Imagine the frustration of waiting on hold for hours, only to receive inadequate help for a customer service issue—this is an experience no customer wants and one you certainly don't want to inflict on your clients.
Research reveals that nearly 50% of consumers will turn to a competitor after just one negative experience, and a staggering 80% will switch after two disappointing encounters.
In today's highly competitive market, delivering exceptional customer experiences is more critical than ever. That's where customer success platforms come in. With the Global Customer Success Platforms Market projected to reach $3.1 billion by 2026, it's clear that businesses are prioritizing customer experience as a key differentiator.
Navigating the world of customer success software can be daunting, but we're here to guide you through the process. Read on to discover essential insights and tips for selecting the best customer success software tailored to your business needs.
What is Customer Success Software?
Customer success software tracks customer data across your entire tech stack to give you a holistic view of each customer. CRM, email, customer service and sales automation tools—everything a customer touches or interacts with—are included in the system.
This comprehensive view helps you identify gaps in customer service and increase loyalty. A customer success platform is great for tracking internal data, such as employee productivity, sales performance and customer feedback. Armed with this knowledge, you can make decisions based on real-time data to better serve your customers.
What Should You Look For in Customer Success Software?
The right customer success software eliminates guesswork and heavylifting of customer service. It should offer features such as:
1. User-Friendly Interface
A complex system only makes you spend more time on customer service tasks which is why an easy-to-use and understand interface is essential. An intuitive design that's easy to use and navigate can help to reduce the learning curve for getting the most out of the software, allowing your team to focus on delivering exceptional customer experiences.
2. Comprehensive Analytics
Opt for customer success software that offers strong analytics as well as reporting features so that you can monitor customer success metrics like engagement, satisfaction, retention, churn, and product usage.
3. Streamlined Automation
You may want to consider customer success software that can help with automating onboarding, renewals, and upselling. This can help your customer success and support teams save time and focus their energy on more pressing customer issues. C
4. Empowering Self-Service Options
Most customers want the ability to troubleshoot their issues as well as find answers to their questions at a time that's convenient for them which is where self-service comes into play. This not only reduces wait times but also enhances customer satisfaction as they can resolve issues at their own pace without relying on your support team.
5. Seamless Integration Capabilities
Ideally, your customer success software can easily integrate with whatever other software is in your customer success stack so that you can gather and access all your data in one centralized location.
6. Proactive Notifications and Alerts
Ideally, your customer success software should be able to send you proactive notifications and alerts when key events occur, such as a customer experiencing a problem or an account needing attention.
7. Collaboration Features
Look for solutions that facilitate collaboration and communication among your customer success team members and across departments.
8. Scalability
The solution should be able to grow with your business, accommodating an increasing number of users, customers, and data without compromising performance.
The Best Customer Success Software Solutions in 2023
Your pick of customer success software depends on your business's needs. Here are seven solutions you can consider:
1. Helpjuice
"Helpjuice enabled Signal OS to reduce support calls and emails by 50% and app errors by 40%, while saving their support team two hours daily. The highly customizable knowledge base empowered customers to better understand their products, improving customer success and preparing the company for future growth." - Jan Tomczak, Customer Success Manager, Signal OS
Overview
Helpjuice's knowledge base solution can help teams organize and centralize information, making it easy for both employees and customers to find answers to common questions.
Here are a few ways Helpjuice's software can contribute to customer success:
- Self-service support: With Helpjuice, you can create a knowledge base that allows customers to find solutions to their problems as well as answers to their questions without the need to directly contact your customer support team. By eliminating the need to contact your support team directly, customers with more intricate issues will experience shorter wait times in times that they do need to make direct contact.
- Improved support efficiency: By using Helpjuice to provide a centralized repository of information, support teams can quickly access answers to customer questions and resolve issues more efficiently.
- Consistent information: A well-maintained knowledge base ensures that both customers and support staff have the ability to access the same, up-to-date information, which fosters consistency and helps to prevent potential miscommunications.
- Onboarding and training: Helpjuice enables you to develop and oversee onboarding materials for new team members, streamlining their learning process and equipping them to deliver top-notch customer support more effectively.
- Reducing support costs: By enabling customers to find answers on their own and streamlining support processes, knowledge base software can help reduce the overall cost of customer support.
Key Features
- Intuitive and easy-to-use interface, making it simple for both customers and team members to navigate and use
- Ability for multiple team members to collaborate on creating, editing, and managing knowledge base articles
- Analytics to help you monitor the performance of your knowledge base, identify popular articles, and discover areas where more content or improvements may be needed
Pricing
- Starter: $120/month
- Run-Up: $200/month
- Premium Limited: $289/month
- Premium Unlimited: $499/month
2. Gainsight
"Gainsight helps our customer success team manage risks, proactively report on customer health, and view usage data trends. Without Gainsight, our team would need to be looking at a minimum of three different systems to try to compile this type of information, and they wouldn't be able to do so proactively either." - Spencer E.
Overview
Gainsight gives you a comprehensive view of customers that allows you to understand trends and risks and act quickly. A holistic view of customer journeys helps you monitor customer health and get actionable customer insights that empowers your customer success managers to increase customer loyalty.
Key Features
- Playbooks that help you scale your team's actions with proven workflows
- Scorecards that capture every aspect of customer health
- Timeline to document and track customer interactions and activities over time
Pros
- Collaborative workspace
- Subscription tracking feature
- User-friendly interface
Pricing
- Custom
3. Custify
"Custify has been a game changer for our CSM team in keeping customer info, communication and insights stored in one place. I like how customizable it is for our business - we are able to pull data in directly from our database and create metrics that are most important to our long-term goals. We also use the playbook feature frequently to send consistent comms quickly to multiple customers." - Quinn A.
Overview
A solution for SaaS-based businesses, Custify helps you understand the customer lifecycle and identify upselling opportunities. With its features, you can reduce churn, improve product adoption, and manage customers to maximize revenue. It helps you save the time of manually gathering information and instead spending it to build powerful customer relationships.
Key Features
- Customer health scorecards that give you customer health scores for better segmentation
- Predictive analytics and insights to track everything in one view
- Integrations with tools such as Slack, Outlook, and Stripe
Pros
- Flexible approach to calculated metrics
- Intuitive and visual playbook builder
- Comprehensive understanding of which SaaS features are used
Pricing
- Custom
4. HubSpot Service Hub
"It gives me the ability to have a "one-stop-shop" so to speak, with the number of app integrations Hubspot has it enables users to build a system specifically for their needs. The feedback survey feature alone has helped us grow by being able to address customer needs we probably never would have heard about otherwise.
Their support team has always been great, I am a person who asks a whole lot of questions and I've always felt like their support was happy to assist. That is about their attitude (which again is great) but I would like to add that the quality of support matches up." - Braydon H.
Overview
HubSpot Service Hub is a customer service platform for small to medium businesses and connect all customer service data and channels into one comprehensive platform. The platform helps you identify opportunities to deliver authentic experiences and connect with customers on a deeper level. It also provides automated workflows, intelligent routing of requests, and a holistic view of customer issues.
Key Features
- Conversation intelligence that captures details from every call and chat
- Knowledge base so customers can help themselves
- Shared inbox to route customer inquiries
Pros
- Customized properties and workflows
- Send customer support, customer satisfaction (CSAT), and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
- Numerous app integrations
Pricing
- Free: $0/month
- Starter: $45/month
- Professional: $450/month
- Enterprise: $1,200/month
- $0/month (Free)
- $45/month (Starter)
- $450/month (Professional)
- $1,200/month (Enterprise)
5. ChurnZero
"Before ChurnZero, as a company, we were reaching out to all clients at least once a month. When you have over 400 clients, that is a daunting task. We were looking for ways to make our reach outs more applicable.
ChurnZero health scores have been able to provide us with very valuable information and allowed us to reach out less often to those clients who are engaged and maybe don't need as much help and reach out more to those clients that need a little more help. This has all happened through health scores! This has streamlined our processes and allowed for more meaningful client interactions." - Kalyn T.
Overview
ChurnZero reduces churn by providing customer success teams complete visibility into customer accounts. The SaaS platform focuses on a seamless customer onboarding journey and also provides data-driven insights that serve as the single source of truth for customer success teams.
Key Features
- Real-time alerts to stay on top of customer health
- Segmentation capabilities so teams can quickly identify at risk customers \
- Automated customer engagements during onboardings
Pros
- Plays to automate tedious tasks
- Track the customer journey
- Integrated survey tool
Pricing
- Custom
6. Totango
"I love how easy it is to create email campaigns in Totango! I sometimes have to use HubSpot for email creation, and after working in Totango, I realize how much more user-friendly and intuitive Totango is.
I love all of the component options that are built out as they are extremely easy to add to your emails and edit as needed. I also LOVE Totango's customer support team. They are very quick to resolve cases that I submit to them and they are thorough in their responses to me." - Marissa B.
Overview
Totango boasts an agile customer success platform specifically designed for scaling up in the modern enterprise. The platform is suited to fast-growing businesses that want a platform that adapts to their customer journey and drives fast time-to-value.
Key Features
- Modular approach ensures you get up and running quickly
- Pre-built workflows to automate customer success processes
- Scorecards to help you measure progress
Pros
- Powerful customer segmentation capabilities
- Complete visibility into usage and status
- Real-time access to customer data
Pricing
- Community: Free
- Starter: $249/month
- Growth: $1,099/month
- Enterprise: Custom
7. Catalyst
"The customizability of Catalyst is outstanding: From creating our customer journey with automatic stage advancement triggers to adding recovery plans to accounts. Aesthetically pleasing account overviews with numeric health scores. Also, bringing our Looker data right into the user interface to help prep for client calls. Catalyst is quickly becoming our single source of truth after only a few months of working with it." - Giuseppe M.
Overview
Catalyst turns customer success teams into growth engines and boasts the highest adoption in the industry, a real-time bi-directional Salesforce synch, and enterprise-ready integrations. Catalyst's intuitive and customizable interface makes it a favorite among customer success teams around the globe.
Key Features
- Complete integration with your tech stack so you get all the data in one place
- Playbooks and triggers that provide insight into leading indicators of expansion, churn, and upsell
- Standardized processes and workflows to scale customer success operations
Pros
- Templates to streamline workflows
- Excellent integration with Salesforce
- Layouts and charts to drive deeper insights
Pricing
- Custom
8. Planhat
"Planhat is what I have been missing for quite some time, a dedicated CS Platform. It focuses on the customers and the contacts (end users) that make up the people relationship for your business. They provide powerful features for automating the manual tasks that go into Customer Success and provide structure with easy-to-use playbooks and page views. The team can track and log their tasks and engagement quickly and efficiently." - Michael E.
Overview
Plathat enables a customer-centric approach to customer success with its comprehensive suite of features. Its automations are a no-code solution and you can create custom bots and integrations to automate customer onboarding, updates, and more.
Key Features
- Complete visibility in the customer lifecycle so you can quickly identify at risk customers
- Visualize customer usage data in real-time to drive insights
- Custom metrics visible to customers so they can see their own usage
Pros
- User-friendly interface
- Automation of customer touch points
- Responsive support team
Pricing
- Custom
Wrap Up
Finding the ideal customer success software is a critical step in empowering your business to deliver outstanding customer experiences, foster loyalty, and drive growth. With numerous software options available, it's essential to focus on features such as integration capabilities, scalability, customization, automation, and self-service support to identify the solution that best aligns with your organization's unique needs and goals.
Among the various options, Helpjuice is a notable contender for its user-friendly and customizable knowledge base platform. However, it's crucial to evaluate each software solution in the context of your specific requirements, considering factors such as your existing systems, team dynamics, and customer base.
Ultimately, investing in the right customer success software will not only enhance your customers' experiences but also enable your team to work more efficiently and effectively. Take the time to explore and compare different options, and you'll be well on your way to achieving exceptional customer success for your business.
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