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Customer Success Software Shortlist

Here are the top 10 customer success software I’d like to highlight out of the 25 I cover in this article:

  1. 1. Churn360 — Best for consolidating customer data and automating processes
  2. 2. Tidio — Best for its customer behavior analysis
  3. 3. Product Fruits — Best for collecting detailed customer onboarding feedback
  4. 4. ChurnZero — Best for managing customer churn risks
  5. 5. Planhat — Best multichannel customer success software
  6. 6. Podium — Best customer success software for SMS & text marketing
  7. 7. GuideCX — Best for customer & client onboarding
  8. 8. Catalyst — Best customer success software for upselling & retention
  9. 9. Skilljar — Best customer success software for customer education
  10. 10. Zendesk — Best customer ticketing system

When your customers win, your company wins. Ensuring that customers get the most out of your products and services will naturally encourage brand loyalty, and in turn, increase sales. That's why focusing on customer success is so impactful: Because their success is yours as well. 

This article features the best customer success software on the market today and shares how to use them in your bid to retain customers and amplify profits. 

What is Customer Success Software?

Customer success software is a type of software designed to help businesses improve their relationship with customers and ensure their success. The main goal of customer success software is to help businesses provide the best possible customer experience, build customer loyalty, and increase customer retention.

Customer success software typically includes features such as live chat, ticketing systems, customer relationship management (CRM), analytics and reporting, and customer feedback and surveys. By using these tools, businesses can track customer interactions, respond to customer inquiries in real-time, identify customer pain points and needs, and proactively address potential issues to ensure customer satisfaction and success.

In summary, customer success software is designed to help businesses build and maintain strong relationships with their customers, and to ensure their success by providing the best possible customer experience and support.

Overviews Of The 25 Best Customer Success Software Solutions

Here’s a brief description of each customer success app to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.

1

Churn360

Best for consolidating customer data and automating processes

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.8
28 reviews

Free demo available

From $199/month

Churn360 is a customer success software designed to help reduce churn and improve customer retention. It can help you monitor customer behavior, identify at-risk customers, and take proactive steps to keep them engaged and satisfied.

Why I picked Churn360: The software — as its name suggests — provides users with a 360-degree view of their customers. What does this mean? It pulls together customer data from various sources (like your CRM, communication channels, and financial platforms) to provide a holistic overview of a customer's lifecycle and history with your company. This helps team members pick up on accounts they're unfamiliar with and provide exceptional, contextual support.

You can also automate various parts of your CX processes with the platform. You can also segment customers to target them with specific communications, manage success campaigns, and set automated actions based on behavioral triggers. A health score is also calculated for each customer to give you a quick pulse on their engagement and churn risk.

Churn360 Standout Features & Integrations

Features include customer data profiles, shared dashboard, customer journey mapping, segmentation, campaign management, automated tasks, push notifications, and analytics and reporting tools.

Integrations include Intercom, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Chargebee, Freshdesk, Jira, Gmail, Outlook, Zoho CRM, Stripe, Zendesk, and Segment, among others.

2

Tidio

Best for its customer behavior analysis

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7
1410 reviews

7-day free trial + free plan available

From $25/user/month

Tidio is a customer success software that helps customer experience teams manage customer interactions using live chat, email marketing, chatbots, and customer feedback.

Why I Picked Tidio: Tidio helps you engage with customers proactively, understand their needs, and resolve their issues. Its ticketing system enables your customer experience teams to track and resolve customer queries and requests. The software includes a knowledge base and community forum for sharing best practices, providing a searchable database of articles and FAQs that can be used to resolve customer queries.

Tidio’s live chat tool enables you to engage in real-time customer conversations. You can also build and configure chatbots which help send automatic replies for missed conversations and personalized messages for returning visitors. Tidio also helps you segment customers and site visitors based on behavior so that you can send personalized messages.

It provides a centralized platform for tracking customer engagement data, helping you get a complete picture of the customer journey and identify areas where the customer experience can be improved. Tidio's conversation-related metrics provide insight into the number of conversations an operator engages with, response times, and missed conversations.

Tideo Standout Features & Integrations

Features include live chat, chatbots, email automation, knowledge base, analytics, customization, mobile app, multilingual support, file sharing, chat history, customer surveys, user roles and permissions, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include email integration, which is helpful for having multiple email inboxes. Integrations include Zendesk, Google Analytics, Pipedrive, Mailchimp, OpenCart, and thousands more through Zapier.

3

Product Fruits

Best for collecting detailed customer onboarding feedback

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7
13 reviews

14-day free trial available

From $89/month

Product Fruits is a user onboarding software that helps businesses understand their customers' needs and track their satisfaction levels through surveys and feedback. 

Why I Picked Product Fruits: the software helps product owners onboard new customers and engage existing ones by creating interactive in-app flows such as surveys and messaging.

The surveys and feedback mechanisms are easy to set up and customize, making it simple to get started with collecting customer feedback. Users can add videos and screenshots to provide greater context and clarity. You can automate surveys and feedback requests to collect customer feedback regularly. The tool also offers real-time reporting and analytics, giving businesses the ability to monitor customer satisfaction levels of a product and respond to feedback quickly.

Product Fruits Standout Features & Integrations

Features include tours and walkthroughs, tooltips, feedback widget, life ring button, in-app announcements, knowledge base, and onboarding checklists.

Integrations include Mixpanel, Heap, Google Analytics, Customer.io, Slack, HubSpot, Smartlook, Sessionstack, and Segment.

4

ChurnZero

Best for managing customer churn risks

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7
598 reviews

Free Demo

ChurnZero customer success software is a cloud-based customer success platform that helps you manage churn risks. It's designed to help you identify your most at-risk customers, engage them, and retain them.

Why I Picked ChurnZero: ChurnZero uses data science to identify at-risk customers based on what they've done in the past and what they're doing now. The software then uses machine learning to predict which customers are likely to leave, so you can take action before they do. ChurnZero customers can use the platform's features to identify their most at-risk customers; set up automated messages to encourage engagement with these customers; and use a predictive model to reach out to these customers before they leave.

ChurnZero is a simple, easy to use customer success software that helps you avoid customer attrition. The tool provides actionable insights into your customer behaviour and lets you track their activities across many online platforms at once. It also offers an automated retention process for keeping an eye on your users and ensuring they don't leave.

ChurnZero Standout Features & Integrations

Features include client account insights, chatbots, custom dashboards, customer health scores, customer journeys, customer segmentation, artificial intelligence, workflow automations, real-time alerts, reporting & analytics, REST API access, customer surveys, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include SAlesforce, Hubspot, Netsuite, Close.io, Spiro, Zoho CRM, Chargebee, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, Pipedrive, Copper, Freshsales, Zendesk Sell, Teamwork CRM, Helpscout, Jira, Segment, Pendo, and other tools. ChurnZero also offers a REST API if you would like to integrate your data into a system not listed.

5

Planhat

Best multichannel customer success software

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7
215 reviews

Free Demo

Pricing upon request

Planhat is an all-in-one customer success software solution that allows users to easily and accurately manage customer relationships, track customers’ usage of their products, identify areas of improvement, and create personalized support services. 

Why I Picked Planhat: What makes Planhat stand out from other customer success solutions is its ability to collect data from multiple sources such as email, web analytics, social media channels, and CRM systems. This data is used to create tailored analytics dashbaordcs and reports to inform strategies for improving customer engagement and loyalty.

Planhat also offers detailed analytics reports that provide insights into customers’ behavior and preferences. With its intuitive interface, Planhat makes it easy for users to navigate the program and make informed decisions about how best to interact with their customers.

Planhat enables users to tailor their customers’ experiences according to their preferences, creating an environment that encourages loyalty. There are also detailed customer profiles, which provide an in-depth look into each user’s journey. This allows users to adjust strategies easily to meet cutomer needs.

Planhat Standout Features & Integations

Features include customer data management, filters, sandbox environment, shared inbox, NPS, automations, dashboards, revenue management, customer portqal,custom roles & permissions, single-sign-on, customer health scores, task management, alerts, and third-party integrations/add-ons. 

Integations include Aircall, Pendo, Segment, SatisMeter, Stitch, Pipedrive, Salesforce, Outlook, Complete CSM, Jira, Mixpanel, Inercom, Mailchimp, Snowflake, Slack, Delighted, Chili Piper, Gmail, Promoter, Ctrl,Zendewsk, Hubspot, FReshdesk, Mandrill, and more if you have a separate account with Zaperi (may incur additional costs). 

6

Podium

Best customer success software for SMS & text marketing

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.6
1247 reviews

Free demo available

From $289/month

Podium is a customer success software that helps organizations manage customer engagement, communication, and feedback to improve customer satisfaction and retention.

Why I Picked Podium: Podium customer success software is a comprehensive platform for SMS marketing and text marketing. With Podium, organizations can send personalized text messages to customers, such as appointment reminders, promotional offers, and other important updates. 

Another key feature of Podium is its ability to monitor customer engagement and usage, including SMS engagement. This helps organizations to identify customers who are not responding to text messages and take action to re-engage them.

Podium also automates routine tasks and workflows, including SMS marketing campaigns. For example, Podium can be used to automate the sending of promotional offers and appointment reminders via SMS.

Podium provides tools for personalizing SMS marketing messages based on customer data, such as location, behavior, and preferences. This makes it possible to create targeted SMS marketing campaigns that are more relevant and effective. 

Podium Standout Features & Integrations

Features include customer communication, feedback management, customer engagement, automated workflows, customizable dashboards, analytics & reporting, text marketing, payment processing, website chat, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include Salesforce, Hubspot, Zoho CRM, Marketo, Pardot, Stripe, PayPal, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Yelp, and TripAdvisor.

7

GuideCX

Best for customer & client onboarding

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.7
158 reviews

Offer a free trial and a free demo

Pricing Upon Request

GuideCX is a customer experience management platform that provides a centralized location for managing customer interactions and improving customer satisfaction.

Why I Picked GuideCX: GuideCX is used for customer and client onboarding as a means of improving customer satisfaction and success. The platform provides a centralized location for managing customer interactions, making it easy to ensure that customers receive a consistent and positive experience. GuideCX provides tools for automating onboarding processes, reducing manual tasks, and improving efficiency.

For customer success initiatives, GuideCX provides a streamlined approach to customer onboarding that can help to improve customer satisfaction and reduce churn. With GuideCX, customer success teams can create custom onboarding journeys for each customer that align with their unique needs and goals. This includes providing personalized training and resources, setting clear expectations, and tracking progress towards success.

GuideCX also provides tools for monitoring customer engagement and usage, making it easy to identify potential issues and take action to address them. The platform integrates with other tools and systems, such as CRM and marketing automation platforms, which helps to provide a complete view of the customer experience. By using GuideCX for customer and client onboarding, organizations can improve the customer experience, increase customer satisfaction, and drive customer success.

GuideCX Standout Features & Integrations

Features include customer onboarding, customer engagement, customizable journeys, automations, analytics & reporting, customer feedback, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Dynamics, Marketo, Pardot, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Stripe, Recurly, Jira, Trello, and other common apps.

8

Catalyst

Best customer success software for upselling & retention

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.6
477 reviews

Free Demo

Catalyst customer success software is a powerful customer relationship management platform that helps you to deliver personalized experiences to your customers for upselling and retention strategies. 

Why I Picked Catalyst: Catalyst helps you capture more leads, boost conversions, retain your existing customers, and grow your revenue with detailed analytics. They accomplish this using tools like automated customer communication follow-ups based on predetermined rules. You can create rules based on the behavior of customers, such as if they don't open emails, send them a reminder email. Or, if they haven't logged in to your platform for two weeks, then send them a 'we miss you' email. With this, you can follow up automatically with customers who are not engaging with your brand anymore.

They also offer comprehensive lead scoring. This feature allows businesses to classify leads into different categories based on their likelihood of becoming a customer. This feature helps businesses understand which customers are most likely going to convert into sales, return purchasers, upsells, and even brand advocates.

Catalyst Standout Features & Integrations

Features include custom dashboards, customer health scores, journey mapping, email automation, playbooks, workflow tools, customer segmentation, data import & export, customer activity tracking, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include Zendesk, Service Cloud, Salesforce, Google platforms, Outlook, Jira, Slack, Snowflake, Redshift, Segment, BigQuery, Redshift, Amazon S3, and Mixpanel.

9

Skilljar

Best customer success software for customer education

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.5
91 reviews

Pricing Upon Request

SkillJar is a cloud-based learning management system (LMS) designed to help organizations create, manage, and distribute online training courses to their employees or customers. It can be used for your customer success strategy by helping your customers become better acquainted with your product or service through dedicated training programs.

Why I Picked SkillJar: SkillJar can play an important role in customer success initiatives by providing a platform for onboarding and training, knowledge management, customer engagement, measuring success, and continual improvement. The platform makes it possible to create and deliver customized onboarding and training programs, which can help new customers get up and running quickly and effectively. By providing a centralized repository of knowledge and resources, SkillJar can make it easier for customers to find the information they need when they need it. 

Features such as gamification, quizzes, and interactive content can help keep customers engaged and motivated to continue learning and using the product. With reporting and analytics capabilities, SkillJar can help measure the impact of customer success initiatives, allowing organizations to track progress and adjust their strategies as needed. 

In general, SkillJar boasts excellent ease of use, an intuitive user interface, and the ability to create and manage professional-looking online courses quickly. It offers customizable features, robust reporting and analytics, and excellent customer support. 

SkillJar Standout Features & Integrations

Features include learning management, training & onboarding, course authroing, gamification, quizzess & assessments, interactive content, cutom branding, user management, reporting & analytics, and third-party integrations/add-ons.

Integrations include Salesforce, Marketo, Stripe, PayPal, Single-Sign-On (Okta, OneLogin, and Google SSO), and more if you have an account with Zapier (may incur additional costs). 

10

Zendesk

Best customer ticketing system

This is an aggregated rating for this tool including ratings from Crozdesk users and ratings from other sites.
4.3
5815 reviews

14-day free trial

From $19/user/month (billed annually)

Zendesk is a customer success software that provides key features such as ticketing systems, automated answers, live chat support, and knowledge base searches.

Why I Picked Zendesk: The ticketing system allows businesses to respond quickly to customer inquiries. Automated answers to common questions help speed up processes so that customers can get the information they need without waiting. Live chat support enables businesses to engage with their customers in real-time conversations, which helps foster strong relationships between businesses and customers.

The Zendesk ticketing system lets you easily manage your customer support tickets in one place. You can view all your open and closed tickets, as well as create new tickets and assign them to team members. It also makes it easy for team members to collaborate on customer support issues. With the commenting feature, team members can discuss tickets and add attachments to help resolve issues faster.

Zendesk includes a built-in customer satisfaction survey that helps you track how well your team is resolving customer issues. With this data, you can identify areas where your team needs improvement and make changes to improve the overall quality of your customer support.

ZendeskStandout Features & Integrations

Features include call integration, ticket management, workflow management, support forum, social media integration, email integration, customer management, contact management, analytics & reporting, knowldge base, instnt chat integrations,self-service portal, real-time alerts, CRM integrations, webchat, and API access.

Integrations include Salesforce, JIRA, Slack, Trello, JIRA, Zoom, Dropbox, Clubhouse, Asana, monday.com, Box, Nicereply, Harvestr, Shopify, Mailchimp, and dozens of other options. 

Need Expert Help Selecting The Right Customer Success Software?

We’ve joined up with Crozdesk.com to give all our readers (yes, you!) access to Crozdesk’s software advisors. Just use the form below to share your needs, and they will contact you at no cost or commitment. You will then be matched and connected to a shortlist of vendors that best fit your company, and you can access exclusive software discounts!

The Best Customer Success Software Solutions Summary Table

Tool Free Option Price
1
Churn360

Best for consolidating customer data and automating processes

Free demo available

From $199/month Visit Website
2
Tidio

Best for its customer behavior analysis

7-day free trial + free plan available

From $25/user/month Visit Website
3
Product Fruits

Best for collecting detailed customer onboarding feedback

14-day free trial available

From $89/month Visit Website
4
ChurnZero

Best for managing customer churn risks

Free Demo

Visit Website
5
Planhat

Best multichannel customer success software

Free Demo

Pricing upon request Visit Website
6
Podium

Best customer success software for SMS & text marketing

Free demo available

From $289/month Visit Website
7
GuideCX

Best for customer & client onboarding

Offer a free trial and a free demo

Pricing Upon Request Visit Website
8
Catalyst

Best customer success software for upselling & retention

Free Demo

Visit Website
9
Skilljar

Best customer success software for customer education

Not available

Pricing Upon Request Visit Website
10
Zendesk

Best customer ticketing system

14-day free trial

From $19/user/month (billed annually) Visit Website

Other Customer Success Options

Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.

  1. Totango

    Best for tracking & managing customer health scores

  2. Insided

    Best for managing NPS & CSAT scores

  3. Front

    Best for customized customer issue escalation paths

  4. Custify

    Customer success software for SaaS-centric companies.

  5. ClientSuccess

    Customer success platform for building healthy customer relationships.

  6. CustomerSuccessBox

    AI-powered customer success platform for driving product adoption.

  7. Accelo

    Professional services automation software for handling customer tickets.

  8. Rocketlane

    Customer onboarding platform.

  9. Gainsight

    Customer success and product experience software to help increase product adoption and reduce churn.

  10. Conversica

    Cloud-based software for attracting new customers and retaining existing ones with the help of virtual assistants.

  11. LiveAgent

    Customer support software with a ticket management system.

  12. Vitally

    Customer success platform for identifying trends and leveraging insights towards improved customer health scores.

  13. Involve.ai

    Software for gaining visibility on customer data to improve retention rates and increase revenue.

  14. ProfitWell

    Subscription software for customer success and revenue growth.

  15. Hubspot Service Hub

    A customer service software for small to medium businesses.

Selection Criteria for the Best Customer Success Software

Perhaps you're wondering how I selected the best customer success software for this list? To build this list, I evaluated and compared a wide range of customer success software with positive user ratings.

After determining my long list of top choices, I further honed my list by using the selection criteria below to see how each platform stacked up against the next one. I also drew on my years of CX experience to pinpoint the features that add a lot of value.

Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best customer success software for this article:

Core Functionality

There are many different types of customer success platforms, so the core functionality will vary from one to the next. I’ve made sure to explain each software’s main capabilities in my overviews.

Key Features

Here are the key features I look for when selecting software for customer success.

  1. Customer lifecycle management: Tools to help with customer onboarding, providing customer support, improving customer retention, encouraging renewals and upsells, and extending the customer lifecycle.
  2. Customer feedback: Survey tools to monitor customer sentiments and collect feedback from your customer base.
  3. Customer dashboard: This allows you to monitor key customer success metrics and metrics like net promoter score (NPS), CES, customer churn rates, and CSAT.
  4. Customer education: Customer success tools such as walkthroughs and tutorials. These empower customers to learn about your products and services to improve product adoption.
  5. Analytics & reporting: Provides actionable insights like customer health scores to identify at-risk customers and proactively act on them.
  6. Help desk: A platform through with customers can access your success agents and seek assistance and guidance.
  7. Workflow automation: Establishing clear processes for customer support and setting up automated notifications for your customer success team.
  8. In-app notifications: Tools to help customers navigate your app or website, triggered by specific customer behaviors or product usage insdicators.

Usability

I look for customer success solutions that are user-friendly and easy to implement. Your success team, sales team, marketing team, and product team might all need to access the platform. So, it should be fairly straightforward to navigate. Extra usability features like templates definitely caught my eye, too.

Integrations

I looked for integrations with SaaS tools that are popular among customer success teams. These included Slack, Microsoft Teams, and email management tools like Zendesk and Mailchimp. I also kept an eye out for integrations with popular cloud CRM software like Salesforce and HubSpot. It’s important that any new software platform can connect easily with the other tools your team members use in their day-to-day.

Pricing

When evaluating the cost of customer success software, it's important to consider the cost and the value the tool will provide. The tools on this list range from about $20 per user per month up to $200+ flat rate fees per month. Many have custom pricing based on your needs, and may offer discounts for startups and small businesses.

People Also Ask: Questions About Customer Success

Here are some answers to FAQs about customer success and software that CX teams use.

Other Customer Success Software

These other lists showcase additional customer success software reviews. If you haven't found what you're looking for yet, go ahead and give these a try.

What Next?

Here are some additional resources to complement your interest in customer success software:

What do you think about this list?

Customers who get what they need from products and services are happy customers and will continue to bring revenue to your company. Attracting new customers is more costly and time-consuming than retaining current ones. So companies need to focus on customer success. 

Customer success software is an excellent tool to help you address customer concerns and deliver exceptional services to help turn casual customers into loyal fans. 

Aside from customer success software, there are other useful tools your company can use to grow your business and attract new customers, and you can read about them when you subscribe to The CX Lead.

By Hannah Clark

Hannah Clark is the Editor of The CX Lead. After serving over 12 years working in front-line customer experience for major brands, Hannah pivoted to a career in digital publishing and media production. Having gained a holistic view of the challenges and intricacies of delivering exceptional experiences, Hannah aims to help CX practitioners 'level up' their skills by amplifying the voices of today's thought leaders in the space.

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