Your sales team just spent weeks in meetings and negotiating the contract. The deal is finally in the bag.
The hard work is finally done, right?
Unfortunately … no. You're only halfway there. Now the work to keep the customer starts. We all know the stats—retained customers are worth more, spend more, and have more loyalty. But after a bad user experience, customers are likely to look to a competitor. In fact, 50 percent of customers will look elsewhere if they have just one bad experience with a company.
Like many organizations, our team at Close uses customer success tools to mitigate that risk. With our software and a detailed customer success strategy, we support every new customer with specialist onboarding, 1:1 support, and tailored training so they start off on the right foot with our CRM.
Today, we’ll discuss how the right tools reduce churn and boost retention, and we’ll recommend the 10 best customer success tools for your team. Let's dive in.
Customer success teams have a tough job—they are in charge of customer success management, cutting churn, and improving retention.
But without the right tools, it's almost impossible for customer success managers (CSMs) and their cs teams to do their jobs. What's rarely mentioned about customer success software is how beneficial these tools can be for the entire team, especially sales. Consider the following benefits:
But not all customer success tools are created equal. Before buying one, make sure it offers these must-have features that will help your team connect with customers.
When selecting a customer success tool, you need to consider the specific features and functionality that your team needs. Make sure it ticks a few boxes:
Finding a customer success tool that boasts all these features isn't easy. The good news: You don't need to spend hours on G2 or TrustRadius. We've done the work.
Here are 10 customer success tools that hit all these points.
There are hundreds of customer success tools that claim to cut churn and improve the customer experience. However, many of them lack key features like metrics, automation, or real-time updates. The tools on our list cover all these bases and help your customer success team retain customers.
Sure—we're biased. But we still think Close deserves a top spot on the list of best customer success tools.
Our platform is designed to help close deals and build customer relationships that last long-term. With Close, you’ll find everything you need to ease the hand-off from sales to customer success, improve contact with customers, and track every deal in your pipeline—and beyond.
Here are some key features that benefit customer success teams:
And yes, we use Close to manage our own customer success.
When someone buys our software, our sales team updates the CRM to accurately reflect the sales process. When it's time to onboard, this information is easy to access for customer success, and there are automated workflows and communication in place to help the new customer (e.g., you) hit the ground running.
We set you up for immediate and long-term success—so that you can do the same for your customers.
Close offers:
Pricing: Close starts at $9/user/month.
Find out why a well-crafted email template is crucial for a successful sales to customer success handoff.
Image Source: SavvyCal
Savvycal helps potential customers find space on your calendar.
This tool reduces scheduling conflicts with prospects, making it easy to book meetings and manage upcoming appointments. Customers can choose a timeslot on your calendar that's convenient for them, and Savvycal ensures that there are no double bookings on your end.
With customizable booking pages, your team can adjust what meeting times are available. Once the meeting is booked, Savvycal sends out automatic reminders and meeting links, saving you time and minimizing missed appointments.
It's an easy way to solve the headache of scheduling.
Savvycal pros:
Savvycal cons:
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $12/user/month.
If your team needs to track deal revenue and get customer insights about which accounts bring in the most cash, ProfitWel is your solution.
This tool is a powerhouse in helping sales teams optimize their pricing strategies, improve customer retention, and reduce churn. Using detailed analytics and data points, ProfitWell helps teams understand buyer behavior, optimize pricing, and test strategies to create a customer-centric experience.
ProfitWell can help your sales team—and naturally, your customer success team—to optimize every opportunity.
Think of this tool as a way to perform a health check on your customer base.
ProfitWell pros:
ProfitWell cons:
Pricing: ProfitWell Metrics is free. The pricing of more advanced features, like algorithms and optimization, vary—contact their team.
EverAfter is a customer success platform that helps businesses to improve customer engagement and retention via a personalized customer experience.
Thanks to data management tools and feedback collection, success teams gain a deeper understanding of their customer base and can provide better support. Notable features include: personalized onboarding experiences, tracked engagement metrics, and feedback tools like Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys and forms. Helping your team understand the customer experience is key to improving retention.
EverAfter pros:
EverAfter cons:
Pricing: No pricing info available, contact their team for a demo first.
Totango has a simple mission: to help your team manage conversations with customers.
This tool has everything you need. It tracks completed deals from handover to onboarding, measures customer health, and finds upsell and cross-sell opportunities for your sales reps. There are also automated engagement campaigns that your team can use out-of-the-box to accelerate onboarding and implementation, without spending hours on video calls or email exchanges.
But the best feature (by far) from Totango is how closely it monitors customer engagement. It can spot customers at risk of churning, or those who aren’t frequently using your product—so you can reach out, ask what’s up, and learn how to improve their experience.
Totango pros:
Totango cons:
Pricing: Restrictive free plan available, paid plans start at $249/month.
CustomerGauge is a customer experience management platform that provides a 360-degree view of the loyalty and happiness of your customers.
Using surveys and engagement tracking, CustomerGauge gives teams a visual representation of the customers’ engagement with the product, and overall satisfaction levels. But there’s more. Besides storing customer data profiles, it can also send alerts about new product releases and feature upgrades.
Think of CustomerGauge as an additional tool that improves the experience by responding to customer sentiment.
CustomerGauge pros:
CustomerGauge cons:
Pricing: Range of pricing options, contact their team for a custom quote.
UserIQ is another customer success tool that gives companies insight into customer account management—in order to increase retention and reduce churn.
The platform has features like health scores, support tickets, product usage tracking, and customer onboarding to help teams interact and engage with customers. One of our favorite features of UserIQ is the in-app messaging. CS teams can send targeted, personalized messages to customers inside the product, based on their behavior and usage habits.
Keep customers engaged and flag potential issues with product usage or satisfaction before a customer churns.
UserIQ pros:
UserIQ cons:
Pricing: Free trial, customized paid plans available on request.
Catalyst helps customer success teams to manage every customer relationship and deal in the pipeline.
It tracks churn risk, monitors customer health, and breaks down every account into stages, so your team can see where every customer is at, and what needs to happen next. It also monitors important metrics like sentiment, and has built-in triggers to send automated messages and reminders to customers. Nothing slips through the cracks—and your customer knowledge base grows by the day.
Get better insight into your customers and their needs.
Catalyst pros:
Catalyst cons:
Pricing: Plans are custom-built, so pricing is only available on request.
The hint is in the name—ChurnZero is a customer success tool that focuses on reducing customer churn.
This tool measures customer usage and health, and also gives teams (particularly subscription-based SaaS companies) a deeper understanding of customer needs, so they can be addressed before major problems arise.
To ensure that each message is targeted and personalized, teams can create automated account plays so that messages reach at-risk accounts right when they need to. It also offers customer segmentation features that target accounts based on firmographics, customer lifecycle, product usage, and behavioral data.
Finally, ChurnZero sends real-time messages that alert customer success teams to usage drops or milestone celebrations, so they can proactively reach out to customers.
ChurnZero pros:
ChurnZero cons:
Pricing: Only available upon request.
Our final tool is TaskRay, a digital task list to keep customer onboarding and success teams on-track with new customers.
Although built for Salesforce users, the tool includes customizable templates, milestone tracking, and daily task lists to keep your CS team on top of every account. TaskRay also comes with team collaboration and onboarding features that make product walkthroughs more efficient when your team is welcoming new customers.
Its reporting and analytics features aren't as comprehensive as some of the other tools on our list. However, TaskRay does a good job of giving customer success teams a detailed rundown of their daily tasks, ensuring that every customer feels like a VIP.
TaskRay pros:
TaskRay cons:
Pricing: TaskRay plans start at $25/user/month.
So, your sales team just finalized the deal. Now what?
Once a customer reaches the end of your sales pipeline, it's important to think about what happens next. Well-equipped customer success teams can improve customer lifetime value, enhance the customer experience, reduce churn … the benefits are endless. Give your team the tools it needs.
Customer success tools can be expensive—and they’re often worth the price, when they provide enough value. But opaque pricing “available on request” makes it hard for teams to budget and make educated decisions.
Close is different. We make customer success easy and affordable. Data is centralized, customers are kept in-the-loop, and automated task management keeps everyone above water. Close is a customer success and sales tool—and we have transparent pricing.
The result? Happy customers. And happy customers = more revenue.