Powerful Customer Success Tools for Every Use

According to Microsoft, about 96% of consumers attribute effective customer service as a primary motivation for brand loyalty. This is especially important for SaaS businesses because your customers require constant support to be able to use your products effectively.

To achieve long-term customer satisfaction, though, you’re going to need to incorporate dedicated customer success software that aims to help you deliver the value your customers deserve.  

In this Customerly guide, we’re going to help you understand why using a customer success tool is so beneficial for your business and share our top customer success tool picks for you to discover. 

Ready? Let’s dive in!

In essence, customer success tools give you a full view of your customer journey and your customer needs, as well as provide automated capabilities to address them. They help your customer support team identify when your users need extra assistance to navigate your product and where the potential obstacles in the customer journey may be.  

To achieve this, customer success software offers a wide range of features, including:

• Customer experience insights
• Real-time customer engagement analytics
• Customer feedback collection
• Automated issue resolution  

Let’s get into some specific advantages of using customer success tools for your business.  

Reduces Churn

Prioritizing customer success is quite effective at reducing churn because you’ll be implementing systems that can cater to your customers even when your team is unavailable. 

For instance, when HubSpot started monitoring its customer success, the company managed to retain 33% of its unsatisfied customers, effectively reducing churn. You can also imagine how this boosted their recurring revenue as a result. 

Improves User Onboarding and Customer Retention

Customer success tools can help you show the value of your product early on because you’ll be able to identify exactly when customers need help during the onboarding process. This way, you can provide the relevant support to keep them hooked on your product.  

Increases the Value of Your Product

By having a reliable customer success tool in your arsenal that provides ongoing support, your customers will be getting the best value out of your product. It can also encourage organic customer advocacy and positive word-of-mouth about your product, ultimately boosting your adoption rates. 

Helps Detect Upsell & Cross-Sell Opportunities

Customer success tools can allow you to monitor your product usage and engagement, which is useful for identifying upsell opportunities. You’ll be able to create alerts for this, so you never miss the opportunity to upsell or cross-sell based on your individual customer needs. 

Before we get into our top picks for customer success tools, it’s important that we run through some essential factors to consider when making your choice. 

• Ease of Use: To make your processes much more efficient, the tool you choose should be easy for your team to use. Spending too much time on training and onboarding processes for customer success software takes valuable time away from actually supporting your customers. 
• Detailed Analytics: Your customer success tool should help you identify who’s using your product so that you can segment your customers according to their needs. You should be able to get relevant insights into what issues are commonly faced by specific groups so you can provide the relevant support for them. 

For instance, Customerly’s Live Chat Reports help you identify common issues among customers looking for help and if they’ve successfully received relevant support for those issues.  

• Number of Clients: The number of clients you have should also guide the type of customer success tool you choose. For instance, you may require a lower-priced plan without too many features if you’re a startup with just a few customers. 
• Integrations Offered: It’s important to consider the integrations you desire for your customer success software because this makes your workflow more efficient. Additionally, the more integrated the tool, the more customer data you can collect to help improve customer satisfaction. 

You can determine your integration needs by looking at the current tools you have already implemented for customer engagement and management. 

Key Takeaways

If you’re in a rush, here’s a snapshot view of our top selection of tools: 

1. Customerly: Best for supporting SaaS customers. 
2. GUIDEcx: Best for customer onboarding.
3. ChurnZero: Best for measuring your customers’ overall engagement. 
4. Custify: Best for automating customer support tasks. 
5. Akita: Best for retaining your customers. 
6. Vitally: Best for collaborating with your customers.
7. HelpCrunch: Best for encouraging customer engagement. 
8. Churn360: Best for mapping out the customer journey.
9. Catalyst: Best customer success tool for upselling. 
10. Qualaroo: Best for collecting feedback from your customers. 

#1 Customerly

Best for supporting SaaS customers. 

Customerly is an all-in-one customer service and support suite that’s dedicated to bridging the gap between you and your customers. 

Key Features

• Help Center: To make it easy for your customers to access the support they need, you can create a self-service help center. You’ll be able to monitor any failed searches your customers encounter so you can fill in those gaps immediately. 
• Templates: Customerly provides over 50 templates to help elevate your customer communications, measure customer success, and improve customer experience. The templates can be applied to in-app surveys,  canned responses, emails, and chat messages.
• Intelligent Live Chat: This popular feature allows you to set live chat triggers, automate messages according to customer type, and chat using full customer context. The best part is that the live chat seamlessly integrates with any CRM, so you’ll get automatic recognition of your users. By implementing Customerly’s live chat trigger feature to their pricing page, FeedDonkey managed to improve their visit-to-conversion rates by 30%.
• Net Promoter Score: You’ll be able to get a complete view of your customer satisfaction with direct NPS surveys. Customerly will automatically send these surveys to your customers based on your parameters and you’ll consistently get the feedback you need. 

Pricing

Customerly offers four paid plans for small to large teams. The pricing is based on the number of users, customer interactions, and the features you require. 

• Essential at $7/month
• Startup at $39+/month
• Pro at $82+/month
• Enterprise at $249+/month

There is also a free plan that gives one user access to the core features like the helpdesk, live chat, and shared inboxes. It also allows up to 100 interactions. 

Pros & Cons

Pros 

• Achieve holistic customer context to maximize support and engagement 
• Easy to use 
• Powerful live chat features
• Wide range of surveys to help understand customers
• The free plan is quite generous

Cons

• Could use more native integrations

#2 GUIDEcx

Best for customer onboarding. 

GUIDEcx is a comprehensive customer experience management platform that offers businesses a centralized space for managing customer experience and improving customer satisfaction. 

Key Features

• Customer Onboarding: The platform helps you create and share realistic onboarding schedules for your customers. You’ll also be able to monitor how your customers are progressing in the onboarding stage and intervene when any issues arise. 

• Centralized Organization: Since customer onboarding can have multiple different steps, GUIDEcx offers a centralized place for storing and accessing important onboarding documentation for your success team.
• Customer Dashboard: Your customers will be able to get an overview of their onboarding process through a clean and easy-to-read dashboard. The dashboard can also be accessed with one click, without logging in, via a mobile app, email link, or web portal. 
• Customer Satisfaction Tool (CSAT): GUIDEcx offers prebuilt surveys to help you collect feedback directly from your customers in real time. The surveys are mainly designed to help gain insights into their onboarding experience so you can address any concerns immediately. 

Pricing

GUIDEcx offers four paid plans, with the Starter plan starting at $100/month per license. All packages have a minimum of 4 licenses. 

To get the full pricing though, you need to contact the sales team. 

Pros & Cons

Pros 

• Powerful and comprehensive customer onboarding tools
• Easily automate tasks
• Mobile-friendly
• Integrated authentication features to protect sensitive customer information
• Free trial available

Cons

• The Android app could be much better

#3 ChurnZero

Best for measuring your customers’ overall engagement. 

ChurnZero is a robust customer success suite that helps subscription-based businesses deliver efficient and successful customer experiences. 

Key Features

• Customer Health Scoring: ChurnZero gives you an in-depth understanding of user sentiment through customer health scores, also known as ChurnScores. These scores measure your customers’ overall engagement and satisfaction with your product or service. 
• Customer Segmentation: A segmentation tool is included so you can easily create and define your customer personas.
• Survey Tool: There’s an integrated survey tool you can use to collect feedback and measure your customer sentiment toward your products through CSAT, NPS, CES, and custom surveys.  
• Collaboration ChatBots: The collaboration chatbots help you quickly look up customer accounts and view their account status, renewal dates, and ChurnScore directly from your Slack or Microsoft Teams. 

Pricing

ChurnZero doesn’t provide any set pricing information. You will need to request a custom quote. 

Pros & Cons

Pros 

• ChurnScores help you understand overall customer health
• Real-time alerts to engage customers in time 
• Easy access to relevant customer data 
• Consistent reporting 
• Offers a wide range of integrations

Cons

• High learning curve, due to the feature-rich nature of the platform

#4 Custify

Best for automating customer support tasks. 

Custify is a customer success platform developed for B2B SaaS businesses. It aims to help you meet your customers’ needs, reduce churn rates and boost your business’s lifetime value. 

Key Features

• Task Automation: The software allows your team to automate certain tasks. For instance, it will identify triggers you set for when customers reach specific milestones so you can reach out to support them at the perfect time. 

• 360 Customer View: Custify makes it easy to get a holistic view of your customer’s entire lifecycle. This includes product adoption and usage. 
• Alerts: Your team will be alerted via in-app notification or email whenever a customer is having issues onboarding or when they are about to churn. 
• Product Growth: Custify helps you identify any upsell opportunities based on your customer’s user data. The tool will automatically create tasks that remind you to reach out to specific customers that are most likely to benefit from additional services.  

Pricing

Custify offers flexible pricing plans depending on your business needs, so you need to get in touch for a custom quote. 

Pros & Cons

Pros 

• A complete view of how your customers are using your product
• Receive alerts as soon as a customer is facing issues with your product
• Good automation features that integrate with your other software
• Helps you identify upsell opportunities
• Their pricing is considerate to startups

Cons

• No free trial is available

#5 Akita

Best for retaining your customers. 

Akita is a relatively new but popular customer success software solution that specializes in helping businesses improve customer retention. 

Key Features

• Customer Segmentation & Health Scoring:  You’ll be able to quickly create customer segments to tailor your customer success efforts to each of their unique needs. Akita’s customer health scoring criteria are also quite robust. You’ll get a good overview of each customer’s CSM score, created projects, additional user information, tracking codes, and active integrations. 

• Customer Success Dashboards: Akita has the capability to combine different data sources and data types to create a unified and holistic view of your customers.  

• Unlimited Customer Alerts: You can set up unlimited customer alerts that notify you whenever a customer is at risk of churn, engaging less with your product, or if they are showing upselling potential. The alerts get sent straight to your email inbox so you have a higher chance of seeing them. 
• Powerful Automation: Akita helps you effectively automate your workflow by offering over 100 integrations. Additionally, you can trigger pre-defined workflows in response to specific customer behavior.  

Pricing

Akita offers three paid pricing plans: 

• Start plan, priced at $160/month, billed annually.
• Connect plan, priced at $480/month, billed annually.
• The Customize plan is a personalized pricing plan for teams that have unique requirements, and it includes more advanced integrations. You’ll need to contact the sales team to get your custom quote. 

There is also a 14-day free trial available. 

Pros & Cons

Pros 

• A holistic view of your customer journey
• Powerful Customer Health Scoring
• Organize automated tasks to attend to customers at the right time
• Identifies upsell opportunities
• More integration options than most tools

Cons

• The list view in the customer success dashboards can take some getting used to

#6 Vitally

Best for collaborating with your customers. 

Vitally is a robust tool designed to help SaaS business achieve their customer success goals. Businesses will get a complete view of their customer’s journey so they can effectively implement proactive customer success strategies. 

Key Features

• Customer Health Tracking: Vitally automatically segments your customers based on their user data. You’ll be able to view and analyze their user status and engagement. More importantly, you can track each of your customer’s Health Scores for a better understanding of how your product is working for them. 
• Customer Collaboration Docs: With this interesting feature, your customer success team can collaborate with customers during the onboarding stage in real-time. Your customers can directly share feedback with you here so you don’t miss out on any improvement opportunities. 

• Analytics: The tool offers powerful analytics that tracks crucial metrics such as customer segmentation, churn prediction, and key performance indicators.
• Easy Integration: You’ll be able to automatically sync customer data from the tools across your tech stack without any extra assistance. 

Pricing

Vitally offers custom pricing for each of their plans, so you’ll need to send a request for your pricing plan. Fortunately, all plans do provide complete access to the Customer Success Platform. 

Pros & Cons

Pros 

• Customizable and intuitive software
• Collaborate with customers through personalized docs
• Helps identify churn risks
• Great organizational capabilities
• Quick and easy syncing of data across your tech stack

Cons

• Vitally’s support team could be more efficient

#7 HelpCrunch

Best for encouraging customer engagement.

HelpCrunch is a versatile customer communication solution that can help you achieve reliable customer support and encourage customer engagement. 

Key Features

• Auto Messages: You can set up behavior-based messages and attractive popups to engage your customers and encourage them to action when necessary. 
• Automated Onboarding Campaigns: Run automated campaigns to help educate your customers on the value of your product once they’ve subscribed. 
• Multi-Channel Customer Engagement: Use in-app chat messages and email alerts to reach out to inactive customers who may benefit from new features. You can also integrate your social media accounts to provide an omnichannel experience.
• Shared Inbox: This feature allows you to forward all messages from your support team email address to the HelpCrunch inbox so you can collaborate more effectively on queries. 

Pricing

HelpCrunch offers three pricing plans and a 14-day free trial:

• Basic plan, priced at $12/month, billed annually
• Pro plan, priced at $20/month, billed annually
• Unlimited plan, priced at $396/month, billed annually

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Great for offering live support
• Auto messaging for higher engagement
• Supports live chat on mobile
• Connect with customers across multiple channels
• Installation is quick

Cons

• Chatbot is unavailable in the Basic plan

#8 Churn360

Best for mapping out the customer journey.

Churn360 is an AI-powered customer success platform that aims to help B2B SaaS customers reduce churn. 

Key Features

• Customer Journey: Churn360 allows you to monitor if your customers are moving through the lifecycle stages of adoption, onboarding, renewal, and upsell. 
• Segments: Once you set your parameters, the tool will segment your customers into groups according to common traits. This allows you to perform bulk actions.

• Smart Widgets: Along with your customer data, you’ll get smart widgets that indicate how your customer is progressing, so you’re up-to-date at all times. 
• Health Scores: You’ll be immediately notified when there are customers at risk of churning based on their health scores. 

Pricing

Churn360 offers three pricing plans:

• Startup plan, priced at $199/month for 1-4 users
• Professional plan, priced at $499/month for 5-9 users
• Enterprise plan requires a custom quote. 

Pros & Cons

Pros

• 360-degree view of customers
• Get a full view of every customer’s journey
• Configure health scores to reflect your needs
• Many customer experience automation capabilities
• Integrates with your CRM and communication channels

Cons

• No free trial available

#9 Catalyst

Best customer success tool for upselling

Catalyst is a customer success platform that gives you a holistic view of your customers and helps you build data-based customer health profiles. 

Key Features

• Customer Health Profiles: Automatically create customer health profiles using data from your existing tools that are tailored to specific customer segments. 
• Personalized Customer Experience: Catalyst will automatically move your customers to the next stage of their lifecycle. They will even be assigned a customer success agent to assist them. 

• Proactive Insights: Catalyst will uncover prominent indicators of churn and upsell opportunities through triggers and playbooks. 

• Salesforce Integration: Streamline your processes with shortcuts inside Catalyst that automatically update fields in Salesforce. 

Pricing

Catalyst offers custom pricing for your needs. 

Pros & Cons

Pros

• All your customer data on one dashboard
• Discover upsell opportunities
• Access reports on customer growth
• Smooth workflow
• Wide range of CRM integrations

Cons

• The learning curve can be quite high for beginners

#10 Qualaroo

Best for collecting feedback from your customers.

Qualaroo is a customer and user feedback solution that helps you survey visitors and customers directly from your website or app. 

Key Features

• Advanced Targeting: Qualaroo makes sure you reach the right customers at the right time so you get feedback for specific features of your product or website. 
• Unique CTAs: Create personalized call-to-actions based on a sentiment score of specific responses. Angry responses from customers can trigger an intervention task for a team member to reach out. 
• Survey Templates: Qualaroo will provide you with a curated list of questions based on your business that you can customize so you don’t have to start from scratch. 
• AI-Powered Analytics: You’ll be able to track sentiment and crucial keywords in all your customer responses so you get in-depth user insights. 

Pricing

Qualaroo offers three pricing plans:

• Essentials plan, priced at $69/month, billed annually
• Premium plan, priced at $149/month, billed annually
• Business plan, priced at $299+/month, billed annually

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Simple to install and use
• Get user feedback on all your products, websites and mobile apps
• Advanced targeting of feedback. 
• Apply feedback in real time
• Sentiment scores help you tailor customer experiences

Cons

• Reporting section needs more filters to easily find what you’re looking for

Well, we’ve discovered and reviewed a range of customer success tools that you can incorporate into your overall customer support strategy. The final decision is now in your hands. Consider the features you need, the integrations offered, and of course, your budget. 

With Customerly, you’ll be able to effectively support and nurture your current and potential customers, acquire more leads, and gain feedback directly from your users to continuously improve your services. 

If you’re interested in giving our top pick a try, get started with our 14-day free trial today and discover the incredible customer success features you can have at your disposal!