Without the right tools, your Customer Success (CS) team's value goes to waste. Instead of spending precious time connecting with key account customers who are at risk of churn, they spend hours switching screens, logging into a dozen business intelligence tools, and reaching out to other teams for support. All this translates into present and future revenue loss. According to Vitally’s Fall 2023 research report, ‘The Secret Lives of CSMs’, 66% of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) spend a significant portion of their workday on repetitive admin tasks.Luckily, CS software can solve this problem. These platforms can not only instantly eliminate a good chunk of those manual tasks and streamline processes, but they will also drive retention, minimize churn, and drive profits.In this article, we showcase a list of 10 leading CS platform providers. While all offer basic features such as integrations, data management, and reporting, they differ in their robustness, sophistication, and AI capabilities.
#1 Gainsight
As the market leader in CS software, Gainsight has a proven track record of catering to and meeting enterprise CS teams' needs. With a long list of G2 accreditations, there are many reasons why B2Bs trust the Gainsight platform to store and decipher customer data and manage and guide their customer success strategies. Amongst its comprehensive list of features, some of the ones you might like include:
- LinkedIn feed—The platform can automatically track and feed LinkedIn updates to your Gainsight platform. If a key sponsor gets a promotion or changes roles, Gainight can automatically trigger a contact alert. This is important because executive sponsors influence health scores and activate CTAs when stakeholders change roles.
- Customizable workflows and playbooks - Gainsight offers customizable workflows and prescriptive playbooks to help your team streamline and maximize operational efficiency, and take action at the right time.
- Nurtures customer advocacy—One of its key benefits is its focus on nurturing meaningful relationships and customer advocacy amongst product users. The platform even has the capability to create customer communities to facilitate collaboration and foster product experts and supporters among users.
Best for: Mid-sized to enterprise businessesPricing: Various price plans provided upon request for growing businesses and enterprises
#2 ChurnZero
The digital-first platform integrates all your data from customer touch points with product, support, finance, and sales (entire customer life cycle journey). All this information is translated into real-time health scores your teams can view and track. ChurnZero is a CS management platform that focuses on streamlining customer engagement and as the name suggests – reducing churn. The capabilities B2B SaaS companies will appreciate include the following:
- Customer health scoring—ChurnZero offers refined health scoring capabilities to capture every customer's overall health. Scores are assigned based on user metrics, engagement levels, and support tickets. This helps your CS team reach out to customers and address issues before they escalate.
- Robust communication tools—As a platform focused on fostering quality engagement, it offers several communication tools, such as in-app messaging, email campaigns, and personalized surveys, so you can connect with your customers at the right time and in the most meaningful way.
- Automated alerts—The platform sends alerts the moment significant events happen, such as usage drops or lead conversations, so your CS teams can act instantly.
Best for: Businesses of all sizes with a primary base of customers being mid-marketPricing: Pricing provided on request
#3 ZapScale
Launched in 2021, Zapscale is one of the newest CS platform providers. However, that hasn’t prevented it from getting some of the top accreditations from leading review platforms. Not only has G2 rated it the ‘Highest Performer for Winter 2024, but it's also the platform that is the ‘Easiest to Use’ and the one ‘Users Most Likely To Recommend. That, right there, is convincing social proof of the platform’s value.Amongst some of its stellar capabilities, you’ll find the following:
- Platform customization - Zapscale can be tailored to your needs and workflows. With a high level of flexibility, the platform can be adapted to your unique processes, delivering a smooth integration and adoption.
- Intuitive interface—User experience and an intuitive user interface are two critical priorities for Zapscale, and the above-mentioned accolades confirm they are on the right path. Making it user-friendly means your business will adapt, adopt, and maximize the software’s potential.
- Automation for efficiency—One of its best features is automating repetitive tasks and orchestrating complex workflows. With these, you can save time, let your teams work more efficiently, and deliver a better customer experience at scale.
- Helpful tools - Zapscale has over 40 pre-built KPIs and 50 playbooks you can utilize as part of your CS strategy.
Best for: Small and medium-sized enterprisesPricing: Yearly plans start at $500/month
#4 Vitally
Vitally’s purpose is to help you drive a winning CS strategy by making sure your customers get the most out of your products by using them in the right way. Rated as G2’s #1 CS platform for best results, it works in line with all types of CS models, from traditional to product-led retention and expansion, large customer bases, and agile CS processes.The capabilities on offer that make Vitally a go-to platform for your team include the following:
- Centralized customer apps - into Vitally helps CS teams have a complete overview
- Playbooks you can customize—While most providers offer a range of workflows and playbooks, Vitally lets you create highly customizable playbooks specifically built for your success strategy.
- Hubs ensure productivity—Vitally’s ‘Hubs’ capability ensures that all your teams have a centralized space for all their productivity tools and the customer data they need to do their jobs.
- Vitally’s Success Network—Vitally stands out amongst other providers because of its Success Network, which offers a wide range of resources and tools your teams can access and use. Here, you can find everything from ‘How to’ guides and a directory of CS experts you can follow on LinkedIn to tools like the Customer Success KPIs Calculator and the 5-Minute Customer Success Process Builder.
Best for: Businesses of all sizesPricing: Three pricing tiers cater to businesses of all sizes with quotes provided on request
#5 PlanHat
Focused on breaking silos in a company and making sure a prospect passes through each cycle of the customer journey, from team to team, smoothly, PlanHat is a CS platform with a keen focus on the customer experience.With a data-driven approach and a holistic, 360-degree view of the customer, the platform caters to customer-centric businesses wanting to uncover and maximize their customer success strategies and lifetime value. Some of its top benefits include:
- Machine learning insights—Using predictive analytics and machine learning, PlanHat can predict customer behavior and potential churn risk.
- Sophisticated customer health scoring—The platform uses analytics to assess and generate customer health scores and notifies your team of the most at-risk accounts.
- Unlimited users—Planhat’s licensing plan lets you have unlimited users. By making it accessible to everyone, you have an open and centralized source for all your customer data, making it easy for all your departments to connect whenever needed.
- Build no-code apps—Alongside standard automation features offered by other providers, PlanHat allows you to build no-code apps on top of the platform, either for data cleaning or third-party connectors.
- Native integrations—PlanHat also offers native integrations with your entire tech stack, from CRMs to product analytics and data warehouses.
Best for: Small to mid-sized businessesPricing: Provided on request for Start-up, Professional, and Enterprise plans
#6 Velaris
Velaris is an AI-powered platform launched in 2022. Its goal is to solve two key issues most CS teams face daily: disconnected, siloed teams managing mass volumes of customer data and keeping track of complex customer journeys.They're ranked #2 on G2 for ease of use among Customer Success Platforms.Some of its strongest selling points include:
- Data management—Velaris stands out in providing comprehensive customer data management and organization. By tracking interactions, preferences, pain points, and lifecycle stages, the platform gives your CS teams the information they need to offer a personalized customer experience. It also lets your team identify and proactively approach any potential problems customers face.
- Predictive analytics—By analyzing your customers' past behaviors and patterns, Velaris can help your teams spot potential churn risks, areas for improvement in the customer journey, and upsell opportunities.
- Customizable dashboards and reports - Velaris’ reporting and analytics capabilities offer real-time visibility into key metrics, performance indicators, and trends. From these insights you can create customized dashboards and reports to use for data-driven business decisions.
Best for: Mid-sized companiesPricing: Provided on request
#7 Catalyst
Founded in 2017, Catalyst was created by CS leaders for CS teams. The company has labeled itself the ‘most intuitive CS platform on the market. ' Its greatest selling point is the platform’s focus on guiding Sales and Success teams to turn existing customers into the business’s number one revenue and growth driver. The capabilities that make Catalyst a top-tier platform provider include:
- Efficient and intuitive - With enterprise-grade potential on a consumer-grade interface, every feature on the platform is designed to increase efficiency.
- AI-powered insights - With the help of AI algorithms, Catalyst’s platform can surface key customer insights and predict customer behavior, preferences, and sentiment, which helps prevent churn.
- Automated workflows—From email automation to project plans, playbooks, and customer journeys, the platform streamlines the workflows of your CS team so they can easily manage and scale their book of accounts.
- Custom dashboards - With one-click integrations with Salesforce and your business intelligence tools, all platform users can see and build dashboards to understand how the business is tracking. The intuitive drag-and-drop functionality helps to create a snapshot of your customer health in minutes.
Best for: All business sizesPricing: Provided on request for a variety of plans, offering access to all platform features
#8 Totango
Since 2010, Totango has been a leading CS software platform with enterprise-grade features that can scale with your business. Its strengths lie in its customer-centric approach and focus on helping your cross-functional teams drive business goals by letting them manage customer portfolios collaboratively.
- In-app communications—With in-app communications for your teams internally and customer interactions, you have a quick and easy way to keep in touch. Everyone from your customer success, sales, product, and marketing teams can work and view all interactions to help you achieve a superior customer experience.
- Success BLOCs—Another great feature is Totango’s Success BLOCs. These are pre-built customer success program templates created with industry best practices and expert knowledge. These customizable templates allow CS teams to save time and ensure they cover all bases, from scorecards and reports to automated workflows and engagement campaigns.
- Robust segmentation—Filter and analyze groups of users, build robust segment criteria and create groups of customers with specific characteristics so your teams can reach out in time and retain customers.
Best for: With a focus on enterprise, it also caters to growing businessesPricing: Provided on request with three plan options
Catalyst + Totango
In February 2024, Catalyst and Totango joined forces to take on Gainsight, one of the largest players in the CS software space. The idea behind the union is to revolutionize CS and to drive customer-led revenue growth.Where Totango has the data model to support the complex needs of enterprise businesses on a platform with high levels of stability, reliability, and performance, Catalyst has a cutting-edge, intuitive interface and AI-powered features that provide a post-sale retention forecasting ability like no other. Combined, the soon to be unified platforms will cater to the next generation of CS teams.
#9 Custify
Designed for B2B SaaS companies, Custify is a CS platform that rates exceptionally well across all review platforms. Some of its features and capabilities which make it stand out amongst competitors include:
- Customizable health scores - Customers can create custom health scores tailored to their specific metrics and business goals.
- Insights and recommendations - Custify offers actionable insights and recommendations based on advanced analytics, not just data visualizations.
- Scalable pricing—With a scalable pricing model, Cusify can accommodate businesses of all sizes, from startups to enterprises.
- Entire customer journey - Custify’s ability to map out the entire customer journey, from onboarding to renewal and advocacy, lets businesses identify issue points and opportunities for improvement.
- Cross-function collaboration - By centralizing all customer data and communications on the one platform, your customers receive a seamless customer experience no matter which team they connect with, whether it’s sales, marketing or CS.
Best for: Any business size, from start-up to enterprisePricing: Provided on requestMore on Custify
#10 Hook
Hook, another AI-powered platform, works to identify your highest-value customers and gives you actionable insights on how to keep them so you can reduce churn and increase your revenue.With the help of data science, Hook maps out the risk or upsell opportunity with automated engagement results for every customer, taking the guesswork out for your team (and saving time).Some of the features that make Hook a worthy mention in the CS software space are:
- Data Sync - The platform tracks all your customer product interactions in one place which you can then sync back into your CRM so all your growth teams work collaboratively and in unison.
- Fast onboarding - Hook promises to onboard your CS team in 30 days or less.
- Highest level of data security—SOC2 certified and GDPR compliant, Hook is designed and committed to the highest level of security in protecting your data at all times.
- Personalized engagement - Thanks to AI, Hook predicts the action you need to take with every customer to let you automate and personalize communications via your existing engagement platforms.
Best for: Mid-sized companiesPricing: Provided on request
