-how. The goal was to enable a customer to get value through feature usage and adoption.
This type of customer success was/is dependent on the customer to drive value, and the Customer Success/Support rep to enable the customer by talking about and teaching features.
2. Customer Value Focus
In the early to mid-2000s companies (such as Salesforce, an early pioneer) began to launch customer success departments. As SaaS became more prevalent, switching costs for software dwindled. SaaS companies realized to retain customers, they had to focus on customer value rather than features. This led to the second phase of customer success. Key markers of this evolution were:
- 1:1 Relational CSM: Client assignment
- KPIs based on retention/expansion of accounts
- KPIs based on user adoption
- Consulting motion. The CSM focuses on customers achieving business goals with the software, rather than simply using the vendor’s software
This model has worked well for almost 2 decades. As SaaS, customer success, and customer requirements and expectations have changed – so has customer success strategy. This led to the 3rd evolution of customer success.
3. Scale + Digital
There will always be a place for high touch and 1:1 engagements. As SaaS business moves increasingly into the small to medium business environment, it is harder and harder to justify or enable a customer success manager with 100+ clients. At some point, the value of that CSM gets marginalized because they cannot provide value to such a large book. This leads to the CSM tiering their book and marginalizing their low-spend customer (who often have the most potential to grow!)
Customer expectations have also changed. When customers invest several hundred thousand dollars (or sometimes millions!), they usually have a dedicated administrator or champion for these tools. That person has time and desire to work with a dedicated CSM for several monthly hours.
When a customer has invested only a few thousand dollars into a software solution, that person is less inclined to dedicate large swatches of time to an outside resource pushing the adoption of that tool. Layer on top that the person responsible for driving that solution likely has 3-4 other jobs – that person doesn’t have time or inclination to meet with CSMs to chat through strategy.
In the TikTok and Twitter world, this person (and many others) want bite-sized information they can employ when THEY are ready. This leads to a need for digital customer success.
What are the Best Customer Success Tools?
Jeannie Walters notes, “Customer experience is not magic. It’s management.” Further, customer experience is a habit and effort that results in excellent outcomes. Having a good customer success team and using proper tools can help you deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Customer success tools take the customer data you’ve collected and automate the process of combining it to offer a comprehensive overview of your customers. These tools provide a detailed overview of your customers’ experiences and display essential clues that tell you if your existing strategies are working and where to make changes.
Customer success software also offloads the heavy lifting of monitoring and managing customer success metrics by unearthing actionable insights you can leverage to improve adoption and scale your business. Gathering accurate data and holistic customer information can boost your retention rates, discover additional sales opportunities, and improve customer health scores.
With proper customer success tools, you can also automate customer journeys and onboarding, optimize product adoption, monitor customer health scores, and accurately monitor and report on the metrics that align with your business’s goals.
Now for the exciting part — the roundup of the best customer success tools to help you build a solid tech stack.
1. Zight – Best for Video Support
Zight is the best customer success software and here’s why. Beyond merely a customer service software, Zight seamlessly integrates streamlined workflows and personalized customer interactions, making it an indispensable tool for businesses committed to delivering top-notch customer service and elevating customer satisfaction. Let’s get into more detail:
a). Accelerated Issue Resolution
Zight empowers customer success teams by facilitating swift and clear responses. In the realm of customer success, time is of the essence. Zight’s design ensures highly efficient customer success operations, eliminating the need for prolonged email threads and chats. This streamlining of communication translates into a faster resolution of customer issues.
The personalized nature of customer interactions and the seamless sharing of relevant content contribute to expeditious ticket resolution. By fostering quicker solutions, Zight enhances overall alignment and contributes significantly to heightened customer success.
b). Enhanced Customer Experience
Zight stands out as an optimal customer success solution, particularly due to its innovative approach to customer interactions. The platform offers personalized video messages, screen recordings, and annotated screenshots. This uniqueness ensures that customers receive assistance in a format tailored to their preferences making it suitable for businesses dealing with customer queries through diverse channels, including live chat, email, social media, phone, and self-service centers.
In the world of customer success, providing a personalized and tailored experience is key to ensuring an elevated level of customer success and customer satisfaction. Zight’s capabilities contribute to happier customers, as their needs are addressed in a manner that resonates with them, ultimately leading to an elevated level of customer success.
c). All-in-One App
Managing customer success across various platforms can be challenging. With Zight you will bid farewell to the complexity of juggling multiple tools for screenshots, personalized video messages, screen recordings, annotated screenshots, and GIFs.
Zight simplifies this complexity by consolidating multiple functions into a unified application. In the context of customer success, where interactions happen through various touchpoints, having an integrated tool like Zight ensures consistent and efficient support, contributing significantly to overall customer success.
d). Annotations for Clarity
In the customer success landscape, clear communication is paramount and teams in customer success often need to convey information precisely and clearly to customers. Zight recognizes this need and provides features such as annotations and visual aids to enhance clarity.
Zight’s annotation features, including quick drawings, arrows, lines, emojis, or shapes, facilitate this clear communication. These annotation features add a layer of clarity to support customer interactions, proving beneficial in industries where detailed and accurate communication is paramount.
e). Collaborative Features
Customer success is often a collaborative effort within an organization. Zight’s collaborative features, including annotations, analytics, and content sharing, cater to companies that value teamwork in their customer success endeavors.
These features enhance the customer success experience and improve team members’ collaboration. While teamwork is essential to address complex challenges, Zight provides a customer success platform that fosters effective collaboration, positively impacting customer success.
f). Integration with CRM
Aligning various functions within an organization is crucial for successful customer interactions. Zight integrates with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems, bridging the gap between marketing, sales, and customer success functions.
These integrations particularly benefit businesses seeking a unified approach to customer-related processes. Having a tool that integrates with CRM ensures a holistic view of customer interactions, allowing for a more coordinated and effective customer success strategy.
g). Customizable Workflows
No two customer success workflows are identical. Zight recognizes the need for customization and provides options, including preferences for shortcuts, making it an ideal tool for businesses with unique workflows.
Where tailored approaches are often necessary to address specific customer needs, Zight’s customization options allow teams to adapt the software to their specific requirements. This flexibility promotes a more efficient and adaptable customer success environment, contributing to successful outcomes.
h). Analytics for Informed Decisions
Data-driven decision-making is fundamental to effective customer success strategies. Zight provides robust analytics tools that enable businesses to track content views and team productivity. Understanding how customers interact with content and assessing team performance is critical. Zight’s emphasis on analytics ensures that organizations have the insights needed to make informed decisions, leading to continuous improvement in customer success strategies.
i). Seamless Content Sharing with Embedding
Efficient content management and file sharing are vital to successful customer success interactions. Zight’s features such as content embedding, annotations, and collections, cater to businesses prioritizing organized content management.
Where visual aids, screenshots, and videos play a crucial role, having a tool that facilitates seamless content sharing is invaluable. Zight’s capabilities in this regard contribute to organized and efficient customer success interactions, ultimately leading to successful outcomes.
Pricing
Zight offers flexible pricing plans catering to diverse business requirements. Whether you’re a small team or an enterprise, Zight provides scalable solutions, ensuring optimal value for your investment in customer service software. They include:
- Free plan
- Pro– $9.95
- Team– $8
- Enterprise– Custom pricing
2. Gainsight – Best for Enterprise Companies
Gainsight targets mid-size businesses and is one of today’s highest-rated customer success tools. It’s among the best customer success software suites that merge data from various sources into a centralized view. It offers 360-degree layouts that display multiple metrics based on the user’s role and customer’s attributes. With this customer success tool, you can also examine your organization’s activity with customers and view a client’s documented history.
Gainsight’s most valuable feature is its ability to develop customer health scorecards that you can personalize to reflect your company’s most critical data points. With the help of AI, this software can track your customers’ behaviors and forecast potential outcomes. Such a customer success tool is also helpful in reducing customer churn rates.
Gainsight’s best features include:
- Data security
- Customer health scores
- Customer profiles
- Customer tracking
- Scalability
It also allows businesses to strategically plan higher-level customer success teams and lower-level account management for customer success teams and managers who perform day-to-day tasks.
Pricing
Gainsight has three pricing plans: CS Essentials, CS Essentials Plus, and an Enterprise plan. All of which you will have to request for pricing.
3. Planhat – Best for Centralizing Customer Data
This customer success software features a minimalist interface that makes customer success simple. Planhat enables you and your customer success team to unify your customer data, monitor and visualize customer usage metrics in real time, set goals and probable outcomes, and improve your customers’ experiences using collaboration and playbooks. In addition, Planhat allows you to see where your customers are in the purchase cycle and determines those who are doing well and those who need help.
Its customer portal is a noteworthy feature that allows you to create playbooks and share them with your audience to build collaborative workspaces. Also, it can help you create custom metrics visible to your clients so they can access their adoption rates.
Planhat best features include:
- Customer health scores to evaluate signs your customers are succeeding or are about to abandon your business.
- Customer segments to organize customers into groups, allowing more efficient communication.
- Revenue monitoring and forecasting help you plan for your company’s bottom line.
- Churn tracking provides a quick overview of which customers your company is retaining and those churning.
Pricing
Pricing starts at about $500 per month for unlimited users.
4. HubSpot Service Hub – Best for Data Enrichment & Managing all Forms in a Single System
This is HubSpot’s customer success management software. With this software, you can develop conversational tools, build help desk automation, and build a knowledge base for your clients. In addition, its support ticketing tool offers your customers a way to contact your team and provides ticket routing to ensure the right team handles customer support requests.
One pro of HubSpot Service Hub is that it enables you and your team to collect user feedback using its feedback tool. This software lets you quickly send customer satisfaction (CSAT), Net Promoter Score (NPS), and customer satisfaction surveys.
Service Hub’s best features include:
- Tickets to organize incoming customer queries and concerns.
- Team inbox shares customer messages and assigns support tickets among your customer success reps.
- Customer feedback to deploy customer surveys and examine customer satisfaction scores and feedback.
- Knowledge base to develop educational resources to help your customers help themselves.
- Conversations that connect all mediums of customer communication so your team can have the context whenever they contact them.
- Automation that leverages customer feedback responses to start workflows that automatically route your customers to their required solutions.
Pricing
Pricing starts at $45 per month, or you can opt for a limited free version.
5. ChurnZero – Best for Product Walkthroughs
ChurnZero is a real-time SaaS software built to reduce customer churn rates by helping success teams understand customers better. Also, it tracks usage stats to offer a comprehensive picture of how your customers are using your products, examines clients’ overall health and the likelihood of renewal, and automates your customers’ experiences.
One benefit of ChurnZero is converting customer data into personalized reporting dashboards. Another crucial feature is an API that passes data directly from your ChurnZero user account into the rest of your CRM systems.
ChurnZero also features other essential features, such as usage tracking, health score, account management, customer lifecycle management, and revenue management, to ease customer success workflows.
Pricing
ChurnZero’s pricing is only available upon submitting a request.
6. Totango – Best for Goal-Driven Teams
Totango is another widely used customer success tool that drives effective customer success solutions for many companies. As a result, the software has a prominent clientele, including Zoom and SAP.
This is a feature-rich customer success tool that primarily targets SaaS businesses. It offers a suite of tools, such as the Spark tool, which tracks customer health scores in real-time. Spark tool also allows your customer success team to perform customer health scoring, stay updated with templates or customer health data, and view product usage analytics.
In addition, Totango’s SuccessPlays feature enables customer success teams to set up tasks that trigger automatically when specific rules are matched. These triggers send action plans to customer success teams to manage any situation immediately.
Although Tatango targets enterprises, its free version is relatively extensive as it excludes only a few of its various features. This makes it a viable option for growing SaaS enterprises or companies venturing into customer success.
Totango features everything you need to run your customer success team effectively. Thus, if you’re a large organization looking to be as customer-focused as possible and analyze customer satisfaction efficiently, Totango is perfect for your company.
Pricing
It features a forever-free version, or you can request a quote to get the Enterprise version.
7. Outreach – Best for Customer Engagement
Outreach is a customer success platform that caters to businesses’ needs, aiming for streamlined communication and robust relationship management. This tool stands out for its comprehensive outreach capabilities, allowing teams to engage with customers effectively across various channels.
This customer success software is suitable for engaging with customers on a large scale. It will help customer teams engage with customers consistently while tracking all the activity the customer service does with customers so the rest of the business can operate as needed.
Key Features
- Multi-Channel engagement to seamlessly connect with customers through personalized emails, calls, and social media interactions.
- Analytics dashboard to gain insights into customer interactions, track engagement metrics, and measure the effectiveness of your outreach efforts.
- Automated outreach sequences, ensuring timely and targeted communication.
- Integration with various CRM systems, empowering your team with a centralized hub for customer data.
- Collaboration tools that facilitate collaboration among customer success representatives, enabling them to work cohesively toward customer satisfaction.
Pricing
There are two pricing plans: Standard and Professional but the amount is only available upon request submission.
8. Hopin – Best as a Webinar Platform
Hopin, an innovative customer success tool, elevates virtual experiences and event management. With a user-friendly interface, it caters to businesses aiming to create impactful virtual events and conferences. It is a top choice for a webinar platform, offering pre-recorded and live webinars to share with customers to provide a clean interface without requiring external downloads for attendees.
Its real-time tracking of feedback and questions, and integration with CRM make it a top choice of webinar platforms.
Key Features
- Virtual event platform to host interactive virtual events, conferences, and webinars, fostering engagement and connection with your audience.
- Networking tools to facilitate participant networking opportunities, enhancing the overall attendee experience.
- Analytics and insights to track event metrics, gather participant feedback, and analyze data to optimize future virtual events.
- Customization to align with your brand, creating a cohesive and immersive experience for attendees.
Pricing
Hopin follows a pricing structure designed to accommodate various event sizes and requirements. Pricing details can be obtained directly from the platform.
9. Qualtrics – Best for the Voice of the Customer
Qualtrics leads in amplifying all your customers’ voices, ensuring that businesses receive valuable feedback to enhance digital offerings. Known for its excellent insights, Qualtrics provides descriptive and inferential statistics, driving informed decisions for customer success strategies.
It stands out by offering back-end data beyond basic survey options, making it a recommended choice for gathering insights from various customer interactions.
You get back-end data that shows descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and drivers of key outcomes. You’ll be able to easily go one click deeper, without needing a strong statistics background. Although most platforms you use in digital customer service will have a survey option, you should utilize Qualtrics for every interaction instead of breaking your feedback up by tool. If you break your feedback up by tool you may save a dollar or two on software, but you’ll pay for it in time and lack cohesive insights on the back end.
Key Features
- Customizable surveys and feedback tools to collect valuable customer feedback and insights
- Experience Management from initial interactions to post-purchase experiences.
- Analytics tools to derive meaningful conclusions from customer data, driving informed decision-making.
- Integration with other business tools for a seamless flow of customer experience data.
Pricing
Qualtrics pricing details are available on request.
10. Domo – Best for Customer Health Score + Insights
Domo, a data-driven customer success tool, empowers businesses with comprehensive data visualization and analytics capabilities. It is a central hub for businesses seeking to derive actionable insights from diverse data sources.
It provides a way to determine which customers will likely churn, allowing businesses to address specific customer needs. The platform offers highly customizable dashboards, making it simple for a customer success manager to own a book of business effectively. Although Domo has a steeper learning curve is outweighed by its wild customizability.
Key Features
- Data Visualization: Create visually engaging dashboards to present complex data in an easily understandable format.
- Real-time Analytics: Access up-to-the-minute insights, enabling timely decision-making and responsiveness to customer needs.
- Collaboration: Foster collaboration among team members by sharing insights and collaborating on data-driven strategies.
- Scalability: Grow your analytics capabilities alongside your business with Domo’s scalable platform.
Pricing
- Free- $0/month
- Standard– $300/month
- Enterprise– Contact sales
- Business Critical– Contact sales
Conclusion on Best Customer Success Tools
By leveraging the right customer success tool, you can attract new customers while keeping the existing ones happy. Conversely, you’ll lose your customers without the right customer success team optimally using top customer success tools. Don’t underestimate the value customer success software can add to your business, so choose one carefully.
Zight is another powerful customer success platform that can help your team deliver excellent customer experiences by responding to customer queries and concerns with quick HD videos. With Zight, your customer success team can respond to customer requests faster than ever with high-quality content that offers the detailed answers your customers need.
Click here to learn how you and your customer success team can quickly leverage Zight to respond to customer queries.
