ChurnZero vs. ClientSuccess vs. Planhat

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.

Client Success is well suited to both growing and established companies who know what they want and need to track for their clients. With the broad ability to support numerous accounts, have multiple users, and its custom success cycles to map a clients progress, it would be a great solution for any Client Success team. I think that teams that are unaware of what they need to track wouldn't find Client Success as useful, and organizations that require a large number of custom client descriptions and variables would find certain limitations a barrier to successfully using this tool.

Incentivized

For someone working in the Customer Success team, Planhat is a must-have software. All your client-level data can be easily managed, stored, and reviewed at any point in time by Planhat. It also helps the management and the leadership team better see each account and its usage. It also helps in identifying potentially risky customers and taking the required actions to engage and retain the account. It also gets integrated easily with other meeting recording tools wherein the summary from the tool gets easily synced with Planhat

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

• ClientSuccess makes it easy for our customer success managers to manage their workflows and provides excellent visibility into our company's customer activity and engagement. We're able to log into CS and regularly check segments of our customers that need to be engaged with on a daily basis, log customer health, and be aware of approaching subscription renewals in order to pay appropriate attention to the right customers.
• The user interface is easy to use, friendly in design, and quick to learn. They make it look attractive with bright color schemes without overdoing it too much.
• As a customer success manager myself, I am appreciative of how this tool has kickstarted our fairly-new Customer Success department and made us much more organized and knowledgeable as a customer-facing entity.
• Their customer success/support teams are excellent as well - which is to be expected. We've felt very well taken care of since we became customers of ClientSuccess.

Incentivized

• Reporting - you can set up filters with boolean criteria to give you insight into everything you need to know.
• Playbooks - these are very good for less-experienced CSM's who need a step-by-step guide on how to deal with different stages of the customer lifecycle. More experienced CSM's may not need the playbooks.
• Usage data for customers - there's a wide range of charts in Planhat that tell the story of client consumption.

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

• The support view takes a few steps to get to the meat and potatoes.
• The success score model can be improved to include smaller one-off campaigns. Success score is good for a campaign that has existed for a while but not for the one-off projects.

Incentivized

• Allow for cc'ing of AEs or others within the same organization from the messaging center. When I went to send a message from within Planhat, I had to manually type out the AE's email address every time if I wanted them cc'd.
• The fonts were funky if I went to add text into an existing email template. For example, if I added in an extra sentence or paragraph, in Outlook on the recipient's end, the font was different despite looking the same within Planhat. Gmail was all consistent, Outlook was showing a different font.

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

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

It takes a while to learn Planhat even for experienced users. It has limitations in terms of what data you can present where, but its important to set internal guides outside Planhat as well so everybody working collaborative. But as CSM Planhat is a great- and critical tool which I use daily to optimise my work schedule and customer interaction with various topics.

Incentivized

Quick response by the CZ team.

Incentivized

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

They are SUPER responsive...even for late night inquiries.

Incentivized

The support team couldn't be better. They are quick to respond, very helpful, and thorough. Our CS manager was always happy to schedule calls to go through specific feature queries and she ensured we had a smooth and quick setup.

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

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

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

HubSpot is excellent as it was an easy expansion from the sales and marketing work we were using it for. It meets our needs but isn't entirely as geared towards customer success like ClientSuccess. ClientSuccess has more bells and whistles that are out of the box vs. HubSpot, where the capabilities may exist but require a little more leg work.

Incentivized

I was not the person involved in choosing Planhat, but it seems to me that Planhat is much better suited to an account management style role, whereas Hubspot is closer to a sales CRM instead. In my position, Planhat is better suited as it is more graphical, more flexible, and easier to find information on.

Incentivized

Easy to escalate.

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

• Within the first week, leadership was able to have more visibility into the lifestage and health score of each client
• We needed to become more proactive as an organization and this platform has allowed us to do so with real-time metrics and reporting.
• We needed to find a way to scale our approach, especially as our Client Success organization continues to grow, and this is already helping.

• Planhat has, for the first time, given us a 360-degree view of all our customers and access to all the different types of communication we have with them across different departments and functions.
• The ability to automate workflows, tasks, and assign playbooks to the various phases of our customer lifecycle has aligned all our departments.