Customer Success Software
Best Customer Success Software
- Top Rated Customer Success Software include: Pendo.io, Intercom, and Totango.
- Other Customer Success Software on the TrustMap include: Gainsight, ClientSuccess, and Woopra.
- A complete list of Customer Success Software is available here.
TrustMaps are two-dimensional charts that compare products based on satisfaction ratings and research frequency by prospective buyers. Products must have 10 or more ratings to appear on this TrustMap, and those above the median line are considered Top Rated.
Customer Success Management Software Overview
What is Customer Success Management?
Customer Success Management is a relatively new phenomenon that came about as a result of the growing trend of the Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model and the subscription economy. When companies purchase software as a cloud-deployed monthly subscription rather than a large, upfront cost for on-premises solutions, it’s easier for unsatisfied customers to switch vendors. Since the bulk of profit is no longer an upfront cost, but rather a much lower monthly fee, vendors must keep customers around in order to derive revenue.
Therefore, some B2B technology vendors focus on ensuring their customers are successful – i.e. deriving continuous and growing value from the technology product – in order to reduce churn rate and increase upsell and cross-sell rates. This involves actions such as:
- selling to the right customers in the first place
- making sure they are using the product through onboarding and training
- providing proactive tech support
- making them aware of ways to expand their use of the product
Benefits & Capabilities of Customer Success Management Software
Customer Success Management Software is intended to help companies improve customer retention through increased visibility into the customer base. One key feature is tracking customer usage and adoption of your product, which can allow you to identify at-risk customers (or power users) and set up alerts or automated personalized responses.
Other capabilities include NPS surveys, customer health scoring, customer profiles, and rule-based automated workflow (i.e., trigger actions based on changes in customer data or engagement). Many CSM software products integrate with email marketing or marketing automation solutions to enable triggered communications based actions the customer takes within the vendor’s product.
Products like Intercom enable this kind of contextual, usage-based communication in-product, whereas products like Woopra and Pendo provide the usage statistics and segmentation capabilities that CSMs can use to trigger communications from within other systems. (Customer success is one use case for these three products; however they are also used by other customer experience/engagement teams, such as Marketing, and are more likely to be integrated with than compete directly with full CSM suites.) Gainsight, Totango, ClientSuccess, and Natero are examples of broader Customer Success Management suites.
The benefits of using Customer Success Management Software include the ability to proactively find customers that need attention, prioritize areas of response, identify upsell and cross-sell opportunities, optimize the customer lifecycle, and discover customer advocates.
The software is primarily used by customer success managers, account managers and sales executives.
Customer Success Products
Gainsight
Gainsight says they enable business transformation through their passionate community, proven expertise, and cutting edge technology. In addition to the largest customer success community, the vendor says they also have a diverse, 333+ customer base spanning across Fortune 1000 companies such as...
Totango
Totango is a customer success platform that is designed to help recurring revenue businesses simplify the complexities of customer success by connecting the dots of customer data, actively monitoring customer health changes, and driving proactive engagements. According to the vendor, Totango is...
Intercom
Intercom is a contextual messaging system from the company of the same name founded in 2011 and based in San Francisco. Central to Intercom is live engagement with customers who visit your site or use your apps via text, chat, or email, or summarily: contextual messages for customer outreach....
Pendo.io
Pendo.io is a product engagement platform with features for in-app analytics, surveys and feedback, and guidance.
Woopra
Woopra provides real-time customer analytics. It begins by tracking users across digital touch points (website, mobile app, help desk, marketing automation, etc.) and building a comprehensive behavioral profile for each user. These Customer Profiles are Woopra's building blocks, which are used to...
ClientSuccess
ClientSuccess is the relatively new customer success management platform from the relatively new company (2014) of the same name in Lehi, Utah. Dedicated to retaining a SaaS company's subscription customers, the ClientSuccess platform provides total lifecycle tracking and health scoring,...
Natero
Natero is a customer success management platform for SaaS companies that relies on machine learning to judge what customers are at risk and what customers are ready to upgrade.
WalkMe
WalkMe is designed to help ensure customers have a simple and smooth online experience. The solution is designed to help customer service managers increase self-service adoption, reduce incoming support requests, thus shortening handling times and enables them to manage customer care across all...
Amity
Amity is customer success software. According to the vendor Amity, senses changes in customer health or rhythms, recommends the right actions and measures effectiveness. Additionally, the vendor says Amity’s combination of real-time playbooks, intelligence and automation helps customer success...
Zoho Desk
Zoho Support is a Saas help desk / ticketing system aimed at SMBs. I competes most often with Zendesk, and Desk.com.
Freshchat
Freshchat is a modern messaging software built for sales and customer engagement teams to talk to prospects and customers on the website, mobile app, or social pages. A leap from legacy live-chat, Freshchat helps businesses and its teams focus on a continuous and context-driven messaging...
Delighted
Delighted is a tool for quickly and easily gathering real time, actionable feedback from customers via email, web or SMS. Delighted uses the Net Promoter System to measure the customer journey, and takes care of all aspects of the customer feedback process from collection and analysis, through...
ChurnZero
ChurnZero's real-time SaaS platform aims to help subscription businesses prevent customer churn. The platform integrates tightly with an organization's CRM system and their application or service. In doing so, ChurnZero (1) allows the business to understand how their customers use their product,...
ServiceSource Customer Success
The ServiceSource Customer Success platform is issued by ServiceSource International, a public San Francisco based company, dedicated to reducing churn from subscription customers. To that end it contains customer engagement health metrics and alerts to bring attention to customers in jeopardy,...
Churnspotter
Churnspotter from relatively new (2013) French big data / machine learning company PredicSis is a customer success management platform for SaaS companies and sellers of mobile apps wanting to retain customer interest and maintain subscriptions. By integrating data from Mixpanel, Stripe, and other...
Sparked
Sparked is a customer success management platform for SaaS companies that uses various intention modeling techniques to score customer loyalty and sentiment, and reduce churn.
Single Customer View
Single Customer View from UnifiedVU is a solution allows users to unify all their customer records into one UI.
Logicbox CRM
LogicBox CRM is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) software built around sales force automation, lead management, and pipeline forecasting capabilities.
CustomerGauge
CustomerGauge is a software-as-a-service platform that helps clients improve customer experiences. The system automatically measures and analyzes feedback. Some key features include: Net Promoter Score, In-depth Loyalty Analytics, and Hierarchy Based Research.
Kapta
Kapta is a customer success management platform with an account-based approach. The vendor describes Kapta as a key account management platform. It aims to help account managers chart out expectations and progress and report on how well goals are met for high-value customers. Kapta includes...
CloudCherry
CloudCherry is a real-time, omni-channel Customer Experience Analytics and Sentiment Mapping product that helps customer-facing brands track, measure and improve customer delight. CloudCherry is a customizable, easy-to-use SaaS-based product that brands can use to measure key metrics like the Net...
FirstRain
FirstRain is a business intelligence software offering from Ignite Technologies.
Strikedeck
Strikedeck is a comprehensive customer success management solution. The vendor’s value proposition is that their solution is rapidly deployable and easy to implement. Additionally, the vendor says the out-of-the-box integrations and domain-specific customizations enable customers to deploy a...
Akita
Akita is a Customer Success Management Platform designed to help you nurture, retain, and grow your customer base. The platform connects to over 100 of the leading Software-as-a-Service tools–from ActiveCampaign to Zuora–providing Customer Success Managers with one unified view of their customer...
Customer Success Articles
Totango Summit: 5 Heads of ‘Customer Success’ Share Lessons Learned
Totango CEO Guy Nirpaz shares his vision for customer success
Interview with Nick Mehta, CEO at Gainsight
Gainsight is a Customer Success Management solution. We interviewed Gainsight’s CEO to discuss trends in the space and areas of focus for Gainsight.