14 customer success tools to support your customers’ journey
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Customer success tools are essential solutions that empower businesses to provide exceptional support and guidance to their customers throughout their journey. These platforms offer tools for fast and efficient support while also encouraging customers to engage with your product or service at crucial moments.
According to Gartner Peer Insights and Vitally’s 2021 report, The State of Customer Success in the C-Suite, 77% of executives predicted customer success would drive up to 50% of top-line revenue growth in 2022.¹
Yet customer success faces its own adoption challenges. In Totango’s 2022 Customer Success Industry & Salary Report, 34% of respondents rated “lack of customer success tools” as a moderate obstacle.²
In this context, finding the best customer success software tailored to your unique needs is not only a nice-to-have but a virtual necessity.
Here, we unpack the key benefits of these tools, explain how they can enhance your business, and explore a list of platforms that are capable of launching your company’s customer success to the next level.
What are customer success tools?
Customer success tools are solutions designed to elevate the overall customer journey and experience. These platforms deploy a suite of strategies focused on delivering personalized service and fostering retention. By enabling a proactive approach, they empower teams to anticipate and address issues with timely and highly targeted support.
Businesses can leverage customer success tools to effectively reduce churn, resulting in more meaningful interactions with customers that lay the foundation for lasting loyalty.
Key benefits of customer service tools
Fast, efficient service
In today’s technologically advanced, hyper-responsive era, customers routinely expect quick resolutions to their issues via any platform they engage with. They want their problems solved promptly and conveniently, without the hassle and time-sink of seeking out specific channels.
These expectations put pressure on customer success teams to deliver reliable, responsive assistance around the clock. Excelling in this demanding environment means using solutions like self-service options and automated chatbots to resolve a substantial percentage of queries instantly.
Customer interaction visibility
Customer success tools provide valuable insights that give you an unmatched view of your clients. With deep visibility into usage patterns, preferences, and needs, these platforms help you gain the comprehensive understanding of your customers required to truly know how to satisfy their expectations.
For example, you can proactively address customers' challenges by analyzing ticket categorization on your help desk. Additionally, you can anticipate their questions by observing what they search for in your help center or what they ask your chatbot.
Churn prevention
According to Totango’s 2022 Customer Success Industry & Salary Report, 58% of professionals identify churn reduction as a key measure of success.
This highlights the critical potential customer success tools possess in preventing your business from losing clients. By leveraging these platforms to help keep your customers satisfied and consequently retain them, you can protect your business's financial health, ensure higher profits, and accelerate growth rate.
Fewer manual tasks
Vitally's The Secret Lives of CSMs' Report found that 66% of customer success managers spend a significant chunk of their workday on repetitive administrative duties.³
When it comes to employee experience, the right customer success tools can make a big difference by reducing low-impact tasks and boosting overall productivity.
Centralized knowledge sharing
Knowledge sharing is a core part of any high-functioning team. By utilizing a customer success program that facilitates best practices, promotes the open exchange of information, and incorporates past lessons into internal protocols, teams can work smarter – and ultimately better serve their customers.
What can customer success tools do?
Now that we've covered the benefits, let's explore some of the specific ways that a customer success tool can help your business.
Proactive support
A Gartner survey found that companies taking a proactive approach to customer support saw 9% higher scores on customer value enhancement.⁴
What does this mean? Simply put, reaching out to customers proactively – that is, before they realize they need assistance – allows you to head off potential issues and shows your customers your dynamic, responsive commitment to their success.
Customer onboarding
Customer onboarding is important for any customer success platform. By automating important aspects of the onboarding process, companies can comprehensively guide new users from first interaction through successful adoption.
During the onboarding period, using automated triggers based on customer behavior can help facilitate a smooth, largely frictionless journey. For instance, as a new user explores product features, the customer success tool can prompt the next steps – like suggesting specific actions to advance in the tour.
Other potential automated messages based on specific triggers include:
A welcome message sent upon signup that includes product information, tips, support links, and login details.
A signup survey that personalizes the onboarding process based on customer goals and feature needs.
Habit-forming messages promoting cross-device adoption to increase product usage.
Milestone messages that congratulate users on progress and boost continued engagement.
Additional tips and resources that provide long-term orientation support.
Discover how to transform new signups into power users with Onboarding Starter Kit.
Customer satisfaction monitoring
The methods companies utilize to gauge customer satisfaction has come a long way. Where businesses once relied on extensive manual efforts to gather feedback, customer success platforms now streamline the process.
Tools that automate data collection for metrics, including Net Promoter Score and customer satisfaction, make it simpler than ever to understand how your clients feel about your business and their relationship to it.
Feedback collection
Feedback is essential for any customer success team. By listening closely to what your users say about their experience, you gain valuable insights directly from the source. Their opinions about products, services, and support interactions provide a clear, actionable picture of where your company excels and where improvements could be made.
Workflow automation
Workflow automation simplifies support processes for your employees, which ultimately has a direct impact on the success of your customers. Consider it this way: the success of your teams is intertwined with the success of your customers.
For instance, you can use an automated help desk for back-office collaboration, ticket routing and prioritization, crucial customer data gathering, expected reply times displaying, and much more.
Read more: A guide to a frictionless experience with customer success automation
Instantly answer customer queries
To ensure your customers' success, nothing beats providing prompt support and swiftly addressing their inquiries. That's where AI chatbots can offer an invaluable advantage by giving your team support representatives that are always on-call, handling queries quickly and effortlessly, and seamlessly directing issues to human assistance when needed.
Self-service options
Providing helpful self-service options is another key part of customer success tools. Customers want fast, easily accessible answers to their queries on their own terms. Well-organized articles, guides, and FAQs on your website empower users to quickly find solutions to common issues and questions without having to engage with customer support.
14 best customer success software tools
1. Intercom
As a leading AI customer service platform, Intercom is dedicated to guiding your users toward achieving their goals and paving the way for their ultimate success.
The core features of a customer service tool directly support many of the same functions your customer success team performs every day. Intercom’s comprehensive platform offers:
AI-enhanced help desk: Elevate productivity by seamlessly linking your inbox, tickets, and help center for a streamlined workflow.
Proactive support: Drive customer success by proactively assisting your users and anticipating support needs with product tours, outbound messages, automated surveys, and more.
AI chatbot: Cut support volume by automatically solving issues with safe, accurate, conversational answers based exclusively on your support content.
Pricing:
Essential: $39 per seat/month
Advanced: $99 per seat/month
Expert: $139 per seat/month
Find out how we calculate price here.
2. ChurnZero
As the name suggests, ChurnZero is a customer success program dedicated to retaining customers by assessing product usage, renewal likelihood, and developing personalized experiences that foster satisfaction and loyalty.
Packed with a comprehensive set of features, ChurnZero's standout capability is customer segmentation, allowing you to efficiently categorize users based on a wealth of data. This ensures precise and effective engagement strategies, aligning with the unique needs of each customer segment.
Main features:
Customer health scores
Real-time alerts
Customer journeys
In-app communications
Walkthroughs
Surveys
Reporting
Pricing:
Contact ChurnZero for pricing.
3. Planhat
Planhat is a customer success tool that sets itself apart through its capacity for centralizing data. It excels at delivering seamless experiences by bringing together data from across your tech stack.
With strong connections to solutions like Intercom, for instance, Planhat creates a complete view of each customer. The 360-degree insights include customers’ priorities, preferences, and engagement history, plus real-time warnings about potential churn.
Main features:
Playbooks to onboard users
Unified view of the customer
Customer health score
Churn risk predictions
Customized triggers
Pricing:
Contact Planhat for pricing.
4. Totango
Delivering impactful customer success journeys requires clear direction, and Totango delivers just that through the feature known as "SuccessBLOCs." This functionality provides you with templates that encapsulate proven best practices, serving as strategic roadmaps to navigate success initiatives.
Through SuccessBLOCs, you can define objectives that seamlessly align with your organization's strategic priorities. For example, if your objective is to convert "freemium" users to paid accounts, Totango offers meticulously crafted templates designed specifically for achieving that outcome.
Main features:
360 customer view
Customer segmentation
Multidimensional health score
Email campaigns
Outcome success plans and customer portal
Pricing:
Starter: $2,988/year
Enterprise: $18,000/year
Premier: Custom pricing
5. Custify
Custify is a customer success platform designed specifically for software as a service (SaaS) companies. It's built to help you understand your customers' health and leverage that data to drive action plans and business strategies that keep accounts thriving.
With Custify's Customer 360 feature, you get a comprehensive dashboard that shows the actions users are taking and how long they're sticking with your product, empowering you to make informed decisions that enhance customer loyalty and longevity.
Main features:
Customer 360 view
Customer health score
Expansion and growth opportunities
Tasks and alerts
Survey feedback
Dashboards and reports
Customer collaboration portal
Pricing:
Contact Custify for pricing.
6. SmartKarrot
SmartKarrot is an all-in-one customer success tool for B2B companies. It brings together key aspects of the user’s journeys, including engagement, onboarding, and product adoption, into one centralized solution.
What really sets SmartKarrot apart, though, is its Augmented Intelligence features. The AI-based call sentiment analysis, for example, uses keyword analysis to identify calls that may require additional attention from success teams. This helps them distribute their time and efforts more efficiently, focusing their expertise where it's needed most.
Main features:
Integrated data
SmartPlaybooks
Early warning
Health scores
Dynamic Segmentation
Call, operational, and business intelligence
Pricing:
Basic: Starting at $6,600/year.
Growth: Contact SmartKarrot for pricing.
Pro: Contact SmartKarrot for pricing.
Enterprise: Contact SmartKarrot for pricing.
7. Akita
When it comes to customer success tools for SaaS, Akita stands out as a simple yet powerful solution that brings together all of your user data, activity, and metrics in a single platform.
With Akita's automated playbooks, you can effortlessly establish scalable customer success processes. From onboarding to contract renewals and the identification of at-risk users, the tool ensures smooth operations and customer satisfaction.
Main features:
Customer segmentation
Task management
Customer health scores
Automated playbooks
360° customer view
Customer success dashboards
Pricing:
Start: $160/month
Connect: $480/month
8. InMoment
InMoment is a customer success tool that primarily leverages users feedback to boost retention, engagement, and advocacy. By gathering data from every customer interaction, it empowers businesses to create an effective customer experience backed by robust analytics.
One notable characteristic that differentiates InMoment from some of its peers is the software’s dedication to both customer and employee success. The company understands that happy employees contribute to better outcomes, and it firmly believes that "Employees excel when they have a voice,” in their own words.
By integrating employee perspectives into customer success, brands gain valuable insights into experiences and emotions.
Main features:
Feedback from every source
Active listening studio
Reporting and dashboard
Case management
9. ClientSuccess
ClientSuccess is a customer success platform designed to guide your users along their journey with your company. The solution focuses on four key stages: onboarding, adapting, renewing, and growth.
Where ClientSuccess really adds value is in mapping out the ideal journey. The platform’s tools help you proactively keep customers on the right path. By identifying critical touchpoints, you consistently engage users, build strong relationships, and increase retention rates.
Main features:
Insights and analytics
Customer journey management
Customer onboarding and customer portals
Pricing:
Contact ClientSuccess for pricing.
10. ZapScale
In the company’s own words, ZapScale is on a mission to "Slash Churn, Scale Retention, Supercharge Upsell." The platform is designed to deepen your understanding of your clients, optimize customer success team operations, and provide enhanced business insights.
ZapScale includes all the essential features of customer success tools without an overwhelming level of complexity. By keeping things straightforward, the company ensures a seamless and enjoyable journey that drives results.
Main features:
Customer 360 view
Health analytics
Account segmentation
Outcome Tracking
Success playbook
Prediction alerts
Pricing:
Startup Plan: $500/month
Growth Plan: $2000/month
11. EverAfter
EverAfter customer success software focuses on streamlining business-consumer communications. By creating centralized customer hubs, the tool helps you simplify processes like onboarding, self-service content, and performance tracking.
EverAfter’s customer hub acts as a single source of information for the entire experience. It provides clarity on where customers are in the journey and puts them in the driver's seat of their own success.
Main features:
Customer hub builder
Automation and visibility rules
Engagement tracking
Advanced reporting
Enhanced task management
Pricing:
Business: Contact EverAfter for pricing.
Enterprise: Contact EverAfter for pricing.
12. Catalyst
Catalyst is driven by a team of experts who understand the importance of customer success. The software is designed to help you unlock retention opportunities and tap into the potential of your existing customer base, driving revenue growth.
Catalyst prioritizes equipping your sales and success teams with the solutions they need to excel. This customer success tool provides intuitive workflows, effective playbooks, and automation to support your users throughout their journey – from onboarding to adoption and beyond.
Main features:
Custom dashboards
Health insights
Journey builder
Email automation
Playbooks
Account layouts
Customer segmentation
Customer activity tracking
Pricing:
Contact Catalyst for pricing.
13. OnRamp
OnRamp’s primary goal is to simplify B2B customer onboarding. It acts as a helpful guide, leading users through each step and empowering them to navigate the process effortlessly with a dynamic action plan.
The OnRamp customer success tool operates in three simple steps. First, create an onboarding template tailored to users’ needs. Second, invite them to embark on a personalized onboarding journey. And finally, review the results and optimize the customer journey for continuous improvement.
Main features:
Template projects
Branded customer portal
Real-time customer feedback
Visibility across customers and projects
Automated project health scores
Dynamic task logic
Bottleneck Analysis
Pricing:
Contact OnRamp for pricing.
14. UserGuiding
UserGuiding – the final entry in our overview of the best customer success software – takes a guided, walkthrough-based approach to onboarding. It enables you to design and deploy interactive product tours that introduce users to key features and functions.
Overall, the platform focuses on orienting new users while also prioritizing quick access to support resources.
Main features:
Product tours
Onboarding checklists
Resource centers
Segmentation
Analytics
In-app surveys
Pricing:
Basic plan: $89/month
Professional plan: $389/month
Corporate plan: $689+/month
Tips for choosing the best software for customer success
Decide which features align with your customer success goals
As a customer success leader, you certainly have key objectives and metrics that define success for your team. Whether it's converting trials to paid users within a certain timeframe, improving onboarding completion rates, or shortening time-to-value, your goals are what drive your business forward.
Knowing them upfront will help ensure you select software that directly supports your initiatives. For example, are you looking for a knowledge base and proactive communication channels to assist customers throughout their journey?
Tools like AI chatbots and in-product messages can help deliver just-in-time guidance. Meanwhile, feedback and surveys may also be important to identify opportunities for improvement, such as where users encounter the most friction.
When your customer success tool is ideally aligned with your business strategies, your team can spend less time managing platforms and more time delivering success.
Assess the ease of adoption and use
Look for a solution that employees can learn and navigate intuitively. Customer success tools should fit seamlessly into your team's daily routine for long-term productivity gains. Select a platform dedicated to being user-friendly and continuously refining its product based on real-world feedback.
Check the integration with your existing tech stack
Without strong integration with other critical systems, your teams will be forced to juggle multiple interfaces just to access the full picture. This decreases productivity, hinders cross-team collaboration, and risks data silos developing over time.
The right platform for your team operates as a centralized hub. It empowers your reps to have all relevant information at their fingertips without toggling between screens. So choose a customer success platform committed to open APIs and ongoing integrations.
Evaluate the level of data security
With data being a core asset of customer success, it's essential to understand how partner platforms safeguard sensitive information.
Data privacy and protection should be non-negotiable requirements. Make certain any prospective vendor fully understands compliance obligations. Their security measures must give you and your customers confidence that information remains private and protected, regardless of where its use takes it.
At Intercom, customer trust and data security are critical to everything we do.
How to leverage Intercom for customer success
At Intercom, we firmly believe that the best customer success software is the one that effortlessly enables exceptional customer service, particularly through proactive support during critical stages of the customer journey.
With the Intercom platform, you can stay one step ahead of support demands using features like product tours and outbound messages, all aimed at ensuring your customers' success. Further, our Series feature gives you the ability to easily build powerful automated support experiences.
Embark on your journey with Intercom and pave the way for success – not just for yourself, but for your customers, too. Start your free trial today or ask for a demo.
Sources
1. Gartner Peer Insights and Vitally, The State of Customer Success in the C-Suite. Gartner Peer Insights and Vitally surveyed 100 executives involved in CS to find out who owns the CS department, how investments in CS are changing, what their strategic initiatives are, and how they are planning for the future.
2. Totango, Customer Success Industry & Salary Report 2022. Totango surveyed customer success professionals from over 49 different industries. Survey responses came from professionals in 41 countries, with 66% of responses coming from North America and 16% from Europe.
3. Vitally, The Secret Lives of CSMs. Vitally surveyed 679 B2B Customer Success Managers in a variety of industries to hear their candid opinions on the topics that all CSMs are thinking about right now.
4. Gartner. Gartner surveyed more than 4,800 customers from November through December 2021 to understand their evolving relationships with customer service channels.