Churn Buster vs. ChurnZero vs. Gainsight CS

If you are a SaaS business with a high volume of customers, having ChurnZero is a must. If you have a subscription based business and a customer success or account management function in your company, I would highly recommend ChurnZero.

There are a couple of tedious areas that can give CSMs double work, like when they fill out details in a text form field, but if they don't click save for each form field, they have to retype everything. Overall, I think this is one of the better CRMs to use for companies that are enterprise. It's fast, intuitive, and easy to use.

Incentivized

• ChurnZero has excellent customer success! They worked very hard to ensure a successful implementation and launch.
• The CZ platform gives a detailed view of customer usage. We know exactly how clients are using our platform which allows us to provide excellent customer success services. This allows helps our product team understand the needs of clients and the success of new features.
• We are able to create plays based on usage which provides a customized and personal experience for each user. CZ makes it possible to give our clients what they need when they need it.

Incentivized

• Ability to capture all customer information in one spot
• Gantt charts for overall success plans to map out TAM deliverables
• Automatically integrate feeds from sources to build reports as needed
• Ability to capture customer follow-up tasks so I'm not trying to capture the list of actions too repetitively (e.g. using the "Tasks" section of an entry)
• Ability to use the plugin to automatically add emails to timeline; ability to use calendar integration to automatically add meeting minutes that will sync up to Gong notes

Incentivized

• When composing an email out of segments, the ability to save it as a draft to review later would be awesome, instead of needing to set up a Play
• In the admin section, I love that we can have a color palate - but we'd like the color palete to be applied in other areas so CZ has more of our companies branding
• The content templates can be hard to stylize if you don't know html
• Add the Merge Fields functionality to tasks, especially tasks made by playbooks

Incentivized

• Quite time consuming from a system admin perspective. It can do almost anything but does nothing without a system admin building it. Example, I wanted to identify accounts in Gainsight that didn't have any contacts (people) records. It's possible, but requires creating a custom field and a rule in the Rules Engine, and then a report.
• Customer Goals and Success Plans feel like they should be tightly connected but aren't. My impression is that these were two separate features developed at different times that have never been properly reconciled.
• Need better customer facing features. Hoping that the new Spaces functionality is a good answer to this.
• Connection between CTAs and Tasks can get confusing. Some follow up items are so simple that I want to just create a CTA without any tasks, but the flaw with that approach is that it won't show up if I have any views that are based on Tasks. So I have to toggle between views of CTAs and Tasks and understand them as sometimes the same thing and sometimes different things.
• It's nice to be able to send a Timeline entry via email, which we WANT to use for sending meeting recaps, but there isn't a way to have an email template in this area. Our CSMs send many, many meeting recaps via email and we haven't been able to identify a good approach that gives us both a fast process for CSMs and a professional customer facing email.

Incentivized

Our team is very happy with the product after evaluating multiple vendors, including Gainsight, Totango and Planhat. We like the additional functionality that CZ offers on its enterprise version. We were strongly considering other products if the price was right and functionality worked, but the change management would have been too heavy and taken too long. The ChurnZero team has been a good partner to rely on and allowed us to free up our time and resources to focus on more pressing matters

Incentivized

Gainsight offers a level of support that I've not experience before. They will work with you to come up with a solution to a problem - or help match you with another client that has a similar setup as you to get their feedback. Also the functionality that we have built within the software works for us. It's 'easy' to use (once you get the hang of it) and our users rather enjoy working in the software.

Incentivized

ChurnZero makes my work life a complete game changer. I say it all the time ChurnZero is a one stop shop for data! I don't fumble through numerous different programs, try to remember different passwords, I literally login to CZ and it is right there in front of me

Incentivized

Reiterating that yes, it is one of the major players, and has for many years been a pioneer in driving customer success tooling, but is lagging behind with what you pay vs. the agility you want and need these days. Rather, OK to adopt internally, but CS members feel it is too administrative.

Incentivized

Quick response by the CZ team.

Incentivized

Rarely any issues with availability or outages. When they do occur, there is excellent communication and consistent updates. Bugs are usually addressed in a timely manner, and communication around those issues is also extremely good

Incentivized

There are some times when it can take almost a minute to load some of our reports or the rules engine. Within a rule it can also take time to load the actions as they each load one at a time when scrolling. The ability to scroll without waiting would be ideal

I recently had the opportunity to interact with ChurnZero's customer support team, and I must say, I am thoroughly impressed. Their responsiveness and willingness to solve problems are exemplary. From the moment I reached out, their team displayed a level of professionalism and dedication that truly stood out.

Incentivized

The CSMs are very hands-on and helpful, both Elaine and Lane have provided a lot of guidance and value over the years. Support is responsive and will jump on things as needed. The thought leadership and community is probably the most valuable part of our support from Gainsight.

Incentivized

The training and onboarding have been very helpful. Since I was not a part of the team when ChurnZero was implemented, it was important to get brought up to speed as quickly as possible and our CSM has been incredibly receptive in that regard.

Incentivized

The online videos are very good for basic tasks in the platform, but it isn't very descriptive or helpful trying to make your own specific variables fit the simple example that is typically used. Typically, I'll watch a video, try on my own and still have to get help from support or Customer Success team

I implemented CZ in 4 months. When I look back, this is not a long time where I needed to get to know CZ by myself (as I did not have knowledge of it at all..) study the Academy, playing around in the test environment and setting up in live environment.

Incentivized

I was not part of the implantation (I took over later). However, based on what was passed to me, the tool was not well implemented at our org. I think this had to do with complexity, wrong person assigned in our org, and org buy-in. I think it would have been very successful if we had a better assignment process internally.

Incentivized

Gainsight CS - you need a team to manage this tool; not intuitive to use, and you're not able to be as agile once configured GUIDEcx - One of my favorites in the space, and so easy to set up, configure, customize, and scale. Able to connect onboarding milestones to SFDC cases, and share out as a customer portal. Mixmax has been purchased in past companies to help fill in gaps of other tools (gives us scheduling links, in-inbox email templates, SFDC lead/contact and task management)

Incentivized

Gainsight has always been the leader in the industry, in my opinion. While a lot more expensive that their competitors, the tool seems to have a better UI and functionality that support the CS organization. My prior employer had a very good implementation of Gainsight and it's a tool I used every day. Some from the Sales org also wanted access based on the great data I was able to monitor from the tool. When talking to customers, the graphs and trends helped me tell a story of activity that was very helpful.

Incentivized

Easy to escalate.

Incentivized

It can lean a little heavily toward Customer Success, but the ability to customize many areas based on specific user or account characteristics allows you to make it work across many different roles. This also makes collaboration within the tool across teams possible. It a flexible tool if you have a skilled admin to help guide your process building.

Incentivized

• ChurnZero has transformed our NPS strategy, helping us get in front of unhappy customers faster
• ChurnZero has reduced confusion and data cleanliness issues across our CS org
• Their customer support has helped us implement and get up and running with Churnzero in excellent time.

Incentivized

• No metrics yet, but we have improved our at-risk customers by identifying risks earlier via our automated health score and with our Gainsight approved mitigation workflow, CSMs and leaders have better discipline with mitigation efforts and sharing at-risk customers across the org so other teams can step in and assist

Incentivized