Table of contents
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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 or customers happy? How can customer success teams in B2B companies really get to know their clients and offer personalized experiences?
This is where a customer success management software comes in.
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: Clients can reach out to you via multiple channels – live chat, phone, or email. All conversations are centralized inside Gmail, making it easy for your account managers or customer success managers to respond and resolve queries.
- Email management: Hiver’s Email Management allows you to assign emails to specific team members or queues based nature of inquiry or the customer’s account. This ensures that each email is addressed by the most appropriate team member.
- Smart automations: Hiver’s robust automation allows you to 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 use Hiver’s Notes to collaborate internally on client inquiries and issues. Team members can leave comments, suggestions, or updates within an email conversation, ensuring that everyone is informed and aligned.
- Email Templates: Create standardized responses to common client inquiries. This ensures consistency in communication and saves time for customer success teams.
- 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 whether customer satisfaction is improving, declining, or remaining stable, allowing for timely adjustments to strategies.
- Insightful reporting and analytics: Leverage Hiver’s analytics to 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 offers three pricing options.
- Lite: $15/user per month
- Pro: $49/user per month
- Elite: $79/user per month
Free Trial: 7 days
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 360 degree overview of client behavior such as product usage, product adoption, and so much more.
- Automation: Automate customer success workflows to help you automatically send welcome and onboarding emails, implement renewal processes, and identify customers with low engagement.
- Dashboards and reports: Monitor your team’s performance and get a detailed overview into your customers’ journey. Track revenue growth, customer acquisition costs, and understand how each customer success rep is performing
- Surveys: Easily track client satisfaction using simple surveys. 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: Define rules to automatically trigger certain actions at different stages of the customer lifecycle. For instance, if a customer has not used your product for a specific duration, an email is automatically triggered to enquire whether the user is facing any issues.
- Collaborative task management: Assign tasks to appropriate customer success agents, ensuring that every client query is addressed promptly.
- Onboarding workflows: Create customized onboarding workflows or checklists to guide customers through the initial setup and usage of your product or service. These workflows ensure that critical steps are not missed, and make for a positive first impression.
- Customer portals: ClientSuccess offers features for creating customer portals, which serve as centralized hubs for customers to access information, track progress, and communicate with their dedicated customer success 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 and try their best to prevent clients from leaving.
- Journey orchestration: Offer tailored experiences at every point. Get in-depth insights on how every client is using your features. This includes how many times they are using it on a daily basis, and other similar parameters.
- Reporting and analytics: Get rich, actionable insights into customer behavior and the impact of team activities. This can help you streamline and optimize customer interactions
Pricing:
Gainsight offers two pricing plans, namely CS 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: Get a 360 degree view of your customer. This includes user activity, billing details, product usage, and tickets in a single place. Identify features they use the most, and features that aren’t seeing a lot of adoption. Leverage this data to create reports, send personalized communication, and more.
- Proactive alerts: Keep track of churn indicators such as a decrease in product usage, increase in support queries, etc. Identify at-risk customers early on and act at the right time 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 for renewal reminders.
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. Zoho Desk
Zoho Desk offers a range of features that is primarily designed for support but can also be used by customer success teams to streamline their operations, improve engagement, and gather valuable feedback.
The platform is best suited for small and medium businesses and even has a free plan for teams with minimal requirements.
Here’ what we love about Zoho Desk
- Omnichannel engagement: Interact with customers on channels they prefer. These channels include email, social media, live chat, phone, and website. This makes it easier for customers to reach out to you.
- Customer segmentation: Customers can be segmented based on different factors like the recency, monetary value, and frequency of their purchases. Customer success teams can use this information to understand lifetime value and gauge if there is any room for upsell or cross-sell opportunities.
- Zia: Zoho Desk’s AI picks up intent from customer emails and helps you strategically frame your replies. For instance, Zia can detect negative sentiments from client emails and alert you any time it happens. This way you can engage with dissatisfied clients accordingly to prevent the risk of churn.
Pricing:
Zoho Desk offers five different pricing plans.
- Express: $7 per user per month
- Standard: $14 per user per month
- Professional: $23 per user per month
- Enterprise: $40 per user per month
Free Trial: 15 days
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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: Send in-app messages to users while they are actively using a product or service. It can be used to encourage users to explore and adopt specific features or functionalities they may not be aware of. This promotes a more comprehensive use 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: Improve how customers engage with your product by enabling interactive onboarding with the help of in-app product tours. This is especially useful to help new users get acclimatized to your product and ensure that they get the most out of it.
- Mobile App: Intercom provides a mobile app that enables customer success teams to communicate with customers and access data on the go.
One of the biggest disadvantages with Intercom, however, is that it is rather difficult to set up and use – something which can hinder the efficiency of your customer success team. Aside from this, Intercom can prove to be expensive for smaller teams that have limited budgets.
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. Zendesk
Zendesk is a widely used customer service and support software platform that can also be used by customer success teams.
It allows customer success teams to engage with their clients across multiple touchpoints – website, mobile, and social media, amongst others. Aside from this, Zendesk offers a range of features and capabilities to help businesses effectively manage client relationships.
Here’s what we love about Zendesk:
- AI-powered bots: Zendesk’s AI can be leveraged by customer success teams to provide automated responses to queries. For instance, these AI bots can be used to provide immediate responses to common client inquiries or frequently asked questions. Questions on subscription plans and renewal policies can be taken up by these bots, allowing the customer success team to focus on more important work.
- Ticket routing: Manage customer success inquiries and issues efficiently. Teams can create and track tickets, ensuring that each request receives proper attention and resolution. For instance, in case a client has a specific request related to billing, the ticket can be quickly routed to the billing team for resolution.
- Automated ticket queues: This allows for the most important and time-sensitive customer queries to be addressed first. High-priority issues are escalated and addressed promptly, improving the overall client experience.
- Reporting and analytics: Identify problematic areas in the client’s journey with your company. You can create multiple reports like ticket reports to track and analyze ticket data. Similarly you can create reports to measure performance metrics such as first response time, resolution time, ticket backlogs, etc.
While Zendesk certainly offers a range of extensive features for customer success, it is relatively expensive as compared to a platform like Hiver. Aside from this, Zendesk has a complicated interface that can take some time getting used to.
Vendor support is also expensive and comes at an additional cost that can range anywhere between $1500 to $1800.
Pricing:
Zendesk has four tiers of pricing for small to large-sized businesses.
- Suite Team: $55 per agent per month
- Suite Growth: $89 per agent per month
- Suite Professional: $115 per agent per month
- Suite Enterprise: Custom pricing
Free Trial: 14 days
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: Comprehensive view of a client’s interactions, history, and engagement with your business. It provides a holistic understanding of the client’s journey with your company
- Customer Health Score: Health scores are typically numerical or color-coded indicators that provide a quick snapshot of a customer’s engagement and satisfaction levels from using your product.
- Customer Success Inbox: A centralized platform or workspace that customer success teams use to manage and streamline their communication and 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: Assess the overall health of their client relationships. Health scores are calculated based on factors such as product usage, support interactions, and feedback.
- Command center: A centralized dashboard or workspace where customer success teams can monitor and manage customer accounts and interactions 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 and personalized messages or notifications to clients while they are actively 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: CSM software aggregates and centralizes customer data from various sources, such as CRM systems, product usage analytics tools, and support helpdesks. This helps in identifying usage patterns, customer behavior, and key metrics that indicate client health and satisfaction levels.
- Customer Segmentation: Categorize customer base into segments based on specific criteria such as behavior, demographics, or engagement level. This segmentation enables targeted marketing and personalized communication.
- Task Automation: Automate routine tasks and workflows, such as sending welcome emails, onboarding messages, and follow-ups. Automation helps customer success teams operate more efficiently.
- 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: Assign a “health score” or customer satisfaction score to each client. These scores are calculated based on various factors like product usage, support interactions, and feedback, allowing customer success teams to assess the overall well-being of their client relationships.
- Product Adoption Tracking: Customer success teams can also monitor product usage. This data helps businesses identify which features are most and least utilized and make data-driven decisions on product enhancements.
- Customer Communication: A CSM software often includes communication tools like in-app messaging, email campaigns, and chat, allowing customer success teams to maintain an ongoing dialogue with client.
- Reporting and Analytics: Get access to dashboards that provide insights into client behavior, trends, and the effectiveness of customer success strategies.
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: Businesses can identify customers who have suddenly stopped using critical features and proactively engage with them. By engaging with at-risk customers and resolving their concerns, businesses can improve customer retention rates or prevent churn.
- Enhanced Customer Satisfaction: Enable 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.
