You want to keep your existing customers coming back for more and give new customers a reason to check out your offering. But you can’t drive over to the homes and offices of your thousands of users, lurk over their shoulders, and coach each of them on how to best use your app. (And even if you could, please don’t.)
You need a proactive customer success strategy to align your product with both internal and customer expectations. But such a strategy requires more substance than “Make good product. Make happy customer. Make mega money.”
Informed and intentional actions make up any worthwhile customer success plan, which means you’ll need a means of diving deep into your user data and feedback. The right customer success software will help you determine what your customers need and how to give it to them—all while helping your company achieve success of its own.
What is customer success?
The term “customer success” refers to the strategy a company adopts to create and maintain a product or service that helps customers achieve their business goals. Customer success focuses a company’s product development on providing a solution to the problems of its target demographic. It effectively hinges on a single basic concept: if your product helps your customers succeed, they’ll keep coming back for more.
This concept is especially important for SaaS companies whose customers aren’t always locked into long-term contracts. Month-to-month flexibility attracts new customers but wreaks havoc on retention efforts and monthly recurring revenue (MRR) figures. A robust success strategy shows customers how they’ve been using your product to win. It also shows them new ways they could be using it to win and reminds them of your product’s value. This results in reduced churn, increased renewal and upsell opportunities, and expanded revenue growth.
But it isn’t enough to simply tell your product team to create an app or feature that customers enjoy. Your customer success strategy must actually improve customer experience and sentiment before you’ll see its impact on your company’s growth. And you can’t determine a campaign’s success if you don’t have a baseline understanding of how your customers feel before launch.
How is customer success measured?
You must gather quantitative and qualitative data on your customer to build and implement a successful customer success plan. Avid product usage can’t always be associated with a positive view of your product. Your customers may log in 10 times a day because they don’t know how in the heck to use it, not because they’re particularly in love with it.
Quantitative data
Your customers hand over scores of useful data just through app usage, bill payment, and the like. Product data reveals how customers use your product: what features they use, where they get stuck, and what they want more of. This data guides customer success strategies, enabling product teams to build features and focus improvements on actual customer behavior and preferences.
It’s not just product teams that benefit from measuring this data. Sales teams can use it to determine the exact right moment in a customer’s life cycle to pitch an upsell or a renewal. Account managers can keep track of daily usage on key accounts and reach out to stakeholders when it drops in a concerning way. And marketing teams can determine which features users find the most valuable and highlight those same features in a dedicated campaign.
There are dozens of potential metrics you can track to keep a finger on the pulse of any given customer. Choose several major KPIs that align with the overarching goals for your strategy and use them to gauge the overall success of your plan.
Common customer success KPIs include:
- Churn rate
- Customer lifetime value (CLV)
- User activation
- Product and feature adoption
- Session length and frequency
- Customer retention cost (CRC)
- Daily or monthly active users (DAU/MAU)
Qualitative data
Qualitative information comes from customer feedback. This feedback must be tracked over time to prove that customer sentiment improves over time. Customer interviews, focus groups, and standard surveys all reveal nuggets of wisdom about how your customers feel about the value of your product. These direct feedback options also allow customers to appeal directly for desired product features or air grievances about existing experiences.
One of the most common ways to track customer sentiment is through Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS surveys allow customers to assign a numerical value to their impression of a product or company. This makes it easy to translate customer sentiment into something more concrete and measurable than, “I like it a lot.”
Build stellar in-app NPS surveys with Appcues
What is customer success software?
A customer success software is a platform that gathers quantitative and qualitative customer data under a single umbrella. It provides you with a comprehensive understanding of your customers’ needs and wants, allowing you to analyze the impact of your current offering by tracking product data and customer sentiment.
Customer success software helps customer success managers (CSMs) sift through the reams of data generated to gain valuable loyalty-building insights. These data sources include:
- Product data
- General customer communications
- Customer feedback
- NPS scores
- Website data
- CRM account billing information
- IT tickets
It would take days for a single person or group of people to simply locate relevant data from this wide variety of sources. Meanwhile, a robust customer success platform with proper integrations will gather, analyze, and report the data on a customer’s overall health within minutes.
6 essential features of customer success software
Every customer success software option on the market offers unique features that aim to make nurturing better relationships with your clients easier. That said, any success platform worth its snuff contains these six features:
1. Success metric tracking
You’ll need to track your KPIs to gain any insight into the current health of your customers and the impact your success strategies have over time. This requires you to use a customer success tool with an easy-to-use and powerful analytics platform that allows you to see your KPIs at a glance.
Bonus points are awarded for customer success platforms that allow you to build custom dashboards for sharing these KPIs with stakeholders in simple, friction-free ways. Remember: customer success teams may use the software more than the average employee, but product managers, executives, and department heads are also likely to take a gander.
Read also: 12 product management metrics & KPIs for data-driven PMs
2. CRM integration
Customer success efforts rely on the accumulation of as much client data as possible—such as the wealth of data contained within your company’s customer relationship management (CRM) software. The CRM provides the data, and your customer success platform will analyze and contextualize it. This allows teams to segment customers based on their behaviors and apply specific success tactics to unique cohorts.
3. Churn prediction and renewal reminders
Customer success teams should obsess over ways to boost retention. It’s difficult to build revenue when your bucket of clients has a big leak. And the more customers you have, the more difficult it is to catch renewal opportunities and identify potential churn indicators.
A quality success tool automatically sends reminders ahead of a contract expiring to give team members the appropriate time to lock down renewals. The best customer success tools also include some version of a churn prediction feature. This allows teams the ability to proactively eliminate blockers on an account before the customer makes up their mind to churn.
4. Reporting
You’re supposed to glean actionable insights from all of this customer data, not just stare at it until you fall asleep. The best customer success software simplifies mountains of data into meaningful, contextualized reports. Analytical reports should be customized to detail who’s at risk for churning or what specific behaviors contribute to the longevity of your power users and everything in between.
5. Customer surveys
Internal data will tell you a great deal about your customer through their behaviors, but sometimes asking them outright is the best way to gauge their sentiment. Many customer success tools offer the means to conduct standard or NPS surveys via email or in-app messaging so customers can sing praises and air grievances to you directly.
Read more: How to make NPS work for you
6. Data security
There’s nothing like a little data leak to derail an otherwise healthy customer relationship. Make sure your success software is as hard to break into as Fort Knox to prevent it from becoming the reason your customers bail. Look for features like two-factor authentication and data encryption to keep your customers’ sensitive information on lockdown.
12 top customer success tools
Now for the hard part: identifying which of the dozens of customer success tools out there work best for your company. We’ve narrowed the list from “dozens” to “a dozen” of the best options on the market, including:
1. Appcues
Shameless self-plug: Appcues is a heckuva customer success tool. In the battle for a customer’s loyalty, the best product experience wins—and Appcues is all about building an enviable product experience.
New user onboarding is the first chance you have at building a winning product experience. Appcues enables customers to construct in-app product tours that drive newbies to a product’s most valuable features. These tours are made from several handy UI/UX patterns, such as modal windows, slideouts, pins, tooltips, and more. These patterns gently guide users to your app’s aha moment—the event that causes users to realize the long-term value of your product—without slowing their momentum.
These patterns also provide in-app opportunities for you to assist customers at other potential sticky points of their life cycle. Use a modal window to announce a new app, and then highlight the feature’s location within your UI with a vibrant hotspot. Appcues even allows you to segment customers by behavior, empowering you to build in-app messages that target specific groups of users—including sporadic users more at risk for churn.
Appcues also contains a powerful analytics engine, enabling you to parse through user data and tweak your success strategy based on real behavioral data. Our customers have used this one-two punch of in-app messaging and analytics to achieve an average 10% lift in revenue.
Experience Appcues’ features firsthand with a free trial
Best features:
- Robust analytics and reporting
- Wide array of no-code in-app messaging patterns
- NPS surveys and feedback forms
- Personalization through segmentation
- Integration with most major SaaS tools, including Zapier, Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk
Pricing:
Appcues pricing is based upon a product’s total number of monthly active users. Each subsequent pricing tier includes an increasing number of helpful features.
- Essentials plan: $249 a month
- Growth plan: $879 a month
- Enterprise plan: Quote available upon request
2. Custify
Custify’s Customer 360 feature allows you to dive into customer data to evaluate everything from product adoption rates to general usage. It displays this information on easy-to-read dashboards that you can also use for forecasting at-risk revenue, renewal opportunities, company-wide KPIs, and more. Dashboards can also be customized to track the performance of your CSMs to ensure that your customer success strategies are being properly supported.
Custify allows you to set tasks and reminders for yourself to check in on or follow up with a customer. You can also set up automatic alerts to notify you of churn risks and upsell opportunities as they occur.
Best features:
- Custify Customer 360
- Customer feedback surveys
- Automated alerts
- User segmentation
Pricing:
- Quote available upon request
3. Whatfix
Whatfix homes in on user experience as the key to customer success. It enables product teams to provide in-app help resources and guidance to users to streamline onboarding and improve the customer journey. You can then gauge the success of these efforts using Whatfix’s built-in analytics.
The platform also excels with workflows. Whatfix allows you to build and evaluate current flows with minimal effort, which makes it easy to refresh content or update dated flows. The tool also includes one-click workflow automation and analysis in addition to task automation, freeing your team up from repetitive work to focus on critical tasks.
Best features:
- In-app messaging
- Built-in analytics
- Goal setting for individual customers
- Comprehensive flow automation
- Integrations with major platforms like Google Analytics, Amplitude, Salesforce, and Slack
Pricing:
- Quote available upon request
4. Totango
Totango contains many of the standard features of a good customer success tool, like health monitoring and data aggregation, but its unique bundles set it apart. Its various SuccessBLOC options bundle customer journey templates, dashboards, and more to help you build and execute success plans ASAP. Each SuccessBLOC has a unique focus that fits a particular need, including customer engagement, upsell improvement, and contract renewal management.
The platform is also big on data security. The software is ISO and Privacy Shield certified and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) compliant, letting its users rest easy that their most sensitive data is well-protected from malicious actors.
Best features:
- SuccessBLOC packages
- Workflow automations
- Totango Customer 360 and health scoring
- Email campaign creation and distribution
Pricing:
Totango’s pricing points are based upon the number of users accessing the software within your organization. You’ll also unlock more features at each subsequent pricing tier.
- Community: Freemium account
- Starter: $249 a month
- Growth: $1,099 a month
- Enterprise: Quote available upon request
5. Strikedeck
Strikedeck includes the all-important Customer 360 feature and health scoring, as well as helpful automated alerts that warn you of likely churn and potential renewals. But it’s the platform’s easy-to-use reporting system that ranks it as a top customer success option. The reports can be formatted for either internal usage or for customers themselves. Strikedeck’s customer-facing Value Reports help reinforce just how your product positively impacts the customer’s bottom lines.
The software also includes email messaging and customer survey functionality to enhance customer engagement efforts. Savvy CSMs can segment users into distinct buckets and send personalized messages to applicable customers instead of blasting out a general reminder to everyone.
Best features:
- Customer health scores
- User segmentation
- Simplified reporting
- Email messaging and customer surveys
- Automated alerts
Pricing:
- Quote available upon request
6. ChurnZero
ChurnZero lives up to its name with a slew of helpful customer success features. Use its customer dashboards to identify customers stuck at a specific stage of the customer journey and get a top-level view of customer health and sentiment. Real-time churn alerts and upsell notifications are sent to stakeholders in-app or through email, Slack, Teams, and even SMS messaging.
ChurnZero’s strong analytics capabilities might hog the spotlight, but the software also contains helpful features for building customer engagement. The app allows you to build in-app messages to streamline onboarding and adoption. It also enables you to create and distribute customer surveys to get a more complete picture of how customers feel about your product.
Best features:
- Health scoring
- Task management
- In-app messaging
- Surveys
- Customer dashboards
- Reporting
- Multi-channel alerts
Pricing:
- Quote available upon request
7. Intercom
Intercom is all about customer engagement. It enables companies to use chatbots to start building good relationships with clients before they ever sign up. These Custom Bots also lessen the workload for your teams, as they can be programmed to automate marketing and sales workflows.
A particular strength of Intercom is its ability to build multi-channel messaging campaigns. You might send a survey out to a particular customer segment via email, or you could announce a brand-new feature via social media. Intercom also supports in-app messaging, allowing users to connect with their customers as they navigate a product for maximum engagement.
Best features:
- Automated outbound email
- In-app messaging
- Push notifications
- User segmentation
- Chatbots
Pricing:
Intercom has several different packages available, each with different features included. You’ll need to reach out to Intercom for a quote.
Smaller SaaS businesses may be able to use the Starter package for $74 a month, but additional features like WhatsApp functionality and customer surveys will cost extra.
8. UserGuiding
UserGuiding is another customer success solution that specializes in user onboarding. Checklists, hotspots, and other UI/UX patterns let product teams smooth out the onboarding process for new customers. You can track user behaviors with built-in analytics to enhance existing onboarding flows or inform new ones.
A key strength of UserGuiding lies in its Resource Center feature. You can use the software to fit your various help resources like blogs, video tutorials, and more under a single umbrella. Lead wayward users to a single resource to answer any problem, which simplifies the customer journey and enhances UX.
Best features:
- Comprehensive Resource Center
- In-app messaging
- NPS surveys
- Goal tracking
- Built-in analytics
Pricing:
UserGuiding bases its pricing plans on the number of your product’s monthly active users. You’ll also unlock more features at each subsequent pricing tier.
- Basic plan: $69 a month
- Professional plan: $299 a month
- Corporate plan: Starts at $499 a month
9. Zendesk
Zendesk is a sales CRM with enough helpful features to merit inclusion in the discussion of excellent success platforms. The platform gathers various threads of customer communication and unites them within the platform. This allows you and your team to send messages out to customers through one of several different channels, including Facebook Messenger, Twitter direct messages, and WhatsApp.
Especially when compared to Freshdesk, the software’s strongest selling point lies in its chatbots. The bots can be used to funnel prospects into the proper automated workflow, ensuring the prospect gets where they want to go without friction. The chatbots are also customizable, allowing you to build a personalized experience right off the bat for soon-to-be customers.
Best features:
- Unified customer management
- Analytics and reporting
- Multi-channel messaging
- Robust chatbot functionality
- More than a thousand pre-built integrations
Pricing:
Zendesk offers separate pricing plans for those looking to use it for customer service and those using it for sales enablement. Anyone looking for service-side pricing from the platform has many packages to choose from, with the more expensive packages containing more features:
- Suite Team: $49 a month
- Suite Growth: $79 a month
- Suite Professional: $99 a month
- Suite Enterprise: $150 a month
- Additional enterprise-level plans starting at $215 a month
10. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is a logical choice for anyone already using HubSpot’s other hubs for sales or marketing. You can use the Service Hub to create helpful knowledge bases or live chat with customers who need assistance. Certain packages also come with email templates and the ability to distribute customer surveys to nurture and measure engagement.
It integrates seamlessly with other HubSpot tools and can leverage the existing customer data within them. But even those who use another CRM don’t need to fret, as HubSpot also supports more than a thousand integrations.
Best features:
- Knowledge base
- Customer feedback surveys
- Email templates
- Live chat
- Reporting
Pricing:
HubSpot offers a free plan that includes a limited array of features. Each successive tier of its paid plans includes more features.
- Freemium plan
- Starter: $45 a month
- Professional: $450/month
- Enterprise: $1,200/month
11. Help Scout
Help Scout aims to simplify the customer success experience for both you and your customers alike. Its shared email allows you to assign customer complaints, tickets, or general messages to anyone on a team. You can also leave private notes for internal use before responding to a customer so your team can answer a question with the best possible information. For instance, a customer’s claim that a rep promised a refund if a particular issue occurred can be verified on the spot if the private notes are up to date and accurate.
Use Help Scout to proactively guide customers through your product with in-app messages. Those in need of further assistance can find all the help they need in a Help Scout web-based or in-app knowledge base. You can also give guidance in real time with the software’s live chat feature.
Best features:
- Shared inboxes
- Live chat
- In-app messaging
Pricing:
Help Scout bases pricing entirely on how many features are included at each tier.
- Standard: $20 a month
- Plus: $40 a month
- Pro: $65 a month
12. Catalyst
Catalyst bills itself as “the most intuitive customer success platform,” and its UI reflects this goal. Churn reduction and revenue growth remain a central focus, but Catalyst also aims to reduce the amount of time users spend completing customer success tasks. You’re only ever a few clicks away from where you want to be, whether that’s creating a custom dashboard or tracking a customer’s activity.
“More efficient” might sound like code for “more shortcuts,” but Catalyst doesn’t skimp on features. It includes all the health scoring and reporting functionality you need from a customer success tool. Catalyst also includes automated email capabilities that send repetitive messages, like progress emails, in the background while you focus on big-picture projects.
Best features:
- Health scoring
- Automated emails
- Custom dashboards
- Customer activity tracking
- User segmentation
Pricing:
- Quote available upon request
Help your customers succeed from the inside (of your app)
It isn’t enough to simply know about your customers’ behaviors and sentiments. Your customer success software ultimately needs to help you act on your insights and foster better, longer-lasting relationships with your client.
Appcues gives its customers the best of both worlds. It enables you to build in-app product tours, feature releases, and announcements to improve UX, boost adoption, and give users a better overall product experience. Appcues also contains comprehensive analytics and reporting capabilities that allow you to inform success strategies through KPI tracking and user behavior analysis. And if that wasn’t enough, you can also use Appcues to gather customer feedback in the form of in-app NPS surveys.
Data gathering? Check. Ease of use? Check. Ability to analyze and act on data? Big, bold check.
Improved customer loyalty, sentiment, and revenue? Entirely up to you—but we’d love to help get you there.
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