Customer success is an often overlooked aspect of a company.
And although the process differs for each company, the required products and help are very similar, and the best way to support a customer success representative is to provide the best tools possible.
One of the popular tools for CS is ChurnZero.
Today, I will be:
- Introducing ChurnZero and providing pricing details and customer reviews,
- Dive deep into each of the competitors,
- And compare them to ChurnZero.
Let’s start with getting to know our star today:
What is ChurnZero?
ChurnZero was the 11th fastest-growing product in 2020.
Out of every other product.
If you are familiar with customer success tools at all, you would know that Gainsight is at the top of the game. However, ChurnZero is the closest runner-up, with a high potential to catch up with similar tools really soon.
ChurnZero’s best quality is probably how easy it is to use the tool, even with the highly detailed features that function just right. Task automation is among the clients’ favorites, with that feature, companies can easily achieve perfect customer monitoring and teamwork.
ChurnZero offers a free demo that lets users explore the tool and decide whether it is suitable for their business (and most of the time, it is) and also live support that helps you adjust to the tool and its details easily and quickly.
Being a tool that rose to the top during Coronavirus Pandemic, ChurnZero is aware of the power of technological communication; they frequently hold webinars and send helpful material to clients.
ChurnZero Pricing
- ChurnZero requires a custom quotation from the sales team on demand.
ChurnZero Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The team has been great at reaching out and keeping us on task so that we can hit our Q1 launch and provide our Client Success team with this powerful tool. They set the standard on what onboarding and Client Success should look like.”
👎 Cons:
“Since ChurnZero is an extremely robust tool, there is a steep learning curve. They do offer useful training resources in CZ University, but I found myself still needing additional assistance as videos can only do so much.”
Top ChurnZero Alternatives
Here are the top 5 alternatives to ChurnZero:
- Gainsight CS
- Totango
- HubSpot Service Hub
- Pendo
- GUIDEcx
I’ll go over each tool, compare it to ChurnZero, and talk about which cases they should be preferred. So, without further ado, let’s start with our first product:
1- Gainsight CS
Gainsight is a robust customer success and product adoption tool for companies that need a complete tool to analyze and guide customers.
Gainsight, as a digital product, is not a single tool itself, it is a company that provides various applications for different use cases.
The 3 tools that Gainsight provides are:
- Gainsight CS for customer success,
- Gainsight PX for product experience,
- Gainsight inSided for customer communities.
Gainsight CS is Gainsight’s customer success platform which allows you to project customer journeys and get actionable insights from your customer base about your overall health score.
Unlike many other customer success software, Gainsight CS focuses on real-time data and analytics features along with surveying and feedback features.
User ratings and customer reviews on various websites show that the tool’s connection to Salesforce separates the tool from all others.
Still, the tool is very hard to use, and some features don’t deliver the promised value.
Gainsight CS Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The most helpful components of Gainsight are the centralization of customer data into the C360, the flexible reporting/dashboarding, and the sophisticated Journey Orchestration capabilities.”
👎 Cons:
“Gainsight can be very complex to configure, it requires integrations with a number of data sources in order to be regarded as the “source of the truth” for CSMs. From a Journey Orchestrator standpoint, the UI/UX is not intuitive and takes quite some time to ramp up.”
2- Totango
With customers like Google and Zoom, Totango is a promising software that ought to help you keep all your customers happy.
Totango’s customer success tool Spark has a clean and easy look right from the start. It’s easy to use, and the fluid interface is one of the best sides of the software.
Although most of its features, such as customer segmentation and the ability to integrate with third-party tools, are highly praised, most clients of the product dislike the lack of automation of certain features.
However, Totango is still a high-rated tool with a free version and a 30-day free trial for the enterprise version, making it an extremely functional and preferable tool for small businesses and startups.
Totango Pricing
- Free version available with limited features
- Free Trial of higher plans available for 30-days
- Starter Plan: starting at $249/month
- Enterprise Plan: custom quotation upon request.
Totango Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Totango is constantly releasing new features and functionality that help us better serve our enterprise customers. We’ve been able to measure customer health, track KPI’s and prioritize our efforts.”
👎 Cons:
“The reports module is not too rich and most of the data (scorecards and reports) are only shared internally in the system for users who are logged in to Totango. It would be great to have more possibilities to share data externally.”
3- HubSpot Service Hub
Having been founded in 2006, HubSpot has been a leading company in the industry for a long time.
With other successful tools such as Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, and HubSpot CRM (which is free) HubSpot proves its prevalent success in the SaaS field. As its name suggests, HubSpot Service Hub is focused on service and not necessarily 100% customer success.
Although, for now, it lacks some features that would be needed for big companies, it has great potential and a lot of workspace for smaller businesses. Its top feature is the live chat tool, which lets you customize a chat tool for your customers. Another advantage is that HubSpot Service Hub integrates with HubSpot CRM, a necessary tool for customer success.
HubSpot Service Hub Pricing
- Professional: $500 a month (up to 5 users)
- Enterprise: $1,200 a month (up to 10 users)
Bonus: HubSpot goes off up to 90% for startups.
HubSpot Service Hub Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The support, ticketing and Knowledge Base features the Service Hub offers for Customer Success Teams such as ours is absolutely amazing for a quick and time bound workflow and team like ours!”
👎 Cons:
“Setting up the Customer Portal is too complex. I’ve been through the documentation and details. Love the concept, need to spend some more time setting it up.”
4- Pendo
Pendo is a robust product analytics and user engagement platform businesses use to build better products and a better experience for users.
The platform has 2 core functions that users can benefit from behavior analytics and user onboarding.
Once integrated, you can see every user action, which allows you to create different reports that can later be combined in custom dashboards that fuel your business’s decisions and actions.
And just like Gainsight, Pendo has a “Guides” feature, using which you can create different in-app elements to boost user experience and guide and engage with your users.
Especially in terms of product analytics, Gainsight PX is much more customizable, with more options in user identification, segmentation, and predictive analytics. However, Gainsight PX’s in-app guidance features are more basic than Pendo’s, which is something to keep in mind when evaluating the two solutions.
Pendo Pricing
Pendo does not have a pre-set pricing that is public, they offer custom plans for each customer.
They have a Starter plan that costs $7,000/year, and this plan doesn’t include most of their key features.
However, there are various Pendo users that revealed the details of Pendo’s whole pricing. One user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that pays $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo, while another user upped this number to $20,000.
Pendo Reviews
👍 Pros:
“It’s great to see what your users are doing within your software to help you make improvements big or small. Ability to bring analyse users by segment (sector or a list of specific users) or we can bring in custom info such as the CSM that looks after those accounts to make the data actionable.”
👍 Cons:
“The tech issues I did present, bugs, were unsolvable. I spent the better part of a month on Zoom calls with tech support only to get a “well, we got nothing, good luck!” So, not exactly helpful.”
5- GUIDEcx
GUIDEcx is a client onboarding and implementation software that helps you with customer engagement and implementation projects.
GUIDEcx is a customer relations-oriented tool, and the list of features it provides leans more towards project success between multiple parties rather than being an internal training tool.
So unlike ClickUp or Smartsheets, this tool really puts the focus on every one that is included in your external projects.
So if you are struggling to keep track of actions that are being taken by your team or external stakeholders, then using GUIDEcx could be a literal lifesaver for your time and projects.
Also, you can create your own templates for workflows and projects within the tool to keep all projects consistent, and easier to follow.
The biggest downside of GUIDEcx is, though, the fact that there is so much to do that you may get lost in the details. Customers have reported that the UI of GUIDEcx is difficult to uncover, and it takes a lot of time and effort to get used to it.
GUIDEcx Pricing
- Starter Plan: $100/month/license, a minimum of 4 licenses required.
- Professional Plan: Custom quotation available via sales demo.
- Premium Plan: Custom quotation available via sales demo.
- Advanced Plan: Custom quotation available via sales demo.
GUIDEcx Reviews
👍 Pros:
“I love being able to reach out to the team when needed and receive great information, a friendly chat, or a think tank conversation by phone on how we can use the software to its full advantages.”
👎 Cons:
“There are some rigid rules for marking projects late, and it has taken some finagling to understand the best way to organize our templates to make use of the different status options.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should use ChurnZero?
Any team that needs help with customer support should use ChurnZero.
How much does ChurnZero cost?
ChurnZero doesn’t have transparent pricing. You need to request a call with a sales representative to get a custom quote.
What are the top alternatives to ChurnZero?
The top alternatives to ChurnZero are Gainsight CS, Totango, Pendo, Hubspot Service Hub, and GUIDEcx.
