10 best customer success software solutions 2023

Happy customers lead to successful companies, but ensuring your customers are fully satisfied isn't easy. 50% of customers naturally churn every five years, but only 1 in 26 unsatisfied customers complain—the rest simply churn. To ensure that customers are getting the most out of your products and services, you need to track customer success metrics and develop ongoing solutions that address pain points as they arise. 

Unfortunately, tracking customer success can be a complex task requiring your team to analyze dozens of data points relating to thousands or even millions of customers throughout various points of the customer journey. To effectively complete these tasks manually would be challenging, if not impossible. 

Luckily, customer success software is available to help you accurately paint a picture of your customers and your ability to meet their needs. 

Customer success software is a platform that compiles data from multiple sources to provide a comprehensive view of your customers and their needs. It helps you get a clearer view of how your customers interact with your products and their satisfaction levels with those interactions.

To help you better understand the role of customer success software, it's important to clearly define customer success. Customer success is a method businesses use to ensure customers reach their desired outcomes when using your services or products. It goes beyond measuring satisfaction to investigate what customers expect when they engage with your company and why those expectations are or are not being met.  

Customer success software helps you achieve that goal by automating the analysis of the customer data you have in your existing tech stack. The platform can then provide a holistic view of your customers' experiences and divulge important clues showing how your strategies are working. 

What does customer success software do?

Customer success software helps businesses improve their relationships with customers with a variety of features that collect and analyze data to provide digestible feedback about the customer experience. With features such as live chat, ticketing systems, customer relationship management, and analytics, the software empowers businesses to track customer interactions and identify pain points and needs. 

The resulting information allows you to proactively address potential issues to ensure customer satisfaction and success by providing the best possible experience.

Benefits of customer success software

Customer experience is more important than ever. PwC surveyed 15,000 consumers and found that customer experience is an important factor in the purchasing decisions of 73% of consumers. Perhaps more importantly, 32% of all customers will stop doing business with a brand they love after just one bad experience. To avoid substantial customer churn, businesses need insights that help them get the customer experience right the first time.

Highly effective customer success software provides businesses with these vital benefits to proactively improve the customer experience:

• Improved customer relationships: The ability to engage consistently with customers and proactively meet their needs allows you to deliver improved experiences that increase customer satisfaction.

• Efficient operations: Customer success software automates many manual tasks to reduce the administrative load on your team.

• Valuable insights: The ability to track and analyze data about customer preferences in real time allows you to proactively meet the needs of customers.

• Improved revenue growth: Improved customer experiences help increase customer retention and loyalty, leading to ongoing revenue growth.

How much does customer success software typically cost?

Customer success software can vary heavily by provider, the services offered, and the payment options. For example, some platforms may only provide services designed to achieve a single task, while other platforms are a comprehensive solution to customer success management. 

Additionally, upfront costs can differ substantially from software-as-a-service (Saas) options billed monthly. As such, it's difficult to pinpoint an average price for customer success software. According to Trust Radius, a typical software instance might charge a one-time upfront fee and then a per-seat monthly fee ranging from $50 to $200, depending on the feature set. 

Software providers offer a variety of features in customer success platforms. To ensure the software meets your goals, look for these essential features:

User interface (UI)

Search for a software solution with a seamless user interface that gives users complete visibility into data analysis from a single dashboard.

Features that meet your goals

Before seeking a solution, it's crucial to determine the goals you hope to achieve with the software and the features required to meet those goals.

Usability

User-friendly software is essential to ensure high levels of adoption and increased productivity.

Integrations

Since customer success software is designed to collect and analyze information from your existing tech stack, it must be capable of fully integrating with the platforms you use.

Pricing

Software should be affordable and offer maximum value while being scalable to accommodate the growth of your business.

Data security

Businesses across all industries are responsible for maintaining certain security standards regarding customer data. The software you're using must adhere to industry-required standards for protecting customer information.

Analytics

A customer success system must be able to analyze all the data in its repository and provide accurate and useful metrics.

Customer success software comes in all shapes and sizes. With hundreds of options to choose from, finding the solution that will help you achieve your customer success goals can be challenging. These solutions stand out from the competition to provide businesses with essential features that offer insights to drive customer success: 

1.  Gainsight

Designed for midsize to enterprise companies, Gainsight is a highly-rated customer success software solution that consolidates data from multiple sources into a central view. Top features include customer scorecards, health scores, proactive playbooks, email templates, note and email logging, reporting dashboards, and powerful integration capabilities. 

2. Custify

Designed specifically for B2B SaaS businesses, Custify is a targeted software solution to help encourage product adoption and reduce customer churn. Top features include informative customer dashboards, task automation, customer health scores, robust reporting dashboards, and powerful integration capabilities. 

3. HubSpot Service Hub

With automated self-help features, feedback tools, and reporting, Hubspot Service Hub efficiently provides the resources to proactively address customer pain points. Top features include ticketing and automation with a shared inbox, customer feedback tools, a self-serve customer knowledge base, and live chat and bots for faster response times. Advanced reporting features empower businesses to unlock insights and improve processes.

4. Whatfix

With several tools to optimize customer experience and in-app guidance for more effective customer onboarding, Whatfix is a digital onboarding platform with on-demand support. Popular features include the ability for customer success teams to create interactive product tours, step-by-step walkthroughs, onboarding task lists, and interactive guidance with no coding required. 

5. Catalyst

Designed to deliver insights for retention risk and expansion opportunities, Catalyst offers shortcuts for improved integration with other platforms and applications. Top features include customer health profiles, one-click integration, and shortcuts to automatically update Salesforce fields and ensure timely follow-up.

6. ChurnZero

A real-time SaaS platform designed to help customer success teams better understand customers to reduce churn, ChurnZero monitors usage statistics to provide visibility into how customers use your product. Top features include automated customer experiences, a detailed command center, customer health scores, a segment analysis tool, and customizable reporting dashboards.

7. Totango

A customer success platform with several features, Totango mainly targets SaaS enterprises. Top features include an extensive free version, health monitoring, automated features triggered by a defined set of rules, scalability, fast time to value, and portfolio management.

8. Planhat

Designed to centralize customer data, Planhat features strong integration features to give businesses a 360° view to better understand customers. Top features include customer health scores, notifications and alerts for changes, and a customer success inbox. Users can also create playbooks, build customized reporting dashboards, and create customer portals for improved collaboration with clients. 

9. Intercom

A live chat solution designed for customer success, Intercom is an AI customer service solution with three main options:

• Conversational marketing: Targets website visitors and greets them with personalized messages

• Conversational engagement: Works to onboard and activate new customers

• Conversational support: Provides self-serve, proactive, and human support

Top features include AI-powered customer service tools, no-code automation, AI-powered inbox, article suggestions, and AI-powered conversation topics.

10. Dovetail

A tool for capturing customer feedback and user research in one place, Dovetail provides customer feedback analysis to turn raw customer feedback into a reliable source of knowledge covering pain points, satisfaction levels, usability, loyalty, and more. It goes beyond the purely qualitative focus of most product management tools and can import emails, survey results, support tickets, and other data.

Top features include:

• The ability to collect customer feedback into an understandable report

• Feedback analysis to gain actionable insight into your customers' feedback

• Automation features to eliminate tedious tasks

• Hundreds of templates to help you get started

• A scalable platform designed to grow with your team