10 Best Customer Success Software in 2023

Cecily Giancaterino

Oct 13, 2023

∙

15 min read

CRM

Did you know that improving customer retention by just 5% can result in profit growth of 25% to 95% over time? It's true. To retain customers and increase their lifetime value, it's time to implement advanced tools for tracking, analyzing, and enhancing the customer experience you provide.

Customer success software can support you in boosting customer satisfaction and reducing churn. In this guide, we help you navigate the best customer success tools for your business.

First, here are the key things to know about customer success tools:

• Customer success tools are software platforms and apps that facilitate and enhance the relationship between a business and its customers.
• These tools can automate and streamline tasks such as onboarding new clients, tracking customer interactions, providing customer support, and analyzing customer behavior.
• Some tools harness the power of AI and machine learning for predictive analysis and automation.
• To choose the right customer success tool for your team, carefully evaluate the needs of your customer success team. Consider the features, pricing, and customer support of each platform.
• There are various options in the market today. Some of the top platforms include FiveCRM, Zendesk, HubSpot, Akita, Twilio, Helpjuice, ChurnZero, Catalyst, Salesforce, and Intercom.

Table of Contents:

• Customer Success Tools Comparison Chart
• What are Customer Success tools?
• How to Evaluate Customer Success Tools for your Team
• FiveCRM
• Zendesk
• HubSpot
• Akita
• Twilio
• Helpjuice
• ChurnZero
• Catalyst
• Salesforce
• Intercom
• Improve Customer Satisfaction with FiveCRM
• FAQs

Here are the top customer success platforms:

1. FiveCRM
2. Zendesk
3. HubSpot
4. Akita
5. Twilio
6. Helpjuice
7. ChurnZero
8. Catalyst
9. Salesforce
10. Intercom

Customer Success Tools Comparison Chart

What Are Customer Success Tools? 

Customer success tools are software platforms and applications that facilitate and enhance the relationship between a business and its customers. They help customer success teams ensure satisfaction and optimize customer experiences, ultimately increasing retention and loyalty.

These tools can automate and streamline tasks such as onboarding new clients, tracking customer interactions, providing customer support, and analyzing customer behavior.

Some of these tools can identify potential customer journey issues, provide actionable insights to improve engagement, and predict churn using AI and machine learning.

How to Evaluate Customer Success Tools for Your Team

When selecting a customer success tool, assess the needs of your customer success team. Here are three vital things to consider.

Integrations

Can the tool integrate seamlessly with your existing systems, such as your CRM or collaboration and project management tools? Can you customize the tool to fit your business workflows and branding? Integrations ensure you can connect your entire tech stack to streamline processes.

Features

What features does the tool offer? Are they relevant to your customer success strategy and goals? Look for features such as customer segmentation, in-app messaging, automated emails, customer health scores, and task management, just to name a few.

Customer Support

Does the vendor provide reliable customer support if issues or questions arise? What is their response time and availability? Look for customer support options like live chat, phone support, email, and community forums. This will ensure you have the help you need to make the most of your platform.

1. FiveCRM

Rating: 4.4/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Complete customization: Seamlessly tailor FiveCRM's interface and functions to align with your workflows and the customer journey.
• Email marketing tools: Personalize your outreach and onboarding emails to nurture customer relationships.
• Reporting and analytics: Get real-time insights into customer behavior to increase retention and brand loyalty.
• Powerful integrations: FiveCRM integrates with other tools like Zapier, MailChimp, Xero, and beyond to streamline workflows and data sharing.

FiveCRM is a customer relationship management (CRM) software designed to boost customer satisfaction and facilitate personalized interactions. While specifically built for lead generation and management, FiveCRM's strength lies in its customization capability, allowing you to tailor the software to your unique needs.

Key features that are especially useful for customer success teams include email marketing tools, which enable you to personalize your outreach to new or existing customers. FiveCRM also has robust analytics and reporting, transforming customer data into actionable insights. Its telemarketing features provide tools that simplify your outbound team's activities and workflow.

Plus, FiveCRM offers robust customer support and training sessions for seamless integration of the tool into your current tech stack.

FiveCRM offers subscription-based pricing options. You can select a plan based on the number of seats you need, with monthly rates starting at $70 per seat or $63 per seat when billed annually.

2. Zendesk Support Suite

Rating: 4.3/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Built-in messaging tools: You can easily personalize your customer touchpoints across channels using bots or messaging embedded into your website or app.
• Marketplace and integrations: Connect apps like Salesforce and Slack through the Zendesk Marketplace to easily integrate Zendesk into your current tech stack.

Zendesk is one of the top-of-mind tools for customer support and experience. Its centralized platform offers a 360-degree view of customer interactions. It offers both sales and service CRM platforms, so you can manage customer expectations throughout the entire lifecycle.

The Sales suite provides features such as lead management and robust reporting. The Service suite offers tools such as personalized messaging, ticketing, routing, and more.

As for pricing, Zendesk for Service starts at $55 per agent/month, while Zendesk for Sales starts at $19 per agent/month.

3. HubSpot Sales Hub

Rating: 4.4/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Email templates: Customize and share personalized templates with your team to simplify customer outreach.
• Live chat: Engage with customers in real time through a chat widget on your website or app.
• Automation: Workflows automate repetitive tasks so customer success teams can focus on high-priority activities.

HubSpot is a leading CRM tool with various features that enhance customer relationships and drive retention. You can set up a renewals pipeline, enroll customers in sequences, track email exchange using the sales plug-ins, and use NPS surveys, all in one tool.

HubSpot also has a Service Hub, which enables you to set up a Knowledge Base within your site or provide live chat and omnichannel messaging. However, the Service Hub is an add-on product and thus comes with a separate fee.

HubSpot is a free tool, but more advanced features are available in Starter, Professional, and Enterprise plans that vary based on the product you choose.

4. Akita

Rating: 4.0/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Automated playbooks: Develop scalable and replicable processes to streamline customer success.
• Customer segments: Take advantage of filters to generate precise lists of accounts and contacts.
• 360-degree customer view: Create a comprehensive and cohesive overview of every account, consolidated from more than 100 SaaS integrations.

Akita is a comprehensive Customer Success Management platform designed to assist SaaS businesses in nurturing, retaining, and growing their customer base. It stands out for its robust integration capabilities, seamlessly merging with various CRM, help desk, billing, and chat tools to provide a holistic view of the customer journey.

Key features include automated customer success playbooks that allow businesses to segment customers based on playbook performance, facilitating a continuously evolving engagement strategy.

Akita comes in three plans: Start, Connect, and Customize. The most basic plan, Start, costs $160 per month (if billed annually) and includes your first 3 users. Each additional user comes at $47.20 per month.

5. Twilio

Rating: 4.3/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Trusted activation feature: Twilio offers customer verification solutions to ensure friction-free onboarding.
• Omnichannel communication: Using MessagingX, Twilio's messaging platform, and its email API, you can meet your customers right where they are.

Twilio is a leading customer engagement platform that stands out for its ability to consolidate various communication channels, including messaging, voice, video, email, and WhatsApp to engage customers in a personalized manner. It also features products like MessagingX, the Twilio messaging platform, and a SendGrid email API.

Twilio's Trusted Activation feature enables seamless customer onboarding with efficient and secure logins. This feature makes friction-free onboarding and customer experience possible.

6. Helpjuice

Rating: 4.3/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Easy authoring and content formatting: Create a robust knowledge base using article templates, a complete history of changes, accordion presentations, and more.
• Search function as instant as Google: Enable customers to find information quickly. Plus, users can search PDFs and images to find exactly what they're looking for.

Helpjuice is a knowledge management solution that empowers you to create, manage, and optimize your knowledge base. Its key features include easy authoring and content formatting, intelligent analytics, customization, search, and integrations.

Helpjuice streamlines customer support and reduces response time by providing a centralized location for information. Plus, customers can use Helpjuice as a self-service tool, empowering them to find the answers they need fast. It's intuitive and easy to use both for you as the content creator and for your customers.

The Starter plan costs $120 per month for up to four users.

7. ChurnZero

Rating: 4.7/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Customer Success AI™: The built-in AI tool analyzes customer data to predict churn and identify upsell opportunities.
• Automation: Automation features scale and personalize customer engagement without manual effort, so you can focus on improving the customer experience.

ChurnZero's "digital first customer success platform" offers customized journeys that manage the entire customer lifecycle, specifically onboarding, product adoption, renewal, and expansion.

What sets ChurnZero apart is its focus on leveraging automation and its predictive Customer Success AI™ that aids in content creation, synthesizes customer touchpoints, and improves personalization.

8. Catalyst

Rating: 4.6/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Automation tools: Easily automate your entire customer growth program, from email outreach to project planning.
• Custom dashboards: See all customer data at a glance with fully customizable and easy-to-use dashboards.

Catalyst is a customer success platform that centralizes customer data, providing insights into customer health. Its features include powerful automation and data shaping, which aid in identifying customer maturity, renewal health, and upsell opportunities.

Catalyst also features a wide selection of integrations via its Integration Hub. You can easily integrate with leading platforms such as Zendesk to fuel your customer retention efforts.

9. Salesforce Service Hub

Rating: 4.3/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Highly customizable: Configure the platform to fit your specific business needs and your customer journey.
• Deep integrations: You can connect with over 450 external apps and platforms, making it easy to incorporate Salesforce into existing workflows.

Salesforce is a well-known customer success platform that offers advanced features like analytics, automation, and customization options. Its customer success tools provide a unified, 360-degree view of all of your customers.

A standout feature of Salesforce is Einstein, the built-in AI tool. Using Einstein, you can generate content, utilize an AI assistant to nurture customer relationships, and more.

As for pricing, Salesforce offers several plans tailored to different business sizes and needs.

10. Intercom

Rating: 4.5/5.0 (G2)

Key Features:

• Intercom Messenger: Access a personalized, in-app messaging tool for proactive customer engagement.
• Customizable bots: Automate customer interactions with customizable chatbots.
• Shared inbox: The centralized inbox simplifies collaboration when it comes to customer communication and support tickets.

Intercom is a popular customer success platform with various features, including in-app messaging, live chat, and chatbot automation.

Intercom's AI-enhanced workspace includes an AI ChatBot to streamline customer support, an AI Help Desk to boost productivity, and a Proactive Support feature to provide help to customers before they need it. With this customer communications platform, you can keep your costs down while maintaining ongoing customer engagement.

Pricing starts at $74 per month with a Starter plan.

Improve Customer Satisfaction With FiveCRM

FiveCRM goes beyond traditional customer success tools by providing a robust CRM solution that provides lead generation, sales, and marketing solutions. It offers a comprehensive, user-friendly platform to manage customer relationships and drive retention and loyalty.

With FiveCRM, you can boost customer satisfaction, streamline operations, and ultimately increase revenue. Don't just take our word for it—experience the power of FiveCRM for yourself. Start a demo today and see how FiveCRM can transform your customer success journey.

Customer Success Tools FAQs

Q: What are customer success tools?

A: Customer success tools are software platforms and applications designed to enhance and facilitate the relationship between a business and its customers. They help customer success teams ensure satisfaction, optimize customer experiences, and increase retention and loyalty. These tools can automate tasks like onboarding new clients, tracking customer interactions, providing customer support, and analyzing customer behavior. Some advanced tools even utilize AI and machine learning for predictive analysis and automation.

Q: Why are customer success tools important?

A: Improving customer retention by just 5% can result in profit growth of 25% to 95% over time. Customer success tools support businesses in boosting customer satisfaction, reducing churn, and enhancing the overall customer experience, leading to increased customer lifetime value.

Q: How do I choose the right customer success tool for my team?

A: When selecting a customer success tool, consider the needs of your customer success team. Evaluate the tool's features, pricing, and customer support. Ensure the tool can integrate seamlessly with your existing systems and can be customized to fit your business workflows and branding.

Q: Which are some of the top customer success platforms in 2023?

A: Some of the top platforms in 2023 include FiveCRM, Zendesk, HubSpot, Akita, Twilio, Helpjuice, ChurnZero, Catalyst, Salesforce, and Intercom.

Q: How does FiveCRM stand out among customer success tools?

A: FiveCRM is a comprehensive CRM solution that goes beyond traditional customer success tools. It offers features like complete customization, email marketing tools, robust analytics and reporting, and powerful integrations. FiveCRM is designed to boost customer satisfaction, streamline operations, and increase revenue.

Q: How can customer success tools improve customer onboarding?

A: Customer success tools can automate the onboarding process, provide personalized outreach and communication, track customer interactions, and offer insights into customer behavior. This ensures a smooth and efficient onboarding experience, leading to increased customer satisfaction from the outset.

Q: Can customer success tools integrate with other platforms?

A: Yes, many customer success tools offer integrations with other platforms and systems. For example, FiveCRM integrates with tools like Zapier, MailChimp, and Xero, while Zendesk can connect with platforms like Salesforce and Slack.

Q: How do customer success tools aid in reducing customer churn?

A: Customer success tools provide insights into customer behavior, preferences, and pain points. They allow businesses to proactively address issues, offer personalized support, and enhance the overall customer experience. By understanding and meeting customer needs, these tools help in boosting satisfaction and loyalty, thereby reducing churn.

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