A guide to customer success software

In today’s marketplace, an outstanding customer experience (CX) is becoming a non-negotiable for successful businesses. According to the Zendesk Customer Experience Trends Report 2023, 81 percent of business leaders see CX as a growing priority for the next year—and investing in the right software is crucial.

Customer success software, sometimes called customer success management (CSM) software, helps businesses increase revenue, hit long-term goals, and deliver an outstanding CX. In this article, we detail the 17 best CSM options on the market to help you find the right solution for your business.

• What is customer success software?
• Customer success software comparison chart
• The 17 best customer success software
• Features of CSM software
• Benefits of customer success software
• How to choose the right CSM tool
• Frequently asked questions
• Try a CSM tool for free

Customer success software, or customer success management software (CSM), is a tool that businesses use to deliver fast and personalized support to their customers in an effort to increase retention and improve the overall CX.

Customer success software helps teams be proactive by providing data and insights to get ahead of issues. With features like workflow automation, custom dashboards, self-service options, and more, businesses can use CSM tools to decrease the touchpoints that lead to customer churn and increase the interactions that foster long-term loyalty.

Below is a comparison chart of the top 17 CSM tools. You’ll find a rough breakdown of each software’s price, free trial options, and features.

Below are the 17 best customer success software on the market. In our overview, you’ll find an extended breakdown of each tool, including a summary, pricing, and features to make the best choice for your operations.

1. Zendesk

CSM software should feel like it gives your organization superpowers—and Zendesk can be the radioactive spider to your Peter Parker.

With several crucial features, Zendesk can revolutionize how you interact with your customers by providing capabilities that matter most.

• Create meaningful connections with your customers by meeting them where they are—whether that’s through a comprehensive help center, messaging services, or AI chatbots.
  
• Scale your service offering in the face of increased ticket volume with full-scale integrations and automated AI workflows to supercharge your support agents.
  
• Stay flexible through change by meeting new consumer preferences and behaviors in real time with extensive analytics reporting to prevent churn and promote long-term relationships.
  
• Build a single view of the customer—by integrating data across channels, tools, and systems into a unified view. Additionally, use customer segmentation and customization capabilities to see the exact data you need in those dashboards.
  
• Proactive engagement features to identify at-risk customers before they churn—and reach out to them to turn a leaving customer into a loyal customer.
  
• Feedback surveys to hear first-hand from your customers what you do well and what features need improvement.

All this and more comes with our wealth of compliance certifications and qualifications to keep your organization’s and customer’s data safe.

Zendesk is an intuitive, all-in-one customer success management software that hits even the most stringent requirements.

Features:

• Customer data management
• AI and workflow automation
• Customer segmentation
• Self-service options
• Custom dashboards and real-time reporting
• Customer feedback and surveys

Pricing:

• Support Team: $19 per agent/month
• Support Professional: $55 per agent/month
• Support Enterprise: $115 per agent/month

  * Plans are billed annually.

• Start a free trial

  View pricing
• Request a demo
• Take a product tour
• Evaluate the ROI of Zendesk

Free trial:

2. Gainsight

Gainsight is a customer-centric CSM designed to reduce customer churn, scale efficiently, and present a holistic and comprehensive customer view.

Using information like survey responses, integrated data, and customer health scoring (CHS)—a set of customer data that determines their engagement and satisfaction with a business—Gainsight pairs your customer tickets with a 360-degree view of the customer. The platform also features seamless integration with Zendesk for service, so businesses can use both to deliver a good CX across their operations.

Features:

• Customer 360 health scores
• Success planning and playbooks
• API and Integrations
• Analytics
• In-app feedback

Pricing:

• CS Essentials: Contact Gainsight
• CS Essentials Plus: Contact Gainsight
• Enterprise: Contact Gainsight

Free trial:

Learn more about Gainsight for Zendesk.

3. ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a CSM software designed for subscription businesses working to prevent customer churn. By integrating with a business’ CRM, ChurnZero helps evaluate how customers use products, how likely they are to renew, and how personalized and appreciated their experience is.

The platform uses an algorithm to collect and analyze customer participation data and generate actionable reports within the software and across a business’s tech stack, with the primary goal of stopping customers from heading out the door.

Features:

• Customer health scores
• Reporting and dashboards
• Churn prediction
• Onboarding management
• Track customer renewals

Pricing:

• Contact ChurnZero

Free trial:

Learn more about ChurnZero for Zendesk.

4. UserIQ

UserIQ is a customer success platform that helps businesses identify churn risks, growth opportunities, and sub-par processes. This product leans on translating data into visualizations like line graphs and charts so organizations can see exactly where they need to focus their efforts.

UserIQ has features like custom customer health dashboards, customer onboarding tools, in-app messaging, and automated suggestions to alert users to potential problem areas. With a focus on growing SaaS companies, this platform can help eliminate the guesswork of assessing customer behavior.

Features:

• Customer health scores
• Reporting and analytics
• Onboarding tours
• In-app customer feedback
• 1,000+ integrations

Pricing:

• Contact for pricing

Free trial:

5. UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a specialized customer success software focused on guiding customers through onboarding and product walkthroughs.

The platform includes features like onboarding checklists, resource centers, guided product tours, and analytics tracking so businesses can monitor their processes' effectiveness. Additionally, UserGuiding has capabilities for businesses to promote new or underutilized product features in their walkthroughs.

Features:

• In-app surveys
• User segmentation
• Onboarding checklists
• Customization capabilities
• Interactive resource walk-throughs

Pricing:

• Basic: $89 per month
• Professional: $389 per month
• Corporate: starts at $689 per month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

6. Custify

Custify is a platform designed for software as a service (SaaS) businesses. With these companies in mind, Custify focuses on making it easier to understand customer health and to use that data to create action plans and business strategies.

Their Customer 360 feature gives a central dashboard of customer health, which determines what actions they are taking and how long they are using your product. Additionally, automation capabilities seek to help companies send welcome emails, assign accounts to team members, and automatically notify companies of customer behaviors.

Features:

• 360 customer life cycle management
• Reporting and dashboards
• Workflow automation
• Surveys
• Growth and upsell identification

Pricing:

• Contact Custify

Free trial:

7. Totango

Totango presents itself as the industry’s only “Composable Customer Success platform.” With scalability and retention listed as top priorities, it helps companies build the software they need with the features they want.

This CSM provides real-time health reports, risk alerts, and specified engagement opportunities to help businesses monitor the status of their customers. Furthermore, Totango has customizable workflows and key performance indicators (KPIs) to assist customer success teams.

Features:

• Workflows and automation
• Custom triggers
• Reporting and dashboards
• Omnichannel customer data transfer
• Customizable templates

Pricing:

• Starter: $2,988 per year
• Enterprise: $18,000 per year
• Premier: Contact Totango

Free trial:

8. ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess aims to help organizations build a customer journey through four areas of focus: onboard, adapt, renew, grow.

Features like Pulse™ provide real-time customer updates so businesses can identify churn risks and upsell opportunities, while its SuccessCycle and customer feedback capabilities can help retain customers and aid in growth initiatives. Overall, this CSM attempts to help teams monitor their customers and use data to promote retention.

Features:

• Reporting and dashboards
• Data import and export
• Churn risk predictions
• Customer interaction tracking
• Renewal health indicators

Pricing:

• Contact ClientSuccess

Free trial:

9. Planhat

Planhat is a CSM built to manage your workflow while giving you crucial customer insights and real-time churn warnings.

Scalable for companies of all sizes, Planhat can create a 360-view of a business’s customers to monitor customer health and allow teams to set realistic goals and ideal outcomes. Key features like customer success playbooks—action items that businesses can use to move customers efficiently throughout their lifecycle—and automation help organizations monitor customers and resolve any issues before they churn.

Features:

• Churn risk predictions
• Customized triggers
• Reporting and dashboards
• Automation capabilities
• No-code bot building

Pricing:

• Basic: Contact Planhat
• Professional: Contact Planhat
• Enterprise: Contact Planhat

Free trial:

10. Catalyst

Catalyst is a “CS platform for CS teams, made by CS professionals.” The software focuses on retention opportunities and promises to leverage existing customers as a source of revenue.

The software emphasizes gathering customer data into one dashboard to identify areas of improvement and new customer strategies for customer service teams. With its automation features, Catalyst aims to help businesses discover why customers churn while providing upsell and expansion opportunities.

Features:

• Wide range of integrations
• Customer health scores
• Automation and custom workflows
• Centralized customer data
• Customer segmentation capabilities

Pricing:

• Contact Catalyst

Free trial:

11. Vitally

Vitally aims to answer one overarching question: How do customer success teams connect consumer data back to their work?

With an emphasis on productivity, visibility, and collaboration, Vitally seeks to provide a solution for the modern-day customer support team. The platform offers customer hubs, full-scale integration, and omnichannel communication options.

Features:

• Automation and workflow builders
• Consumer health scores
• Project management
• Real-time data
• Import conversations from tools like Zendesk

Pricing:

• Tech-Touch: Contact Vitally
• Hybrid-Touch: Contact Vitally
• High-Touch: Contact Vitally

Free trial:

12. Churn360

Churn360 is an AI-driven customer success platform that helps B2B SaaS businesses use their customer data to identify churn risks and retention opportunities.

This product offers various integrations that combine in one unified dashboard to give businesses a 360-degree view of their customers. Features like customer segmentation, health scores to predict churn risks, personalized messaging, and email campaigns can aid businesses with their customer relations.

Features:

• 360 customer view dashboard
• Customer segmentation
• Customer health scores
• Reporting and analytics
• Onboarding

Pricing:

• Startup: $199 per month
• Professional: $499 per month
• Enterprise: Contact Churn360

Free trial:

13. Staircase AI

Staircase AI is an AI-powered customer success and intelligence platform that aims to empower support teams.

Connecting directly to email, tickets, Slack, and more, this product works alongside a business’ customer relationship management (CRM) tool to identify churn and growth opportunities. With features that benefit the marketing, sales, CX, and other sectors, Staircase helps teams use data to improve the customer experience.

Features:

• Full integration with products like Zendesk
• AI health scores
• Churn investigation
• Efficiency reports
• Stakeholder KPIs

Pricing:

• Contact Staircase AI

Free trial:

14. ZapScale

ZapScale is a customer success platform that seeks to “slash churn, scale retention, and supercharge upsell.”

This software has three main focus points: helping businesses understand their customers, offering an efficient way to structure and operate CS operations, and providing enhanced insights. It includes features such as 360 customer view, premade success playbooks, and analytics.

Features:

• Full integration with products like Zendesk
• Trend analysis
• Outcome tracking
• Customer 360 view
• Success playbooks

Pricing:

• Startup Plan: $249 per month
• Growth Plan: Contact ZapScale

Free trial:

15. EverAfter

EverAfter is a customer success platform that wants to reinvent business-consumer communications.

Businesses can use EverAfter to create hubs that make consumer meetings, onboarding, and KPI tracking less of a headache. Start with importing contacts from platforms such as Zendesk and create pages that can improve time to value for all consumer interactions.

Features:

• Drag-and-drop hubs
• Customer onboarding
• Personalized buyer engagement
• Reports and insights
• No-code customization

Pricing:

• Business: Contact EverAfter
• Enterprise: Contact EverAfter

Free trial:

16. Startdeliver

Startdeliver is a customer success platform that seeks to aid customer success managers and C-suite executives in delivering faster growth and more satisfied customers.

This software can help with the day-to-day tasks of many business roles. On the customer success side, managers can create customer workflows, streamline onboarding, and provide weekly customer insights. Startdeliver provides retention, net revenue retention (NRR), and customer health metrics for executives.

Features:

• Full integration with products like Zendesk
• Shared team workspace
• Customer analytics
• Custom workflows
• Streamlined onboarding

Pricing:

• Mega: €445 per month
• Giga: €695 per month
• Tera: €1,195 per month
• Peta: €1,795 per month

  *Plans are billed annually.

Free trial:

17. OnRamp

OnRamp seeks to improve the business-to-business (B2B) customer onboarding experience for customer service professionals and onboarding managers.

This platform works in a three-step process: create an onboarding template, invite customers to participate, and review and optimize results. With automation and analytics every step of the way, businesses can attempt to improve their customer experience.

Features:

• Dynamic task logic
• Template projects
• Real-time customer feedback
• No-code workflow builder
• Customer surveys

Pricing:

• Contact OnRamp

Free trial:

No matter which CSM software you choose, you need to ensure it has a few key features.

Customer data management

Modern CSM software should provide a unified hub where businesses can gather, organize, and access consumer information from various touchpoints. This gives support teams and operations managers a roadmap to deliver personalized and relevant consumer interactions.

However, it’s not enough to just gather this data—CSM platforms also need to secure it. Make sure your chosen software has the relevant safety certifications, like the certifications and memberships at Zendesk, that show it’s qualified to keep your data safe.

AI and workflow automation

Artificial intelligence (AI) and workflow automation are making customer support more streamlined and efficient for businesses and consumers. According to our CX report, 74 percent of consumers believe AI will improve CX efficiency.

AI chatbots act as on-call support agents, handling consumer queries in the blink of an eye and routing issues to human assistance when necessary. Workflow automation can simplify support teams’ list of duties, offering assistance for simple tasks so they can focus on more complex issues.

Real-world example: Liberty, a UK-based premium department store and retailer, uses Zendesk AI to automatically classify and route incoming customer support tickets to the right agent. Learn more about how Liberty uses AI capabilities from Zendesk in our customer story.

Customer segmentation

With segmentation tools, businesses can categorize customers based on demographics, behavior, trends, and other factors. With this information, management can target a specific customer segment—like consumers at high risk of churning—and deliver tailored solutions to meet their needs.

Self-service options

Empowering consumers to find solutions to issues or queries is crucial to boosting customer satisfaction while easing the workload of a support team. Articles, guides, FAQ pages, and other knowledge base solutions can result in faster resolutions and a positive customer experience.

At Zendesk, for example, our knowledge base and help center capabilities allow businesses to provide consumers the resources to handle issues independently.

Custom dashboards and real-time reporting

CSM software can deliver valuable insights into the health and behavior of your consumers, so make sure you can find that information easily.

Custom dashboards, like what we offer at Zendesk, can provide a bird’s-eye view of essential metrics like ticket times and customer satisfaction so you can make the most effective data-driven decisions. Real-time reporting is just as crucial to this equation, as business professionals need to know what’s happening now with their customers—not how they felt last week.

Real-world example: Medline Industries, L.P., the nation’s largest privately held manufacturer and distributor of healthcare supplies, uses Zendesk to create custom dashboards to give their support agents better visibility and increased productivity. Learn more about how Medline uses Zendesk in our customer story.

Customer success software integrates with CRM tools to create a unified view of the customer. Using their combined powers, you can use your CSM software to achieve several benefits.

Gain customer interaction visibility

CSM software allows you to understand your customers—specifically, the channels they spend their time on and how they behave.

This information lets businesses comprehensively view customer patterns, preferences, and needs. This increased visibility equips customer support teams with the information to personalize and tailor experiences to best suit their customers’ needs.

Provide omnichannel support

Today’s consumer interacts with businesses across several channels like email, social media, and live chat. With so many communication platforms, consistency is important.

According to our CX report, 70 percent of consumers expect anyone they interact with to have the full context of their situation. CSM software like Zendesk can route customers to the most capable agent with omnichannel routing features. From there, the agent can quickly get up to speed with the customer’s situation, resulting in a seamless and convenient support experience.

Real-world example: Wavy, a salon management software company, uses Zendesk’s omnichannel capabilities to structure their customer support better, resulting in a 400 percent increase in first reply time and a 90 percent one-touch resolution rate. Learn more about how Wavy uses Zendesk in our customer story.

Identify and prevent customer churn

Losing customers is one of the most significant areas of impact for businesses. CSM software can analyze data, like customer engagement and behavior, to identify potential churn risks before they happen.

This predictive analysis helps businesses identify and reach out to high-risk customers to learn about issues and a lack of engagement before the problem escalates. This proactive approach can increase the likelihood of customer retention, as well as aid customer-first initiatives.

Improve customer onboarding

When you acquire new customers, they must receive comprehensive customer onboarding and support to help them understand your product. CSM software can streamline this process.

With CSM, you can easily send relevant onboarding resources, automate tasks, and track progress. This can reduce the time it takes for new customers to realize the value of your offering, leading to higher retention and loyalty.

Real-world example: Tucows, an internet services and telecommunications company, uses Zendesk’s onboarding capabilities to streamline its onboarding process, resulting in a 50 percent reduction in onboarding time—even when coupled with a drastic increase in customer appointments. Learn more about how Tucows uses Zendesk in our customer story.

Increase agent productivity

With CSM software, businesses can support their agents with dashboards, task automation, ticket management systems, and easier access to internal knowledge bases. These features build on customer service training, allowing agents to focus on the level and quality of their customer support rather than mundane tasks.

At Zendesk, we offer features like Agent Workspace that allow agents to deliver seamless support without switching between dashboards or having customers repeat information. This unifies channels and allows support teams to perform to the best of their abilities.

With so many options available, choosing the right CSM tool for your business can be tough.

You should first get input from your team and know your current weaknesses. That will provide a baseline for selection. Beyond that, here are a few of the top factors to consider.

Make sure it integrates with existing programs

If your CSM tool cannot integrate with your existing software—especially your CRM and customer service management tools—then it’s not for you.

Without an open and flexible CSM solution that integrates with your other tools and systems, agents will be forced to toggle between different interfaces to get key customer information, which decreases efficiency, negatively impacts collaboration between departments, and leads to data silos. Make sure integration is seamless and all relevant personnel have complete access.

Consider the total cost of ownership

While the initial price of the software may be a significant factor, it’s crucial to also consider the total cost of ownership (TCO).

TCO includes all direct and indirect costs of ownership, such as maintenance, training, customization, full-scale adoption, and other factors a business may accrue while owning the product. At Zendesk, for example, we are a top vendor for total ROI and low TCO.

Evaluate the level of security provided

CSM software is all about data—and it’s important to consider how your business’ and consumer’s data will be protected and stored.

When evaluating software options, pay attention to the vendor’s security measures. Look for features such as data encryption and compliance with industry standards to ensure you select a product that protects your business' and your clientele's data.

Assess the ease of use and level of support you’ll receive

If CSM software is challenging to operate, you won’t have much success with implementation and facilitating wide-scale adoption in your organization.

Consider how responsive the vendor is and if the platform offers user-friendly navigation and an easy-to-use interface. Also, ensure you can easily find answers to your problems via an internal help center or forum—like the community we established at Zendesk.

Use your demo or trial to test hypothetical scenarios

Most SaaS products offer a free trial or a demo before you commit. Always take advantage of those offers and ensure your new CSM tool blends seamlessly into your existing tech stack.

During your trial, run through a few simulations with specific problems. Take note of where the software succeeds and areas where you wish you had more information. This type of analysis can help you make the right selection.

Here are a few frequently asked questions about customer success software.