Published on: 21 Nov , 2024

6 Best Customer Success Software for 2025 and Beyond

C

Chethna NK

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In today’s SaaS-based economy, the difference between thriving businesses and struggling ones comes down to the fact that happy customers stay, grow, and become your advocates.

Hence, customer success is no longer a nice-to-have; it's a must-have. However, managing customer relationships and engaging proactively at scale becomes overwhelming as your company grows.

Enter Customer Success Software: it can help you streamline operations, automate tasks, and gain valuable insights to deliver exceptional customer experiences.

But with countless options available, each promising to revolutionize your customer success operations, how do you choose the solution that aligns with your business needs? This guide will walk you through everything you need to know about customer success software, from essential features to detailed comparisons of leading platforms, and helping you make an informed decision that propels your customer success strategy forward.

What is a Customer Success Software?

Customer success is a proactive strategy focused on helping customers achieve their goals and experience meaningful success with your product. Customer success software is a platform that empowers businesses to manage, nurture, and optimize customer relationships across the entire customer journey, from onboarding to renewal and growth.  

Customer success software centralizes customer data, providing a 360-degree view of each customer’s experience and analyzing key metrics. This helps the customer success team understand customers, address their issues and uncover expansion opportunities. Ultimately, this leads to happier customers and even happier customer success managers.

Here, are some important functionalities to be considered while choosing the right customer success software.

  • Customers’ profile and interaction history
  • Dashboard - success metric tracking
  • Communication tools - emails and live chats
  • Feedback collection tool
  • Automated reminders to alert for churn risk, upsell opportunities and renewals
  • Integration with other tech stack
  • AI-powered features to enhance workflow

Here are six customer success software providers in the market for you to evaluate:

1. ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a comprehensive customer success platform offering automation, in-app communications, health scoring, and revenue forecasting to deliver value and succeed at scale.    

Top features of ChurnZero:

Customer Success AI™

  1. Drafts personalized content for emails and in-app communications
  2. Snapshot AI - summarizes customer account histories, health scores, communications, survey feedback, and engagements
  3. Assistant AI - instant answers about customer information

Launchpad:

  • Ready-to-use template library for best practices

Renewal and Forecast Hub :

  • Captures every renewal and expansion opportunity in customer accounts

Success insights:

  • Alerts risk accounts and provides churn risk reports regularly
Pros Cons
60+ native integrations Inability to reply within an email thread
Command center - single view for CSMs on daily tasks User-interface lacks intuitiveness
Collaboration chatbot for customer success teams to access customer data Steep learning curve
Real-time alert
Pricing Plans Free Plans Features
ChurnZero provides custom pricing based on your needs. No free trial is available.

2. Gainsight

Gainsight’s customer success platform helps to build retention-focused customer relationships and drive long-term growth. The platform combines 360-degree customer insights, AI-powered analytics, and workflow automation, to enable proactive engagement and data-driven strategies.

Top feature of Gainsight:

Staircase AI

  1. Analyzes and summarizes every customer relationship
  2. Analyzes and interprets every customer interaction
  3. Identifies and alerts risk and expansion opportunities
Pros Cons
Automatic LinkedIn profile synchronization for customer contacts Performance issues with large datasets
Revenue forecasting with dollar-value precision Analytics view is a bit clunky
Pricing Plans Free Plans Features
Gainsight has two tiers - Essentials and Enterprise. Each tier has custom pricing based on the customer’s needs. No free trial is available.

3. Totango

Totango's customer success platform helps to achieve customer success goals and outcomes. It offers tools for the integration of data sources, portfolio management, and AI-enhanced engagement and reporting tools.

Top features of Totango:

SuccessBLOCs -

  • Pre-built customer success programs embedded with best practices
  • Ready-to-use workflow templates

Successplay :

  • Trigger-based automation for customer actions
  • Customizable workflow automations

Campaigns:

  • Goal-triggered communication automations

AI:

  • Predicts churn
  • Content generator for emails
  • Instant specific customer insights
  • Generates account summary
Pros Cons
Customizable data reporting Integrations having technical bugs
Comprehensive data stream integration Difficult to send emails
Transparent success plan sharing with customers Health scores are not always accurate
Limited reports and insights capabilities
Pricing Plans Free Plans Features
Totango has two-tier plans - Enterprise and Premier. Each tier has customizable add-ons and custom pricing. No free trial is available.
Provides a 3-minute product tour.

4. Planhat

Planhat’s customer success platform enables data-backed decisions and maintains strong customer relationships. It equips CS teams with comprehensive data tools, automation capabilities, integrations, workflows, and presentation tools.

Top AI features of Planhat:

  • Smart signals for intelligent monitoring
  • Simplifies and summarises communications and account profiles
  • Automates workflow without coding
  • Integrate your advanced AI model without writing code
Pros Cons
Unique analytics architecture - reports data in a structured way Limited email formatting capabilities
Customizable application architecture Limited data visualizations
30+ pre-built metric templates
Pricing Plans Free Plans Features
Planhat has three tiers - Startup, Professional, and Enterprise. Each tier has custom pricing based on their needs. No free trial is available.

5. ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess offers a streamlined solution for implementing and enhancing customer success strategies, focusing on simplicity and effectiveness. It provides features on insights and analytics, customer journey management, AI and automation, customer onboarding and portals, and integrates with CRM, support, and communication tools.

Top features of ClientSuccess

SuccessCycles -

  • Customizable playbooks for different lifecycle stages

SmartCS™- AI-powered features

  • Analyzes and interprets NPS score
  • Tracks customer sentiments and provides weekly reports - Pulse
  • Meeting and call engagement note summarization and post to Pulse
  • Assists in creating personalized and one-to-many emails
  • Customer segmentation analysis with conversational AI
Pros Cons
AI-powered health score analysis Limited task reminder functionality
Detailed customer portals with collaboration features Poor UI/UX experience
Comprehensive customer segmentation
Pricing Plans Free Plans Features
ClientSuccess has three tier plans - Startup, Growth, and Enterprise. Each tier has custom pricing based on their needs. No free trial is available

6. Velaris

Velaris’s customer success software streamlines operations through flexible AI-powered analytics, success plans, collaboration tools, and automation functions.

Top features of Velaris:

Velaris AI

  • Advanced sentiment analysis
  • Issues recognition in customer communications
  • Identify customer’s pain points through support tickets and other messages
  • Generates next-step action from customer communications
  • Assist in drafting email content and responses

Custom object:

  • Build and store required databases apart from standard data fields. This can be linked with other native data sources and can be tracked with specific metrics

Automation Builder:

  • Set scenario (sequence of actions) flowcharts to schedule and automate scenarios based on conditions and triggers  
Pros Cons
Comprehensive task time tracking Steep learning curve
Unlimited data point tracking
Manual ratings for health scores from CSMs
Automate actions based on conditions set
Pricing Plans Free Plans Features
Velaris provides a custom pricing plan based on your needs. No free trial available.

How to Choose the Best Customer Success Software that Fits Your Business Needs

Need help to pick the right customer success software? With so many options available, making the right choice can feel overwhelming. Let’s break the process into simple and actionable steps.

1. Define your Business Needs

Before diving into your many customer success platform websites, step back and list why you require a customer success solution.

Consider answering these questions:

  • What are your customer success goals and objectives?
  • List down features that are absolutely necessary to meet your goals

Example: Customer health scoring and alerting for risk accounts

  • How many members are in your customer success team and how many require access to tools?
  • What is your current tech stack?
  • What is your current process or customer success operation?
  • Is there scope to streamline or automate routine tasks?
Pro Tip: Create a checklist for ‘Must have’ and ‘Nice to have’ feature lists to prioritize your requirements.

2. Evaluate Platform Compatibility

Look beyond their fancy marketing and focus on the functionality offered. Narrow down your customer success platform by ticking the features that align with your requirements.

Also, consider the following while browsing platforms

  • Pricing structure and product plans
  • Self-serve knowledge base and support center
  • Integrations, automation, and AI-powered functions
  • Read reviews online

Example: If you use HubSpot for marketing, Zendesk for support, and Stripe for billing, ensure the software can pull data from all these sources to give you a complete customer view.

Pro Tip: Discuss with your team members and consider their feedback throughout the decision process to ensure the solution meets everyone’s needs.

3. Take Advantage of Demo Calls and Free Trials

Make the most out of this evaluation period. A demo call helps you understand the CSP’s (customer success platform) workflow better and check whether it aligns with your needs. Clearly articulate your use case during the discussion call, to find and ensure a good-fit platform.

Based on your previous evaluation, create a checklist that has to be asked or considered during the demo call.  

Some platforms do not offer free trials, so request free trials to test your workflow with the platform.

Bring Out the Full Potential of Your Customer Success Platform with Trainn

A strong customer success platform builds satisfaction and loyalty, but integrating powerful customer education software elevates customer enablement and success.

Trainn simplifies customer success by offering a unified platform for self-serve onboarding, product training, and technical support. It equips customers with essential knowledge, improving their experience and fostering long-term success with your product.

Your customer success platform serves as the roadmap, directing customers toward their goals. Trainn acts as the vehicle and fuel, enabling them to follow that path with confidence and ease.

Regardless of your choice, integrating your customer success software with Trainn creates synergy to boost product adoption, reduce churn, and build loyalty. Investing in customer education goes beyond product knowledge—it supports the long-term success of both your customers and your business.

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