13 Essential Customer Success Tools / Software to Adopt in 2023

Often overlooked, customer success is one of the most important aspects of any company.

A customer success team should be able to help users succeed and consistently generate loyal customers. Through this journey, a strong alignment with every team of the company and a wide variety of supporting tools will be the most helpful.

In this article, we’ll go over 13 tools that should be essential to any customer success team, from user education to analyzing the behavior of customers.

But first, let’s start with what you should look for in a customer success tool:

Must-haves of Every Customer Success Tool

Although the core use cases of customer success tools may vary vastly, there are a number of features each customer success tool in your stack has to have.

These include:

1- Should be easy to adopt

For customer success teams, just as it is for any other team, a tool should be straightforward and easy to use.

Should work as expected with minimal effort on the customer success team’s side.

This is because customer success teams don’t have time or resources for training and lengthy onboarding processes, nor should they be bogged down by complicated software that requires too much from them in terms of technical knowledge.

2- Has to be no-code

How many of the customer success managers do you know know how to code?

None?

What about the ones who do – are they able to code in multiple languages?

The customer success team at your company should be spending their time on being productive and not developing or maintaining software. They have enough work as it is!

So the product you’re going to adopt should fully adopt the no-code approach.

3- Strong analytics and user-identification

The duty of every customer success team is to make sure each and every user achieves success with the product and comes back for more.

If the customer success team can’t figure out who is using their product, they’re going to have a really hard time achieving that goal.

An analytics suite should be included in your customer success tool as well as strong user-identification features like linking email or phone numbers with accounts and more advanced ones such as segmentation options.

This way, you’ll know who to target next, what type of content you should produce for users, and of course, how you’re performing.

4- Data security

The last thing you need when helping out your customers is a leak of a customer’s confidential information.

A customer success tool should have strong data security features to make sure that you and your customers are protected.

The best tools use encryption techniques like SSL, two-factor authentication, and more.

It’s important for the user experience as well because if they don’t feel safe in their account, then it will really affect the extent they use the product confidently.

And these are the features we think are essential for a customer success tool to have, and we kept that in mind preparing this list.

Top 13 Customer Success Tools / Platforms in 2023

So what are the best tools out there?

There’s no universal right answer, but I’ve compiled an in-depth and detailed list of 13 great and fundamental customer success tools that you should consider adopting as soon as possible, based on our own experience.

1- Salesforce

#1 on our list is Salesforce since it’s one of the most skilled platforms when it comes to customer service.

Salesforce offers a smooth experience for agents via automated workflows that work in their favor; these workflows don’t require any team member to code, and they’ll be managed by clicks only –

Another feature that I appreciate is personalization which Salesforce highly urges agents to benefit from; teams will be able to look at their data and customer portfolio at the same time when solving an issue.

Moreover, they’ll be able to employ AI as well during these processes, making things a lot easier.

Thus, if you want to work smarter and streamline your operations with the help of AI, give Salesforce a try!

Best Features

• Automation
• Workflows
• Case Management
• Omni-Channel Routing
• Knowledge Management
• Reporting and Analytics
• Customer Service Incident Management

Pricing

• Starter: $25/month per user when billed annually
• Professional: $75/month per user when billed annually
• Enterprise: $150/month per user when billed annually
• Unlimited: $300/month per user when billed annually

2- Zendesk

Zendesk makes a great customer success tool as it enables strengthening the bond customer success teams have with customers via the functions it includes.

The features you’ll soon read aren’t the only reason, though.

First of all, Zendesk is a tool that’s relatively easy to adopt compared to its alternatives.

Secondly, yes, it’s no-code, so, teams don’t have to work on their coding skills – all they need to do is trust their expertise in queries and learn how to amplify that power via Zendesk.

Last but not least, it offers enterprise-grade security since data security is one of the most important components for businesses.

If you don’t believe me, take a quick tour with Zendesk’s agents to learn more about the platform!

Best Features

• Messaging
• AI
• Automation
• Help Center
• Ticketing
• Routing and Intelligence
• Analytics and Reporting

Pricing

• Suite Team: $49/month per user when billed annually
• Suite Growth: $79/month per user when billed annually
• Suite Professional: $99/month per user when billed annually
• Suite Enterprise: $150/month per user when billed annually
• Its Gets Even More Powerful: Starting from $215/month per user when billed annually

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. 

Best Features

• Feedback Collection
• Security
• System Monitoring
• Device Responsiveness
• Ticket Creation User Experience

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.

4- UserGuiding – the all-in-one interactive user onboarding platform

It is a proven fact that User Onboarding boosts Customer Success.

And UserGuiding is an all-in-one platform that helps you provide your customers with a seamless User Onboarding experience with the power of on-screen guidance.

Whether it is product walkthroughs, tooltips, or hotspots; UserGuiding helps you create the perfect automated onboarding process.

The NPS surveys feature helps you measure customer satisfaction.

And the segmentation feature lets you group your users into custom segments that you can target with tailored content.

The best part?

It doesn’t require any coding at all.

5- eWebinar – Onboarding customers through interactive webinars

eWebinar is a must-have customer success tool for automating the user onboarding experience with webinars that go beyond.

With eWebinar, you don’t have to be physically present for video presentations, training, or live webinars. SaaS companies can record their user onboarding sessions, upload the video recordings, and allow users to sign up and watch them when they’re available, regardless of their time zone. 

eWebinar has a live chat feature that allows attendees to chat with the presenter or customer success or sales rep while the session is ongoing. Attendees can participate in live polls, Q&A, downloads, special offers, and more making the presentation interactive.

eWebinar also includes pre-written email reminders and follow-ups to increase attendance and get people to show up for their sessions or watch replays.

Check out eWebinar here.

6- Custify

Custify is an intuitive and user-friendly customer success platform designed for SaaS businesses to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.

The concierge onboarding and automation features put Custify in a unique position on the market.

Custify’s greatest strengths are the personalized onboarding process and the automation features. Within its modern interface, you can set up multiple health scores to track and determine their weight on the global account health score. With the playbooks feature, you can set up automations such as creating and assigning tasks to CSMs, sending personalized messages, or triggering custom actions.

Tracking customer lifecycles is particularly easy in Custify because of the friendly interface, and we appreciate the option to add custom CSM ratings. The platform makes it easy to track customer success, its many features focusing on the fact that each customer’s behavior is different.

Best Features

• Playbooks and automation
• Concierge onboarding
• Multiple configurable health scores
• 360 view of the customer
• Automated task management
• Custom CSM ratings

Pricing

• Starter: $199/month up to 2 users
• Standard: $499/month up to 5 users
• Enterprise: quote-based

7- SmartKarrot

If there is any platform that encapsulates the latest evolution in Customer Success, then it is none other than SmartKarrot.

SmartKarrot is one of the most comprehensive, intelligent, and actionable platforms that operationalize and scale customer success from onboarding to advocacy.

Best suited for the fast-growing, customer-centric B2B companies, SmartKarrot is an all-in-one, easy-to-use customer success platform. One thing that sets it apart is the elegant use of predictive insights to provide prescriptive guidance in the form of actionable steps to its users. It brings in the aspects of customer engagement, onboarding, customer success operations, customer experience, and product adoption.

Best Features

• 360 View of Customer
• Configurable Health Score
• Customer Touchpoints
• Success Playbooks & Automation
• Account Intelligence

Pricing

• Free trial: 14 days
• Starter:   $499/month up to 5 users
• Growth:   $699/month up to 15 users
• Enterprise: Custom pricing for users > 15

8- PlanHat

With a minimalist interface that was designed to make customer success simple, PlanHat has many outstanding features.

Although many other customer success tools have the same features such as customer health scores, customer monitoring, and playbooks; how these features operate makes the difference. While other tools excel in one or two features, PlanHat gets an A+ from all of them.

With an all functional system that also lets teams have their shared space on the software, PlanHat is not only remarkable in functionality but also ease of use. Being designed to make it all simpler, it is known as one of the customer success tools with the easiest use in the industry.

Best Features

• Product Engagement
• Customer Health Scores
• Customer Monitoring
• Scalability
• Data Security

Pricing

• Startup: $500 per month (plus $1 per customer/ per month)
• Professional: $1250 per month (plus $1 per customer/ per month) 
• Enterprise: Custom

9- Gainsight

Gainsight is one of the top-tier customer success tools that many companies use and recommend.

What makes it so popular could be that many big companies such as Cisco and General Electric prefer the tool, or it could be because of many features that not only offer an easy-to-use experience but also cover the whole life-cycle of the customers. One of the most anticipated features of the software is the Customer Health Scores. With regular customer data flowing, the software calculates the customers’ health score, which shows how satisfied each customer is.

Such a system is especially helpful to avoid customer churn, but that’s not the only strong point of the tool. Gainsight organizes, categorizes, and predicts customers and customer behavior. Using feedback, it quickly learns customer behavior and possible outcomes.

Best Features

• Customer Health Scores
• Scalability
• Data Security
• Customer Monitoring
• Customer Profiles

Pricing

• Quotations must be requested

10- Totango

With customers like Google and Zoom, Totango is a promising software that’s ought to help you keep all your customers happy. If they can keep Google and Zoom happy, so can you.

Totango’s customer success tool Spark has a clean and easy look right from the start. It’s easy to use and 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 that has a free version, as well as a 30-days free trial for the enterprise version, making it an extremely functional and preferable tool for small businesses and startups.

Best Features

• Customer Segments
• Data Security
• Customer Monitoring
• Scalability
• User Access & Permissions

Pricing

• Free version
• Enterprise version (30-days free trial)
• Quotations must be requested

11- ChurnZero

ChurnZero is 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 the top of the game. However, ChurnZero is the closest runner-up, with a high potential to catch up with Gainsight 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.

Best Features

• Customer Monitoring
• Data Security
• Customer Segments
• Performance & Reliability

Pricing

• Quotation must be requested.

12- ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess is beyond everything, loved. Most customers can’t easily come up with something they dislike about the tool.

ClientSuccess has all the basic features you would look for in a customer success tool; customer profiles and segments, product engagement, and churn risk notifications. However, there are some points that make these features special. Most users of the tool think that each feature is easily customizable and they feel like the people at ClientSuccess understand how to achieve client success.

ClientSuccess creates a difference thanks to the people behind the product. Apart from designing the software just how it should be, they keep working on perfecting the product and they include their own clients to the process so that you make sure your opinion matters and shapes the product you use.

Best Features

• User Access & Permissions
• Customer Monitoring 
• Data Security
• Performance & Reliability
• Customer Segments

Pricing

• Quotation must be requested.

13- ProfitWell

ProfitWell is a small-business’ delight.

They also work with bigger companies like Siemens and HubSpot, but there is a reason small businesses prefer ProfitWell more, and that is metrics.

ProfitWell’s best quality is probably how they are deeply engaged in metrics and how accurate they are. Metrics can be a serious step forward to avoid and overcome churn, so it is clear to see that ProfitWell dives deep in the origin of the problem.

This could be a curse and a blessing. When you work with a team of financers the interface is easy to understand, but from the eyes of someone who does not like graphs and numbers as much, the interface can be confusing. Though at the end of the day, ProfitWell is a customer success tool that offers perfect numbers and graphs regardless of the tier you are on, even the same for the free tier.

Best Features

• Data Import & Export Tools
• Reporting & Dashboards
• Performance & Reliability
• Data Security
• Workflow Capability

Pricing

• Paid products aligned with customer outcome.
• ProfitWell Metrics: Free Tier
• Retain: Quotations must be requested
• Recognized: Quotations must be requested

Conclusion

No matter how good your product, your advertisements, and your marketing is, without a proper customer success team that utilizes the best CS tools, you lose customers.

A customer success tool helps you regain your customers while keeping the existing ones happy. Such a crucial tool cannot be chosen recklessly, you need to consider the size, the field, and the goal of your business.

This list was made to help you pick the perfect software that will benefit you the best and cover all your needs. Choose wisely and conquer the hearts and minds of customers.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a customer success platform?

A customer success platform or a customer success software is a 3rd party software that helps customer success teams manage relationships with the customers, analyze their behavior, onboard and educate them, or conduct surveys.

What is the best customer success software?

While the “best” customer success software may vary on your business’ needs, from our standpoint, the best for educating and onboarding users is UserGuiding, the best CRM for customer success is Intercom or Hubspot, while Custify is best for customer monitoring and customer health scoring.

Why do you need a customer success tool?

Customer Success Teams need different tools because they have to be more agile and effective when it comes to helping customers reach their goals. Efficient 3rd party tools are extremely helpful to customer success teams since they can help them save time and achieve better insights.

How is customer success measured?

NPS surveys, customer health scoring, customers’ time to value, and their product adoption rates are a few metrics to measure the success of customers. Customer Success teams can use different software to calculate and track these metrics.

How do you choose customer success software?

When choosing customer success software, teams need to make sure the software suits their needs efficiently, it’s cost-effective, no-code, easy-to-adopt, straightforward, and of course, secure. You should also definitely consult others in the customer success field for suggestions.