10 Best Customer Success Management Software for Your Business in 2024
Table of contents
Strong client relationships go a long way, especially in the Business-to-Business (B2B) world. When your clients are happy and satisfied, they not only end up upgrading their subscription plans but also drive positive referrals.
So, how do you keep your clients happy? How can customer success teams in B2B companies offer personalized experiences and build stronger relationships with buyers?
This is where a customer success management software can help.
Table of Contents
- What is Customer Success Management Software
- Top 10 Customer Success Management Software to Consider for Your Business
- Key Features of A Customer Success Management Software
- Benefits of A Customer Success Management Software
- Conclusion
What is Customer Success Management Software
A Customer Success Management (CSM) software is a tool that B2B businesses use to efficiently manage and optimize their customer success efforts. It helps businesses streamline customer onboarding, track product usage, gather feedback, and engage with clients proactively.
CSM software centralizes customer data and provides insights – What features are most used? What features are least used? – enabling targeted improvements.that enable companies to improve retention rate, boost engagement, and identify cross-sell and up-sell opportunities.
These solutions also help B2B businesses automate key customer success tasks, such as monitoring customer health, sending personalized communication, and identifying at-risk accounts.
Top 10 Customer Success Management Software to Consider for Your Business
Here is a list of some of the best customer success management software in the market today.
1. Hiver
Predominantly a help desk, Hiver can also be used by customer success teams to streamline client communication. Customer success teams can use Hiver to delegate, track, and collaborate on client inquiries in the most seamless manner.
The best part about Hiver is that it works right inside of Gmail and so, is incredibly easy to set up and use.
Hiver offers several robust features that help customer success teams seamlessly manage client interactions.
- Multichannel engagement: Enable clients to reach out to you via live chat, phone, or email. Centralize conversations inside Gmail, making it easy for account or customer success managers to respond to queries.
- Email management: Assign emails to specific team members based on the nature of query or the customer’s account. This ensures that each email is addressed by the most appropriate team member.
- Smart automations: Automate routine tasks such as assigning or tagging emails. For instance, all emails from a specific client can be auto-assigned to that client’s dedicated account manager.
- SLA management: Ensure that your customer success team addresses client requests in a timely fashion by defining SLAs. For instance, setup a rule saying every query needs to be responded to within two hours. Consistently meeting or exceeding SLAs enhances client satisfaction and trust. Satisfied customers are more likely to renew subscriptions, make repeat purchases, and become advocates for the brand.
- Notes and @mentions: Customer success teams can collaborate internally on client inquiries and issues. Team members can leave comments, suggestions, or updates within an email conversation, ensuring that everyone is on the same page.
- Email Templates: Create standardized responses to common client inquiries. This allows customer success managers to respond faster to client emails.
- CSAT surveys: Send simple CSAT surveys to clients to collect feedback. By doing this regularly, customer success teams can track satisfaction trends over time. This helps them identify gaps in customer satisfaction and take proactive measures to address them.
- Insightful reporting and analytics:Get clear and actionable insights into team performance and customer satisfaction. For instance, monitor metrics such as first response time to get an idea of how quickly your team responds to inquiries.
Pricing:
Hiver has four pricing plans, which includes a free plan. It also offers a free trial of 7 days.
- Free plan
- Lite plan: $19/user/month
- Pro plan: $49/user/month
- Elite plan: $79/user/month
2. Custify
Custify is a customer success platform designed specifically for SaaS businesses.
The platform’s aim is to help SaaS businesses significantly reduce churn and improve revenue.
Here’s what we love about Custify
- Customer 360: Get a complete overview of your client’s behavior. Track product usage, adoption, and so much more.
- Automation: Automatically send welcome and onboarding emails to new clients. Automate renewal processes and set up customer success workflows to identify customers at risk of churn.
- Dashboards and reports: Get detailed insights about your team’s performance. Also analyze your customers’ journey. Build reports to understand revenue growth, customer acquisition costs, etc.
- Surveys:Use simple surveys to track your client satisfaction. This is a good way to identify high-risk customers and reduce churn.
Pricing:
Custify offers custom pricing to customers depending on their requirements. You will need to fill out a form on their website to get the exact pricing for your business.
3. ClientSuccess
ClientSuccess is a dedicated Customer Success Management (CSM) software designed to help businesses effectively manage their client relationships.
It helps you gain insight into the end-to-end customer journey, from onboarding and product usage to renewals and churn.
ClientSuccess also incorporates functionalities for real-time sharing of updates with your entire team.
Here’s what we love about ClientSuccess
- Lifecycle automation: Automatically trigger specific actions at various stages of the customer cycle by defining certain conditions. For instance, if a customer has not engaged with your product for a specific duration, an email will be automatically triggered to enquire whether the client is facing any issues.
- Collaborative task management: Assign tasks to appropriate customer success agents, ensuring that every client query is addressed promptly.
- Onboarding workflows: Guide customers through the initial set up and help them get used to your product or service with the help of customized onboarding workflows. This way critical steps will not be missed and customers can learn to unlock the value of your product faster.
- Customer portals: Create customer portals or centralized hubs for customers to access information. They can also track the progress of a ticket and interact with their dedicated account managers.
Pricing:
ClientSuccess has three pricing tiers – Startup, Growth, and Enterprise with custom pricing, according to business requirements. You will need to get in touch with them on their website in order to get the exact pricing for your business.
4. Gainsight
Built for mid-sized companies to enterprises, Gainsight is among one of the most popular customer success management softwares available in the market.
The platform empowers customer success teams to deliver exceptional client experiences, reduce churn, and maximize customer lifetime value through data-driven insights and personalized support strategies.
Here’s what we love about Gainsight:
- Customer 360: Get a granular view of every customer, allowing you to identify possibilities of churn. This allows customer success teams to take the appropriate action at the right time.
- Journey orchestration: Tailor a customer’s experience at every point in their journey. Discover in-depth insights on how clients are using various features of your product.
- Reporting and analytics: Unlock actionable insights into customer behavior and the impact of your team activities. This could help you streamline and optimize customer interactions.
Pricing:
Gainsight offers two pricing plans, namely Essentials and Enterprise. Each of these plans have custom pricing depending on your customer success requirements.
5. Freshsuccess
Freshsuccess by Freshworks is a comprehensive customer success management software.
Freshsuccess allows B2B businesses to get complete visibility into customer profiles and set up workflows for onboarding, renewals, and so much more. It helps reduce customer churn, increase expansions, and identify critical issues before they become problematic.
Here’s what we love about Freshsuccess:
- Account 360: Access critical customer information from a single dashboard. This includes user activity, billing details, product usage, and tickets. Identify features they use the most, and features that are lacking adoption. Leverage this data to create reports, send personalized communication, and more.
- Proactive alerts: Track aspects such as decreased product usage, increase in support queries, etc. Identify high-risk customers and engage them in a timely manner before they churn.
- Reporting and analytics: Get actionable insights into customer behavior by tracking metrics such as lifetime value, financial health, product adoption, and more. Create custom dashboards and track how well customers are using your product.
- Email automation: Send out personalized email campaigns or automated messages based on customer behavior. For instance, you can send emails to welcome new users, nudge inactive users, or remind them to renew their accounts.
Pricing:
Freshsuccess offers two pricing plans:
- Estate: $79 per user per month + Platform $499 per month
- Forest: $129 per user per month + Platform $749 per month
6. Totango
Totango offers a range of features that is designed for customer success teams to prevent churn and improve business growth through expansion.
The platform can be used by both CS as well as sales teams to optimize and streamline the customer journey.
Here’ what we love about Totango
- Email campaigns: Use the platform’s pre-built automations to segment customers according to various factors. Use automated workflows to send personalized email campaigns to different customer segments.
- Artificial Intelligence: Totango’s AI can be used to accelerate the productivity of your CS teams. It can summarize important details about customer accounts to help you identify churn indicators and client health attributes. It can also help account managers craft content for contextual email campaigns.
- SuccessBLOCs: These are pre-built customer success program templates that include elements such as scorecards, segments, reports, automated workflows, and campaigns. They can be implemented in minutes and customized as needed to help CS teams monitor onboarding activities, product adoption, customer health, detect risk, and manage contract renewals.
Pricing:
Totango offers three pricing tiers. You’ll have to get in touch with them to get a quote for your business.
7. Intercom
Intercom is a customer messaging platform that intelligent leverages AI to help customer success teams personalize communication with their respective clients.
The platform provides instant messaging capabilities, allowing customer success managers to engage with their clients on a real-time basis.
Here’s what we love about Intercom
- In-app messaging: Use in-app messages to guide users to explore and adopt features and functionalities of your product. This will help customers unlock the real value of the product.
- Fin: Intercom’s AI bot Fin provides instant, contextual, and precise answers to common client inquiries. This allows your customer success managers or account managers to focus on the more important, high-value conversations.
- Product tours: Interactive onboarding using in-app product tours is a great way to increase customer engagement with your product. New users can get acclimatized to the product in no time, improving their time-to-productivity.
- Mobile App: Intercom provides a mobile app that enables customer success teams to communicate with customers and access data on the go.
Pricing:
Intercom has three pricing tiers
- Essential: $39 per seat per month
- Advanced: $99 per seat per month
- Expert: $139 per seat per month
You Might Also Like: 10 Best Intercom Alternatives
8. SmartKarrot
SmartKarrot is an intelligent customer success software that helps you with renewal management, growth and revenue expansion, and onboarding.
It helps customer success teams to handle important components of the post-sales journey for every client such as onboarding, product adoption, and churn management.
Here’s what we love about SmartKarrot:
- Workflows and intelligence: Enable customer success managers to identify every touchpoint in a client’s journey. Tasks are assigned to agents automatically according to the different stages in the workflow to identify opportunities for cross-selling or up-selling. For instance, say a customer has reached a usage milestone with your product. You can set up an automated workflow such that any time a user hits this milestone, they automatically receive an email suggesting an option to upgrade their plan to accommodate higher usage.
- Automated playbooks: They are templates that can be customized by adding tasks, emails, and touchpoints. Playbooks act as standardized workflow templates and can be used to establish processes for customer onboarding, upselling, and more. For instance, an automated playbook for upselling will include triggers, criteria for segmentation, reminder and follow-up email templates, notification templates, and a customer feedback form as well.
- Customer 360 view: Get the full picture of your customer’s journey and interactions with your business. No need to sift through multiple systems to get relevant information about your customer accounts.
Pricing:
SmartKarrot has four pricing plans that start at $15,000. All other plans have custom quotes for which you’ll need to contact their sales team.
9. Planhat
Planhat is another comprehensive customer success management software that allows you to unify customer data, track product usage, and enhance your customer’s experience.
Planhat is suitable for businesses of various sizes and industries that have a dedicated customer success team to take care of client relationships.
Here is what we love about Planhat.
- Playbooks: Predefined sets of actions, strategies, or best practices that guide customer success teams in their interactions with clients. These playbooks are designed to help teams manage client relationships effectively and achieve specific outcomes.
- Customer 360: Detailed information about every client and their engagement with your business. This gives a comprehensive understanding of how a client’s journey with your company is progressing.
- Customer Health Score: Health scores are indicators that provide quick information about how a customer is engaging with your product and their satisfaction levels.
- Customer Success Inbox: A shared inbox for customer success teams to manage their interactions with clients.
Pricing:
Planhat offers three custom pricing tiers – Startup, Professional, Enterprise. You will need to get in touch with their sales team in order get a pricing quote that closely matches your budget requirements.
10. ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a customer success platform that aims to helps businesses proactively spot churn and prevent clients from switching to competitors.
It gives insights into usage statistics and provides visibility into how your clients are using your product and their probability of renewal.
Here’s what we love about ChurnZero
- Customer Health Scores: Evaluate the overall health of client relationships based on product usage, support interactions, and customer feedback.
- Command center: A single source of truth for customer success teams to monitor and manage client accounts effectively.
- Automated Customer Engagement: Automate various aspects of customer engagement, ensuring that customers receive timely and personalized communication. For instance, if a client’s health score falls below a certain threshold, a series of automated emails or in-app messages are triggered to re-engage the client.
- In-App Communication: Send targeted messages or notifications to clients while they are using your product or application. It allows you to engage with clients in real-time, provide relevant information, and encourage specific actions so that they derive maximum value out of your products.
Pricing:
ChurnZero has custom pricing plans which are only available upon request.
Key Features of A Customer Success Management Software
The primary goal of a customer success management software is to ensure that clients achieve their desired outcomes, have positive experiences, and continue to derive value from the products or services offered by the business.
Here are some of the key features you should consider when choosing a customer success management software for your business.
- Customer Data Management: Manage customer data from various sources, such as CRM systems, product usage analytics tools, and support help desks from a single control center. This helps CS teams stay on track with everything that’s happening with their client accounts.
- Customer Segmentation: Differentiate your customer based into segments based on categories such as behavior, demographics, and engagement levels. This can be used for sending personalized campaigns.
- Task Automation: Let automation take care of routine tasks such as sending welcome emails, onboarding messages, and follow-ups. This helps customer success teams focus on more complex client interactions.
- Feedback Collection: Most CSM software includes tools for collecting customer feedback through CSAT surveys, Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, and other methods. This feedback helps businesses identify areas for improvement.
- Health Scoring: Health scores are based on factors like product usage, quality of support interactions, and feedback. It is an important indicator of the overall state of client relationships.
- Product Adoption Tracking: Identify how your product is being used by tracking most and least utilized features. Use this data to make informed decisions about product enhancement.
- Customer Communication: A CSM software often includes communication tools like in-app messaging, email campaigns, and chat, allowing customer success teams to constantly interact with their clients.
- Reporting and Analytics: Get insights into client behavior, interactions, and more using centralized dashboards and robust reporting.
Benefits of A Customer Success Management Software
Customer Success Management (CSM) software offers numerous benefits to businesses. Here are some of them:
- Improved Customer Retention: CSM solutions can help businesses identify customers who have suddenly stopped engaging with their products. By engaging with at-risk customers and resolving their concerns, businesses can improve customer retention rates or prevent churn.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Offer personalized communication and support, making customers feel valued and understood.
- Streamlined Onboarding: CSM tools often include onboarding workflows and checklists, guiding new customers through the initial setup and usage of a product or service. This results in a smoother onboarding process and a positive first impression.
- Proactive Customer Engagement: Businesses can set up triggers for proactive engagement with customers. For example, sending automated messages or offers when customers exhibit certain behaviors. Say a user hasn’t actively used your product in the past 30 days. An automated email can be triggered that aims to remind them of the software’s value, offer assistance if needed, and encourage them to return and continue using the platform
- Cross-Selling and Upselling Opportunities: CS reps can use these tools to analyze customer data to identify opportunities for cross-selling or upselling additional products or services. This can significantly help increase revenue.
Conclusion
The customer success management tools discussed above offer powerful ways to understand, engage, and support your clients, ultimately leading to long-lasting relationships.
Whether you’re a small startup or a big company, finding the right customer success software can make a huge difference in understanding client behavior, product usage patterns users at risk of churn, features that aren’t widely adopted, and more. So, explore these options and choose the one that fits your needs best to keep your clients engaged and happy.
