ChurnZero 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.

Planhat is very cost-effective compared to its competitors and offers a similar level of functionality. So if you are looking for a CS platform that will give your CSM's all the data they need to manage their portfolio, then Planhat will do the job very well. I was part of the team that was tasked with selecting a CS platform for Pexip, and the combination of cost and performance made Planhat a clear winner against the other two products we were evaluating.

I still use Salesforce on a daily basis because that's the platform we use to generate quotes. It would be nice if I only had one platform to perform all of my CS tasks in. I'm not sure if that's a criticism of Planhat or not, as I don't know if it has a quoting module that we haven't implemented, or whether that function simply isn't available.

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

• Excellent customer support and onboarding experience. They are very quick to respond to queries via the live chat. Our CS manager was brilliant in helping us get set up and making sure we were getting the most from all the features.
• The platform and features are very user friendly and intuitive. It's an extremely powerful tool with a lot of functionality, but thankfully it doesn't take long to learn how to use it.
• The customer portal is a game changer. The ability to share playbooks, data, and meeting notes all in one place is so useful for our customers and helps build trust and transparency.

• 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

• 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

Our onboarding experience with Planhat was smooth and quick. The features and dashboards are very intuitive and don't take long to get the hang of. The support team is very responsive and helpful. Our CSM really took time to understand the goals and objectives of our business and helped us make sure Planhat was working to deliver on these goals.

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

Planhat support is excellent. We have a dedicated resource allocated to work with us, and he is extremely knowledgeable, articulate and responsive. The wider support team at Planhat is also very good, responding quickly to any issues logged. As an end-user, you can chat with Planhat support if you encounter any issues or have any questions, and they have always helped me.

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

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

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

• 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.