With customer success comes business success. Customer success software helps you achieve both these things, giving you a complete, centralized view of all your customer data.
Customer data can include support tickets, product usage reports, live chat messages, or other similar information. All this is collected and consolidated by customer success software so your business can make sure it’s delivering on its promise to customers.
Below, we go over customer success solutions in more detail – what features to look for, whether your business needs one, and other alternative tools to consider. We end with a list of the top customer success software you can use to guarantee your customers see value from your products and services.
(Or, you can just skip straight to the customer success software list.)
What is customer success software?
Customer success software is a complete set of tools to help your business better understand its customers. How satisfied are they with your product? Are you helping them achieve their desired outcome?
By bringing together all the pieces of customer data your business has, you can get a clearer picture of how your customers are doing.
Customer success software analyzes all past customer interactions and reactions in order to determine how the relationship will fare in the future.
If the relationship is faring well, your business can look forward to customer retention and possibly explore further optimizations. On the other hand, if the relationship is showing signs of dissatisfaction or churn, you can take immediate action to address any concerns.
It’s important to note the difference between customer service, customer experience, and customer success:
- Customer service or support is focused on single instances, helping or troubleshooting immediate customer concerns.
- Customer experience is how customers view and feel about your business as a whole, based on their personal interactions and expectations.
- Customer success is about using data to understand and retain customers, develop better strategies, and create mutual benefits for both customers and businesses.
Below, we go over some things to consider if you’re looking into customer success software.
What are the key features of customer success software?
Customer success software comes with a wide range of functionality, from creating customer profiles to predicting future growth.
While the best software is different for every business, here are some key features to keep in mind as you look for customer success software:
1. Consolidates all customer data
A main benefit of this software is to have all your data in one place. Capturing their purchase history, product usage, feedback surveys, and more, customer success platforms provides a 360-degree view of every single customer.
2. Creates customer segments and profiles
With this raw data, you can use the software to identify customer segments and build detailed profiles. How often does a certain segment interact with your business? What is their preferred payment method? Knowing these details will help you refine your offerings and predict future growth.
3. Customer analysis and insights
Once you have a good grasp of customer data, the next step is to keep track of “customer health.” This combines data and predictive metrics to project customer behavior – whether it’s continued loyalty or churn – and decide on the best course of action.
4. Project management platform
Create a workflow and tasks to guide your team and customers to success. Keeping all customer data on one platform ensures everyone has easy access and updated information. Software typically also includes alerts and notifications to keep the team on track.
5. Third-party integrations
Most of your customer data will come from several different sources. It’s important for customer success software to integrate with other tools used by your business, from initial sales and marketing to ongoing customer support.
Do you need customer success software?
It can be argued that every business needs customer success software. Who doesn’t want to see customers reach their goals, thanks to your product or service?
Of course, customers can also be successful without a specialized program. But for some businesses, customer success software can make a big difference to your bottom line.
Here are some signs this type of software is worth the investment:
- You run a subscription or recurring revenue model: If your business relies on customers continuously using your product, then ensuring their success is a high priority. This type of software can help reduce churn and increase customer retention.
- You have a fairly complex product or service: Products that require onboarding, training, or any special configuration would benefit from customer success management. Not only will your customers appreciate the personalized assistance, it will also increase adoption as you directly explain your value.
- You have a high deal size, longer sales cycle, and/or are a B2B: It’s natural for customers to expect more from pricier purchases, or ones that took a longer sales process. These expectations include post-sales support or troubleshooting, and can be managed with a customer success software.
Customer success software alternatives
There are many ways to reduce churn and build long-lasting relationships with your customers. In fact, many of them can even be used alongside a customer success software, should you decide to integrate one in the future.
Here are a few types of software focused on increasing customer loyalty:
- Help desk software solutions
- Customer scheduling software tools you need to use
- The best referral software tools
- Advocate marketing software
The evaluation criteria
| Evaluation criteria | Description |
| Pricing | How much does the software cost? What different plans are available? Are you required to commit for an entire year, or are monthly plans available? |
| Free plan or trial | Does the company offer a free plan or trial period for you to try out the software before purchase? |
| Customer service and support | How does the company help assist you when using the software? What are the ways you can contact them for questions or issues? |
| Review score | How do existing users rate the customer success software? Based on an aggregate score from top review sites, our rating is out of 5 stars and indicates how many people reviewed the software tool. |
| Notable features | What makes this customer success software stand out? We’ve broken down the top features of each, such as customer health scores, data collection, and analysis. |
The 20 best customer success software
Using our evaluation criteria, we put together a list of the top customer success software for your business. The table below lists down all the platforms we cover in this article. Click the tool to read more about the company and its most popular features below.
Note: The software is not listed in any order of rank or recommendation. Our aim is to put together a selected source of customer success software, and give a clear picture of all the available options.
[table “” not found /]Planhat
Planhat is built to make customer success simple. By centering your business around your customers, the software aims to reduce churn, drive engagement, and maximize the lifetime value of your customers.
Passionate about bringing together customer success and technology, Planhat is a flexible customer success platform for the new generation of customer success managers.
Key features
- Unique data platform: A complete relational database for structured data, such as CSV files and tables, and semi-structured data, such as JSON – in a single integrated solution.
- Customer portals: Share success plans and tips, and collaborate with your customers to show transparency, build trust, and drive adoption. Share success plans, playbooks, usage dashboards and much more.
- Revenue management: Take control of your revenue and subscription data, report on real-time SaaS metrics,and forecast future renewals and at-risk accounts.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Start Up ($950/month + from $1 per customer), Professional ($1,500/month + from $1 per customer), and Enterprise (contact for pricing) | Free demo available | Live chat, FAQ, tutorial video | 4.7 (23 reviews) |
Custify
Custify believes that real value lies in creating visibility and knowing how customers use a product – and they’ve built a customer success solution to cover these exact needs.
By aiding customers stuck in any stage of the product lifecycle, Custify helps reduce churn. retain customers, and grow revenue.
Key features
- Customer 360: Get all your data in one view – product usage, user adoption, and customer life cycles in seconds, when you need it most.
- Customer health: See the performance and health of your customer portfolio at a glance, and identify opportunities and risks early.
- Automated tasks and alerts: Customize your alert channel to get a Slack message, email, or in-app notification whenever customers hit certain milestones so you can reach out.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Starter ($199/month), Standard ($499/month), and Enterprise (contact for pricing) | Free demo and trial available | In-app chat, email | 5 (94 reviews) |
ClientSuccess
As clearly stated in its name, ClientSuccess aims to help you drive a “culture of customer success” across your entire organization. The company operates on the core principles of ensuring customers onboard, adopt, retain, and grow.
ClientSuccess has helped companies in various industries, from ecommerce to insurance, around the globe deliver world-class client success.
Key features
- SuccessCycle™: Deliver a consistent customer experience throughout their lifecycle by defining best practices and measurements for success.
- Pulse™: Stay updated with real-time visibility into the health of each customer, as well as send data and the status of any relationship with your team.
- SuccessScore™: An objective view of your customer health, with weighted scores you can customize. Include metrics like product usafe, adoption, feedback, and more, and alert your team of any potential problems.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Phone, email, case studies, live chat, webinars | 4.5 (167 reviews) |
ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a real-time customer success platform that caters to SaaS and subscription-based businesses. Specifically built to reduce churn rates, the software enables you to understand how customers use your product, assess their likelihood to renew, and manage the entire customer experience.
Key features
- Command center: The starting page of the platform, showing a comprehensive view of all tasks. Organize your calendar and meetings, manage accounts, and isolate any critical cases that need special attention.
- ChurnScores: Get a crystal-clear picture of your customer’s health, with customizable weight factors that gauge their likelihood to churn, renew, or even promote your business.
- Walkthroughs: Multi-step guides that walk customers through specific steps within your application, and allow you to track engagement and gain deeper insights.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Email, FAQ, webinars, case studies, ebooks, Churn Monster playbook, Churnopedia | 4.7 (465 reviews) |
StrikeDeck
Strikedeck’s fresh approach to customer engagement integrates machine learning, predictive analytics, and workflow automation. Applying the best of tech in its customer success solution, Strikedeck is a proprietary SaaS solution committed to redefining customer success.
Key features
- 360° customer success dashboard: A single, unified system of record for each and every customer, including journey stage, renewal status, support tickets, and other key metrics.
- One-click integrations: Integrate with over 50 other apps, and access eight different ways to pull in or transfer data.
- Customer success templates: Access a library of 20+ customer success journey templates and 21+ email templates to streamline operations.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Phone, email, live chat, webinars, guides and handbooks, templates, events, training programs | 4.5 (49 reviews) |
Gainsight
Gainsight literally wrote the book on customer success (you can buy it here). The company believes customer success is a movement, and customers are not just transactions or deals – they’re human beings just like you.
Its powerful software platform and evidence-based best practices allow you to draw insight from data and maximize your customer relationships.
Key features
- Customer 360 view: Consolidate data from multiple sources into one central platform, giving your entire team a holistic view of your customers and strategy.
- Scorecards: Capture every dimension of customer health, and create health scores based on custom weight measures and other criteria.
- Timeline: View a customer’s entire chronological history, including touchpoints and team notes, to understand their unique journey.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Phone, FAQ, community, guides, videos, Gainsight University, CS Slack channel | 4.4 (759 reviews) |
Totango
Totango was one of the pioneers of cloud-based customer success software, and is now known for its focus on enterprise and recurring revenue businesses.
The company prioritizes an enterprise-to-customer business growth strategy, where the customer is at the core of everything your employees do.
Key features
- Spark: An enterprise customer success solution that monitors all customer health signals and results in proactive customer success teams and a lower churn rate.
- Zoe: Democratize customer data by making it available when and where your employees need it, allowing the entire team to work more efficiently with the customer at top of mind.
- DNA-CX: The Dynamic No-Schema Active Customer Index technology at the core of the platform allows you to connect the dots of all customer information.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Community Edition (free) and Enterprise Edition (contact for pricing) | Free demo, trial, and plan available | Email, on-demand webinars, knowledge base, community, Totango Academy | 4.3 (309 reviews) |
UserIQ
Health + intelligence + campaigns. With an all-in-one customer success platform, UserIQ’s mission is to make customer success a business mindset, not just a function.
The software is especially great for SaaS companies, as it combines the intelligence to understand users with experiences to guide them to success.
Key features
- Customer health: Health scoring, in-app notes, forecasting, and other features help you address any changes in a customer’s journey.
- User intelligence tools: Access product usage analytics, allowing you to drill down to any segment and know how customers are using your product.
- Campaigns: Create guided tours, custom onboarding experiences, and other custom campaigns that allow you to spend more time with each user segment.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing (price adjusts with monthly active user count) | Free demo available | Phone, email, live chat, webinars, dedicated customer success manager, help center, community, ticket system | 4.4 (110 reviews) |
Freshsuccess
Part of the Freshworks suite known for its customer engagement tools, Freshsuccess is a focused customer success software.
The platform specifically focuses on software and subscription companies, helping them prevent churn, increase expansion, and strengthen customer relationships.
Key features
- Account 360°: Automatically capture user behavior, support tickets, billing information, and more – all in one place.
- Data integrations: Integrate detailed customer information from leading CRM systems, support ticketing, invoicing, and other third-party software.
- Team management: Fully understand team performance and each part of your customer journey, so you reallocate resources or set better expectations.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Estate ($79/user/month + Platform $499/month) and Forest ($129/user/month + Platform $749/month) | Free demo available | Webinars, case studies, ebooks, academy, videos | 4.6 (8 reviews) |
Amity
Amity positions itself as providing a flexible customer success software that adapts to your business.
The platform combines data from your application, site, and/or mobile apps with intelligence and automation so your business can scale quickly and efficiently.
Key features
- SmartPlaybooks™: Create playbooks and automatic tasks to ensure your team provides a consistent customer experience for every situation.
- Unified analytics: Access management reports and gain insight into sources of revenue churn and helps you forecast renewal revenue more effectively.
- Customer health and analytics: Calculate a score for every account and get the timely information you need to act.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Help center, videos, knowledge base, support tickets | 4.3 (27 reviews) |
SmartKarrot
The founders behind SmartKarrot believe the best companies are built on customer success. Starting as an automated engagement layer for digital products, the company now offers a comprehensive customer success platform for the entire customer journey.
Key features
- 360-view of customer: Get all your customer data and insights in a single view, and use dashboard widgets to customize a meaningful view for your needs.
- Early warning system: Create custom alert rules whenever there’s a usage drop, contract expiration, or missed milestones to prevent customer churn.
- Customer success automation: Automate your actions, alerts, internal and external communication, and more to stay notified in real time.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Starter ($499/month), Growth ($699/month), Enterprise (contact for pricing) | Free demo and trial available | Email, implementation team, dedicated customer success manager | 4.6 (18 reviews) |
Clientshare
The team behind Clientshare describe themselves as client-obsessed, transparent, and results-focused.
Its software tools are built for service-based companies, and are focused on safeguarding relationships and guaranteeing service governance.
Key features
- Service governance: Utilize key tools to governing all your contracts throughout their lifecycle, allowing you to build profitable relationships and renewal success.
- Relationship safeguards: Find everything you need on an account, from historical record to all the files you have ever shared with your client.
- Standardized coverage: Streamline account management by sharing the same resources consistently across your portfolio.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Clientshare Professional and Clientshare Premium (contact for pricing) | Free demo available | Email, live chat, knowledge center, webinars, scheduled appointment, Youtube channel, customer success support team, (program management implementation and managed service for Premium plan) | 4.6 (28 reviews) |
STAMP
STAMP (a product of Stonegate) stands for STrategic Account Management Platform. It’s positioned as the first retention automation platform, using AI to systematize the retention process, save time, and increasing customer lifetime value.
The cloud-based platform captures the voice of your customers, and can either operate independently or alongside other CRM software.
Key features
- Overall customer sentiment: A high-level account summary based on key indicators, and an overall customer sentiment score based on STAMP’s proprietary algorithm.
- Account performance management: Detailed summary enabling you to see how well each account manager is performing across their book of business.
- Campaign dashboards: Visualize major category averages and alerts, including for clients performing below expectations.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Phone, email | 4.4 (19 reviews) |
Salesmachine
Salesmachine works by handling all your routine tasks, suggesting action steps, and sending notifications. This frees your time so you can focus on what matters: making your customers happy.
Founded with the aim of building a new generation of customer success products, Salesmachine functions like a personal assistant so you can grow your business.
Key features
- 360 customer profile: Centralize conversations from your teams and resources, and access all the customer information you need in one platform.
- Create workflows: Coordinate projects between different teams and measure the impact of all actions through a detailed workflow report.
- Customer lifecycle management: Automatically move your customer across the different stages of the lifecycle, based on rules you define.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Grow ($75/month), Scale ($500/month), and Business ($2,500/month) | Free demo and trial available | Live chat | 4.4 (34 reviews) |
CustomerSuccessBox
Built for B2B SaaS and subscription-based companies, CustomerSuccessBox specifically addresses the issues of churn and retention.
Its all-in-one customer success software goes beyond health scores and viewing portfolios. CustomerSuccessBox is outcome-driven and enables success across all customer lifecycle stages.
Key features
- Milestone and alerts: Truly understand your customer’s product adoption, automatically generating alerts based on risk and upsell opportunities.
- Customer journeys: Design automated customer success workflows throughout a lifecycle, including account assignment, self-onboarding drip, and renewal reminder emails.
- Easy integrations: Sync data from your favorite SaaS apps in minutes to create a custom, fully-integrated platform.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Grow, Business, and Enterprise (starts at $499, contact for pricing) | Free demo and trial available | Phone, email, live chat, webinars, ebooks, FAQ, training | 4.5 (27 reviews) |
Vitally
Vitally understands that your customers vastly outnumber your customer success team. And you need a customer success platform built with that in mind.
This is where they step in, with a customer success solution that addresses the needs of fast-growing B2B SaaS companies.
Key features
- Customer analytics: Analyze every user interaction with your product, track progress, customize metrics for your unique needs.
- Segmentation: Use dozens of data points to auto-organize customers, and compare MRR, churn, and product usage across segments.
- Automated conversations: Create personalized conversations and schedule them to send out to the right users (or group of users) at the right accounts.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Live chat, documentation | 4.8 (45 reviews) |
CustomerGauge
CustomerGauge has been “making companies easier to love since 2007.” With customer experience being the new competitive battleground, CustomerGauge helps your B2B customers succeed every moment before, during and after a transaction.
Key features
- Account experience™: Combine key revenue data with account insights to help you make better customer-centric decisions and grow your accounts faster than the competition.
- Monetized net promoter technology: Using powerful reporting suite, you can automate customer surveys, prioritize follow-ups, and monetize your account base.
- Predictive analytics: A revenue simulator helps you decide on new targets based on hard data that prioritizes customer success and revenue.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Support, community, videos and webinars, Account Experience™Academy, case studies, ebooks | 4.6 (53 reviews) |
Catalyst
Behind Catalyst is a team of designers, developers, problem solvers, and friends dedicated to building a tool that takes the guesswork out of customer success.
The software is intuitive, well-designed, and gives you the means to mobilize customers, measure success, and grow your business.
Key features
- Customer 360: Integrate with your entire tech stack so you can view all the activities for every customer in one place.
- Lifecycle management: Follow your customer journey, build customizable tasks per stage, and automatically move the customer to the next stage at the right time.
- Reporting and analytics: Intuitive, cross-platform reporting and complete visibility into your customers journey and trends.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Community, coaching corner, ebooks, videos | 4.7 (59 reviews) |
Akita
As a comprehensive customer success software, Akita was founded to break down data and organizational silos and make customer relationships easy to maintain and nurture.
The platform empowers anyone in your company with a 360-degree view of each customer and all the information needed to create customer success.
Key features
- Usage tracking: Send usage data from your application to your team, learn how your customers use your product, and create actionable workflows and health scores.
- Customer lifecycle management: Create powerful customer segments and measure how well your customers are going through each stage of the customer journey.
- Automated playbooks: Trigger predefined workflows in response to customer behavior or attributes, and free up your time for more high-value tasks.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Start ($199/month), Connect ($699/month), or Customize (contact for pricing) | Free demo available | Help desk, email, phone, knowledge base (white glove onboarding and dedicated success engineer with Connect and Customize plans) | 3.2 (3 reviews) |
Kilterly
Kilterly is software that “tells you when things are off kilter.” Specializing in customer success, it gives you a clear gauge on the satisfaction and desires of your customers.
With the power of data, predictive analytics, and automated communication, Kilterly helps defend against churn, build loyalty, and increase customer success.
Key features
- Intuitive dashboard: Organize ticketing activity, product usage patterns, customer sentiment, NPS, and other insights your team needs to make the best customer success decisions.
- Built-in features and integrations: Operate from one platform that has industry-leading proprietary features, like survey and campaign development and management.
- Automation and response: Build workflows with automated communication and task lists, triggered by date, events, or shaky customer health scores.
| Pricing | Free demo or trial | Customer support | Review score |
| Contact for pricing | Free demo available | Phone, webinars, white papers | 5 (4 reviews) |
