18 Best Customer Success Tools of All Time [In-Depth]
What Are Customer Success Tools?
In essence, customer success tools (SaaS) offer a full 360-degree view of your customers. They enable your CS team to identify which customers require more assistance for adopting your product, or where there may be potential points of friction across the customer journey.
In practice, that means that most customer success software has to offer a range of different features.
Here’s a quick overview:
Some of the features that customer success tools will provide are:
- Customer engagement analytics
- Product usage tracking
- Customer lifecycle analytics
- Health scoring customer data
- Customer experience insights
- Customer feedback collection
- User profiling
- Real-time insights of customer engagement
The Best Early-Stage Customer Success Tools:
- Userpilot
- Vitally
- Helpscout
- eWebinar
- Wootric
- Custify
- eWebinar
The Best Growth-Stage Customer Success Tools:
- Gainsight
- Totango
- Natero
- Akita
- CustomerSuccessBox
- Salesmachine
- SmartKarrot
- Brightback
- Profitwell Retain
- Sherlock
- Churnbuster
- Churnzero
Let’s dive in!
Customer Success Tools for Companies in the Early-stage:
In the early stage, you should be focusing on improving your customer experience and your product through continuous customer feedback collection, making sure your customer success teams are focused on customer satisfaction.
1. Customer Success Tools For Driving Customer Engagement & Collecting Feedback: Userpilot
While Userpilot is primarily for onboarding customers, it also helps CS teams monitor user behaviour, collect user feedback (like NPS surveys) and deploy in-app experiences with ease.
With a variety of survey templates organized by role and use case, CS teams can customize, deploy surveys and gather user feedback quickly and easily. They can be customized with different types of questions, conditional logic, and our platform can trigger surveys in real-time based on in-app behavior and user attributes. This allows businesses to ask the right questions to the right users at the right time.
Also, Userpilot’s analytics feature enables you to drill down into different user segments with advanced customer segmentation capabilities. You can see how different groups engage with your product, enabling CS teams to onboarding customers according to their JTBDs.
The best part, however, is that your CS team can then be empowered to improve your in-app messaging and experiences with our WYSIWYG builder (no coding required!). This helps to drive engagement and ultimately boost retention.
Our Review
Userpilot’s ease-of-use and efficient UI means that your CS team can start making improvements across onboarding, engagement and retention in no time at all. It’s a comprehensive tool (we didn’t even mention Resource Centers and our new AI features here!).
We definitely want you to learn more about Userpilot! Book your free demo today.
2. Customer Success Tools For Empowering CS Teams: Vitally
Used by SaaS businesses like Segment, Calendly, or Zapier, no wonder Vitally had to make it on our list of the best customer success tools.
Vitally empowers your customer success team to create better customer experiences with analytics, automation, and project management capabilities. All in one tool.
It’s designed for customer success teams to be able to keep track of customer engagement interactions across the entire customer lifecycle while keeping an eye on the most important metrics.
You’ll find their Customer Health Score to be useful when you need to identify when a user is at risk of churning and might need help from your success team. Using Vitally you can see your live customer happiness score from different equations with custom metrics and weights for different segments of users, and get automated alerts when a customer is a risk or an opportunity, based on their score.
Vitally integrates with most used tools in the industry like Segment, Mixpanel, Slack, Intercom, and Zendesk so you don’t need to worry about syncing customers’ data from tools you are already using.
Our Review
Vitally was clearly build with the needs of customer success teams in mind and not only facilitates collecting customer feedback, but it also lets you track customer success and empowers true customer lifecycle management for your teams.
3. Customer Success Tools For Educating Your Customers: Helpscout
Customer education is a huge part of customer success. Helpscout is an affordable approach to it.
You can set up a self-serve knowledge base, providing the entire customer base with all the help and support they need to use your product successfully.
If your customers need extra support, they can use Helpscout’s live chat and messaging feature to chat to your Support or CS team.
Another neat feature of the Helpscout customer success platform is the ability to send targeted messages to customers as they use your product. This means you can nudge them in the right direction improving customer retention.
You can connect Helpscout to all your favorite tools. There are over 50 integrations, including Slack, Hubspot, and Salesforce.
Our Review
Helpscout is a great customer success software that helps educate your customers, improve customer engagement, and ensure users make the most out of your product.
4. eWebinar — The Webinar Tool For Engaging Customers
It’s essential that your customer engagement strategies feel human and that’s what eWebinar brings to the table.
Their automated webinars bring the same welcoming atmosphere to your customers but without all the hassle of hosting live events and hoping you don’t run into any technical issues mid-presentation.
eWebinar gives you the best of both worlds by displaying key metrics right on the dashboard while also letting you dig deeper into its analytics when needed. This gives you both an eagle-eye and granular view of the customer sentiment, i.e., how customers are reacting to your webinars.
You can see how many sessions have been streamed, the attendance rate from registrants, the average watch time, and what percentage of people watch until the end among other useful metrics.
Our Review
With third-party application integrations to ActiveCampaign, ConvertKit, Mailchimp, Keap, Slack, Zoom, Zapier, and more there’s a lot to like about eWebinar.
5. Wootric — For In-Depth Customer Feedback
One of the most important things that a customer success tool helps with is – good quality customer feedback. This means happy customers..Wootric gives you exactly that.
It offers a wide range of customer sentiment surveys, including NPS, CSAT, and customer effort scores.
A customer success manager can access qualitative customer feedback data with micro-surveys, and have a direct influence on the product roadmap using that data. This means you can focus on building what your users actually need, improve product usage, and reduce customer churn.
Finally, Wootric helps your CS team to close the loop. You can use the customer success software of your choice to reach out to customers and update them about their feedback.
Our Review
Customer feedback is crucial to any SaaS company, and Wootric is the tool for the job.
6. Custify — The Customer Success Tool For Growth and Upselling
Customer success strategies aren’t just about retention, it’s also about spotting opportunities to upsell to your customers. That’s where Custify comes in.
Custify offers a range of different features. You can see a full 360 view of your customer’s behavior and health data, product usage, and journey.
You can also set up automation flows for common tasks, meaning your CS team can avoid the day-to-day and focus on improving the customer experience.
But where Custify sets itself apart from other customer success software is with its growth feature. Custify will notify you about customers who are reaching the end of their trial so you can reach out to them. It also highlights customers who are likely to upsell so you can focus your efforts accordingly and increase customer lifetime value. This is where the power of customer segmentation comes into play.
Our Review
For a simple approach to upselling, Custify is the right customer success software.
Customer Success Tools For The Growth Stage
7. Gainsight — For The Heavy Lifters
Gainsight is one of the heavyweights when it comes to customer success software. It’s safe to say it’s been around for a while and has become one of the biggest names.
The product itself is extremely robust, offering a wealth of different features. As a result, it can cater to any kind of CS team.
It offers strategic planning, for higher-level customer success managers, as well as lower-level account management for that customer success manager doing the day-to-day work. You can see overall trends, but then drill down into more specific data.
One of Gainsight’s most useful features is its employee onboarding. As you scale your CS team, new CSMs are able to learn your processes on the job. Gainsight will show them walkthroughs and video tutorials, providing contextual guidance. Everyone is quickly brought up to speed.
Our Review
For large companies that are scaling fast, Gainsight is a no-brainer.
8. Totango — Customer Success Software For Enterprise Companies
Totango is a giant in the customer success space. It’s aimed at Enterprise companies that have a large CS team and lots of customer relationships to manage.
Totango Spark, the primary product, is a robust customer success software. It allows you to do customer health scoring, view product usage analytics, and get up and running with templates of best practices and customer health scorecards.
While Totango Spark is aimed at your CS team, Totango Zoe is a product for your whole organization. It’s a conversational interface that allows any employee to access customer health data and volunteer for customer-centric activities.
Our Review
Totango provides everything you need to run an Enterprise CS team efficiently and effectively.
If you’re a large enterprise company that wants to be as customer-centric as possible and measure customer satisfaction effectively, then Totango might be the right choice.
9. Natero — Customer Success Software For Scale
Natero by Freshworks is another customer success tool that enables B2B SaaS companies to scale up CS operations.
You can do this by standardizing your process with Natero’s built-in templating. This helps you to automate certain processes.
You can also schedule personalized campaigns, triggering them based on customer behavior. Natero includes tools to help you manage your CS team as well.
Our Review
If you’re looking to scale up your CS efforts and automate key tasks, then Natero is a good choice.
10. Akita — For a Variety of Integrations
Akita offers lots of useful features for customer success. You can see how your customers are using your product with its usage tracking. You can also see how customers progress through your onboarding flows. This provides useful insights into such a crucial part of the customer lifecycle.
But where Akita truly shines is with its huge variety of integrations on offer. It connects with practically every other SaaS tool in your stack. Mailchimp, G Suite, Stripe, Typeform, Zendesk, Slack, and Intercom are all supported, along with hundreds of others.
These integrations enable your CS team to connect Akita to their existing workflow. It’s far more efficient this way.
Akita also offers automation, enabling you to set up automatic workflows.
Our Review
Akita is a great choice if you want to connect your customer success software to all of your existing tools.
11. CustomerSuccessBox — For Achieving Your Business Goals
Customer success is important, but even more so when you consider the impact of it on the goals of your business.
CustomerSuccessBox focuses on helping B2B SaaS companies to scale up their customer success efforts while focusing on business goals.
You can combine customer data from your CRM and billing software so that you have a full view of overall customer satisfaction. You can also combine your communication tools so that all your customer conversations are in one place.
This helps you to scale up efficiently as you acquire more customers and expand your CS team.
CustomerSuccessBox also focuses on upselling. It highlights customers who are ready to upgrade so your CS team can reach out and try to close the sale.
Our Review
Ready to scale up your customer success? CustomerSuccessBox is amongst the best customer success software targeted towards B2B SaaS companies.
12. Salesmachine — For Automating Your CS Processes
Salesmachine is a great customer success tool that aims to automate most of your CS team’s workload so they can focus on delivering value to customers who need a little more support.
Instead of having to manually calculate and update customer health scores, Salesmachine will handle it for you. Your CS team can then proactively reach out to customers with low scores before they churn.
Salesmachine also integrates with communication tools like email and Slack. This means your CSMs are notified when customers are in need of extra support.
You can also integrate Salesmachine with other tools like Hubspot or Salesforce. You can then generate certain actions to be triggered by customer health data.
Our Review
If you’re looking to automate your customer success efforts as much as possible and increase customer retention, then Salesmachine can help you get there.
13. SmartKarrot — For Achieving Customer Success
SmartKarrot is a fast-growing customer success platform empowered with an account intelligence engine that prevents customer churn & drives revenue expansion.
The product is robust, stable & loaded with features such as account intelligence, early warning system, customer health score, product adoption analytics, touchpoints, automated playbooks, onboarding, feedback, and many more.
It enables the CSM teams to automate and scale product adoption and success operations at ease. It caters to the executives with real-time truthful data to make informed decisions for the adoption strategy and revenue management.
Their dashboard is simple, flexible & requires less or no learning curve. It is suitable for companies of any size.
Our Review
SmartKarrot is one of the most suitable customer success platforms for companies that want to scale up customer success and product adoption in a customer-centric way.
14. Brightback — For Understanding Your Churn
One of the best ways of avoiding future customer churn is to understand the reasons for your current churn. Brightback aims to help you do exactly that.
Brightback segments your customers based on their pricing plan or billing term. When they show signs of churning, Brightback will flag them up.
It then provides churning customers with a tailored cancel page. This page will include personalized offers based on customer segmentation. It’ll also gather customer feedback about why they canceled.
This helps to reduce churn for on-the-fence customers, and provides your CS team with valuable customer feedback about the customer’s behaviour
Your CS team will also get real-time alerts so they can reach out to customers and prevent churn.
Our Review
If you want to understand why customers churn, Brightback is a great customer success software to have.
15. Profitwell Retain — For Winning Back Your Customers
Retain is one of Profitwell’s products. It’s designed as a last-minute attempt to improve retention.
Retain uses algorithms to determine the best way to win back churned customers. This means you can sit back and relax, confident that Retain is helping you behind the scenes.
It’s also completely white-labeled, so your customers have a consistent experience. This is vital at such a delicate stage in the customer lifecycle.
Their pricing is also fair. It’s free up to your current recovery rate, and then you start paying based on any performance beyond that.
Our Review
If you’re looking for a dunning tool that learns as it goes along, then Profitwell’s Retain is a good one to try.
16. Sherlock — Customer Success Tool For Actionable Insights
Sherlock aims to take the pain out of analytics. It does this by combing through your wealth of customer data and pulling out the key insights.
This can save your CS team a lot of time and effort and makes it easier to start making improvements right away.
Sherlock also claims to have the only product engagement scoring system. This system combines various metrics of engagement, including signing up and viewing a certain page. It then combines these customer health scores to give each customer an overall product engagement score.
This is a really useful metric for any customer success team, as engagement is a strong indicator of customer satisfaction and future customer retention.
Sherlock also recently launched a new AI feature. The AI will look at your data and give you conversational insights. It’s like having a data scientist constantly analyzing your data and reporting back to you to improve customer satisfaction.
Our Review
If you’re looking to pull out actionable insights based on customer behavior, then Sherlock will make life much easier for your CS team.
17. Churnbuster — For Combatting Churn
Churnbuster isn’t like the other tools on this list – it’s a customer success platform designed to focus on a specific aspect of churn.
According to the team at Churnbuster, failing payments account for 40% of churn. With that in mind, Churnbuster aims to help stop those failed payments.
It will automatically try to retrieve failed payments on your behalf. It’ll also back-charge customers when they finally update their card details.
Churnbuster also provides you with real-time Slack alerts. You can take matters into your own hands and reduce churn if a high-value account is at risk of churning.
Our Review
While Churnbuster is more reactive, and a last-ditch attempt to reducing churn, it’s a useful tool for customer success teams to have at their disposal.
18. ChurnZero — For a Comprehensive Overview
ChurnZero offers all the main functionality that other customer success software also provide.
You can monitor customer health scores, gather NPS data, segment customers, track the customer journey, and communicate with them.
ChurnZero’s main draw is that it provides a command center that enables your customer success team to know exactly what they need to do each day. This ensures no tasks fall through the gaps.
It also offers a useful communication feature. You can communicate with your customers in real-time, from inside your product. This improves your customers’ experience and ensures your messaging won’t go ignored.
Our Review
If you need a comprehensive customer success software that helps organize your CS team’s efforts, then look no further than ChurnZero.
Which Customer Success Software is Right For You?
Choosing from all of these customer success tools can be tough.
Hopefully, you now have a better idea of what each has to offer and which one you need to achieve your customer success strategy.
We’ve condensed all customer success software into a feature matrix, so you can easily compare them. (Credit goes to Rachel from Recurly who first created her own feature matrix.)
Feature matrix for early-stage products:
Feature matrix for growth-stage products:
Conclusion
That was a lot, right?
Customer success is not a set it up and forget about it type of activity. It requires continuous improvement and communication with your customer.
It’s ok to feel overwhelmed by the number of customer success tools available, but what’s important is to start from somewhere.
If you want to have better insights into how your users behave inside the app, collect feedback in a contextual way and reach out to your customers to improve engagement, then get a Userpilot Demo and get started right away.