Customer Success

The Best Customer Success Software in 2023: A Comprehensive Overview (updated for 2024)

December 4, 2023

Customer success teams play a crucial role in ensuring customer satisfaction and maximizing the value customers derive from a product or service. However, managing complex customer success tasks can be overwhelming without the right tools. In this article, we will explore the best customer success software options available in 2023, their features, pricing, and how they can help businesses improve customer relationships, streamline operations, gain valuable insights, and boost revenue growth.

Importance of Choosing the Right Customer Success Software

Choosing the right customer success software is essential for businesses to enhance the customer journey, build meaningful connections, and drive growth. Here are some key reasons why selecting the right software is crucial:

  1. Improve customer relationships: Customer success software enables businesses to engage with their customers consistently and proactively. By understanding customer needs and preferences, businesses can anticipate their requirements, resolve issues before they arise, and deliver personalized experiences that lead to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
  2. Streamline operations: The right customer success software automates and streamlines manual and time-consuming tasks associated with managing customer relationships. By reducing administrative load, teams can focus on strategic activities, increasing productivity and efficiency.
  3. Gain valuable insights: Customer success software offers powerful analytical capabilities. By tracking and analyzing customer behavior, feedback, and preferences, businesses can gain valuable insights into what drives customer adoption, satisfaction, and retention. These insights can inform strategic decision-making and optimize offerings and approaches to align with customer expectations.
  4. Boost revenue growth: Prioritizing customer success leads to long-term customer retention, reducing the need for constant customer acquisition. Satisfied and loyal customers are more likely to refer new business, contributing to revenue growth. By using the right customer success software, businesses can foster these valuable relationships.

Now that we understand the importance of choosing the right customer success software, let's explore the top customer success software options available in 2023.

Gainsight

Gainsight is a highly rated customer success software product targeted toward mid-size to enterprise companies. It offers a comprehensive suite of features that consolidate data from multiple sources into a central view, providing a 360-degree layout of customers based on their attributes or user roles. Gainsight's standout feature is the ability to create customizable customer health scorecards that reflect the most important data points for a company. Additionally, Gainsight utilizes AI to study customer behavior and predict possible outcomes. Pricing for Gainsight is available upon request.

Custify

Custify is a customer success platform designed specifically for B2B SaaS businesses. It offers views of product usage and adoption, providing a comprehensive picture of a customer's lifecycle. Custify's automation capabilities allow businesses to identify triggers when customers reach certain milestones, enabling timely outreach. This software also offers relatively low pricing, making it attractive to new startups and bootstrapped companies. Pricing for Custify starts at $199 per month.

ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess is a customer success software platform that provides visibility across all customer activities, from onboarding to retention to growth. It tracks customers throughout their lifecycle and offers multiple options for tracking overall customer health. ClientSuccess features pre-built integrations for popular CRM, support, and communication platforms, making it easy for customer success teams to get set up quickly. Pricing for ClientSuccess is available upon request.

Planhat

Planhat is a comprehensive customer success platform that unifies customer data, tracks and visualizes customer usage data in real-time, and enhances the customer experience through features like playbooks and collaboration. Planhat allows businesses to see where customers are in their lifecycle and identify which ones need assistance or are performing well. A notable feature of Planhat is the customer portal, which allows businesses to create playbooks and share them with customers, creating collaborative workspaces. Pricing for Planhat starts at $1,150 per month, with an additional cost per customer.

Whatfix

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that empowers businesses to optimize the customer experience through in-app guidance and support. Whatfix provides a no-code editor that allows customer success teams to create interactive product tours, step-by-step walkthroughs, onboarding task lists, and interactive guidance without the need for coding. One of the standout features of Whatfix is its advanced analytics, which measure customer engagement with a product. Pricing for Whatfix is available upon request.

HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot Service Hub is a customer service management platform that offers a range of features to solve customer problems efficiently and effectively. It includes ticketing and automation with a shared inbox, a knowledge base for self-service support, live chat and bots for faster response times, customer feedback tools for measuring satisfaction, and reporting for unlocking insights and improving service strategies. HubSpot Service Hub offers a free version and pricing starts at $45 per month.

ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a real-time SaaS platform designed to reduce churn by helping customer success teams better understand customers. It monitors usage statistics, provides visibility into how customers are using a product, analyzes customer health and probability of renewal, and automates customer experiences. ChurnZero offers features such as customizable reporting dashboards and an API for seamless integration with other tech stack tools. Pricing for ChurnZero is available upon request.

Catalyst

Catalyst is a customer success platform that provides a 360-degree view of customers and builds customer health profiles tailored to specific segments. It also offers one-click integration with popular software such as Salesforce, Zendesk, and Slack. Catalyst features shortcuts that automate processes within Salesforce, such as updating fields and creating next steps and tasks. Catalyst can automatically log meetings to Salesforce as well. Pricing for Catalyst is available upon request.

Medallia

Medallia, formerly known as Strikedeck, is a highly customizable customer success software that includes advanced tools for reducing churn and improving customer health. Medallia's Customer 360 tool provides a complete view of customers in real-time, while its health tool allows for customization using key customer insights. Medallia also incorporates tools for tracking and measuring product usage. Notably, Medallia offers advanced segmentation capabilities for creating detailed segments based on attributes such as profitability, utilization, vertical, and geography. Pricing for Medallia is available upon request.

Totango

Totango is a feature-rich software platform that primarily targets SaaS enterprises. Its suite of tools includes the Spark tool, which monitors customer health signals in real-time, and the SuccessPlays feature, which allows for the setup of triggered actions based on defined rules. Totango's free version offers extensive features, making it an attractive option for growing SaaS companies and teams getting started with customer success. Pricing for Totango's enterprise version is available upon request.

Written by:
Wandee Lee

Better Handoffs = Better Retention

It is time to unlock the valuable customer insights stuck inside your CRM, inboxes, and business software. Your customers will thank you!