5 Customer Success Platforms You Should Know

Customer success management software (CSM) is a vital component of many CS teams’ successes. Customer success management software is designed to provide tools to ensure that customers achieve their desired outcomes with a product. Typical customer success software provides features such as customer engagement analytics, product usage tracking and adoption, renewals dashboards, NPS surveys, and other customer-centric insights.

Customer success software should not be confused with customer relationship management software (CRM). CRM software focuses on managing business data pertaining to customers and ensuring positive customer support experiences. CSM software on the other hand, enables customer success managers to help their clients attain their goals. Customer success software is less about tracking customer data and tickets, more about managing the ongoing delivery of value and the assessment of client outcomes.

On TrustRadius, leading Customer Success platforms are ChurnZero, Intercom, ClientSuccess, Gainsight, and Totango. These tools stand out from the crowd on TrustRadius by having high overall star ratings (their trScore) and research frequencies (how many buyers are checking out these tools). In this blog post, we’ll highlight these popular tools and what their current users like about them.

ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a customer success platform designed to help SaaS companies prevent customer churn. ChurnZero provides users with a command center through which they can manage their customer-related to-dos and customer relationships. It also features automated reports, customer segmentation analytics, real-time notifications and usage tracking, built-in marketing automation, and customer support.

On TrustRadius, ChurnZero’s highest-rated feature is for customer segmentation (8.9), the task of adeptly creating customer groups based on common characteristics or demographics to maximize marketing efficiency. Its next best-rated feature is for customer health scoring (8.7), or its ability at tracking and communicating metrics on a customer’s likelihood to remain a client.

“ChurnZero is great for CS teams, and for those who rely on customer information to always be up to date and monitored. The platform allows anyone to pick up exactly where they last left off with the client, since it enabled all correspondence to/from the customer to be rolled up into one place.”

Chad S. | Account Manager | Computer Software

Intercom

Intercom is a customer-centric messaging platform with specialized solutions for lead generation, customer engagement, and customer support. It is designed to drive loyalty and growth throughout the customer lifecycle and can be used for efficiently on-boarding enterprise clients. Some of its key capabilities provide users with automated chatbots and customer self-service, automatic lead qualifications and auto-routed conversations, and guided product tours using its tools.

Unlike the other products on our list, Intercom’s primary category is live chat software, not customer success software. Owing to this, Intercom is not rated on the same set of customer-success-focused features. However, they’re overall likelihood to recommend score is great—a solid 8.6. Throughout Intercom’s reviews, customers excitedly call out Intercom’s breadth of capabilities to manage both customer experience and customer success in one application.

“We love the interface and especially the fact that the company is so dedicated to customer success with constant product improvement and thoughtful resources. Intercom is robust enough to help us meet our customers’ needs but also simple for new employees to learn.”

Verified User | Director in Marketing | Computer Software

ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess describes itself as a customer success software platform that helps executives and their customer success teams retain and grow their existing customer base. Its biggest selling point is that it aims to be an all-in-one platform for managing customer data and insights. It provides real-time alerts, trends, and reports for all customer segments. It can also track subscriptions, monthly recurring revenue, and annual recurring revenue.

API capabilities are the highest-rated feature for ClientSuccess (8.8). Its next highest-rated features are its sponsor tracking and customer profile tools (8.7). Sponsor tracking is used to manage changes in point-of-contact along job titles, new hires, and departures. Customer profiles are useful for managing and tracking the needs of individual customers.

“It is extremely well suited for a company like ours where each Customer Success Manager manages a lot of different customers and even has the added difficulty of some workers working remotely. It keeps us on track and in sync for how we handle each phase of the customer journey.”

Shannon K. | College Athletics Customer Success Manager | Computer Software

Gainsight

Gainsight Customer Success is the customer-success-focused component of the Gainsight Customer Cloud which also includes software designed for managing product experience, customer experience, customer data, and revenue optimization. Gainsight Customer Success provides analytics and reporting, team collaboration tools, customer feedback and engagement features, and tracking for customer adoption and retention.

Gainsight’s highest-rated feature is its NPS survey capabilities (9.3). Its next highest-rated features are its customer profile tools and customer health scoring, tied at 9.2. NPS surveys, or net promoter score surveys, help you analyze customer loyalty beyond simple customer satisfaction ratings that is more closely correlated to actual revenue growth.

“In a customer success setting, Gainsight is highly efficient in helping CSA/Ms keep up with hundreds of customers. Being layered on top of Salesforce is key as well because there is a lot of automation with data gathering and it makes it easy to figure out your point of contact within a customer’s organization or figuring out what you need to get accomplished that day.”

Nikhil G. | Customer Success Advocate | Telecommunications

Totango

Totango is a mid-market-focused customer success platform.  Totango takes an “enterprise-to-customer” approach to designing their software to optimize growth, ideally with every employee at a company adopting this strategy. Its three main pillars are enterprise impact, customer-centric data, and customer engagement. Some of its key modules, which it calls SucessBlocs, assist users with managing KPIs, customer segments, assets, campaigns, and reports.

TrustRadius reviewers highly rate Totango’s product usage insights, customer profiles, and customer health scoring metrics, all at 7.8. Its next highest-rated capability is its customer health trends tracking. Product usage insights help customer success teams identify product strengths and weaknesses by providing analyses related to user engagement, issue tracking, and A/B testing results, for example.

“I’ve worked with two other mainstream Customer Success-focused products in the past, and found their UIs very complex, particularly around navigation and creating custom reports. One in particular required heavy assistance from the product’s CSM to stand up custom reports. I find that Totango has a very intuitive user interface and a simplified approach to reporting. Best of all, my Totango Customer Success Manager (CSM) is in frequent communication throughout the course of the month so I rarely ever feel ‘stuck.’”

Verified User | Account Manager | Information Technology

What’s good in the neighborhood?

Whether you’re just exploring customer success software, or currently utilizing one at your business, check out reviews in the space on TrustRadius for additional insight into the CSM market. If you see your current tool on TrustRadius, write a review! Writing a review is a great way to help other buyers like you evaluate a new CSM platform. In the process, you may uncover new criteria you had not considered in your evaluation that may prove useful on your buyer’s journey.