Sales Tools

The Top 7 Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions

Explore the Top Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions known for their customer health monitoring, onboarding automation, and analytics features to drive customer satisfaction and retention.

Last updated on Mar 06, 2024

Written by Mirren McDade

Technical review by Laura Iannini

The Top 7 Customer Success Management Solutions include:

1. ChurnZero
2. ClientSuccess
3. Custify
4. Freshsuccess
5. Gainsight
6. Planhat
7. Totango

Customers are essential to the success of business, so it is unsurprising that the question of how to win their loyalty is often debated. Next to the quality and value of the product that a business is delivering, high-quality customer service is key sales driver. Customers want a holistic experience that is reliable and straightforward. This is where a Customer Success Management (CSM) solution can be useful.

Among the benefits of using a CSM platform is improved customer engagement, better understanding of customer needs, expanded upselling and cross-selling opportunities, as well as increased customer loyalty and satisfaction. These solutions enable businesses to proactively manage their customer lifecycle with a solutions-based approach which can leading to reduced churn, increased upsell, and improved customer satisfaction.

The market for Customer Success Management platforms is diverse and competitive, with many providers offering unique sets of features to target different areas of customer success. Some platforms are more robust and targeted, they offer a set variety of tools, while others are more flexible to address other aspects of customer success such as onboarding or usage tracking.

This guide will explore the top Customer Success Management solutions, taking into account their features, integrations, analytics capabilities, user feedback, and overall performance. Whether you are a start-up looking for your first CSM solution or an established business considering a switch, our comprehensive guide will help you make an informed decision.

ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a comprehensive platform designed for customer success. It enhances operational efficiency, improves revenue, and provides optimal customer experiences while empowering teams to identify churn risks promptly and recognize opportunities for renewal and expansion. ChurnZero streamlines customer engagement via high-quality automation, in-app communications, and AI-supported customer success strategies.

The platform incorporates multiple features including journey mapping, health scores, survey tools, segmentation, plays, reporting, real-time alerts, walkthroughs, and collaboration centers. These robust features facilitate easy integration with your CRM system and other technology infrastructure. For subscription businesses, ChurnZero effectively assists in customer retention and account expansion, which are crucial factors for growth. The platform provides teams with insightful data for accurate renewal forecasting and identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities. Additionally, it enables the creation of a holistic customer view by integrating data from all stages of the customer lifecycle. This comprehensive view ensures that teams have the essential insights for strategic decision-making and revenue management.

ChurnZero’s customer success software is designed to maximize team productivity, allowing them to focus on essential tasks. Whether it involves changing customer health, upcoming renewals, or expansion opportunities, ChurnZero’s range of features ensures teams can efficiently manage their time and focus on impactful work.

ClientSuccess

ClientSuccess is a customer success platform geared specifically to SaaS companies. It focuses on managing customer relationships, assessing customer health, and optimizing revenue. This platform gives companies the tools to monitor retention, renewal, and growth rates, providing feedback that propels tangible results.

The platform utilizes customer data across multiple departments – Product, Sales, Marketing, Support, and more – to provide a cross-functional approach to growth. An integrated feature of ClientSuccess is the SuccessScore, which extends a comprehensive view of customer health by integrating usage trends, adoption rates, feedback, engagement level, and sentiment into a single measurement. ClientSuccess also incorporates customer journey management, enabling a custom-tailored approach to customer lifecycle management, including a cooperative customer onboarding process, product adoption methods, renewal management driven by insights, and proactive lifecycle stage automations. A standout feature of ClientSuccess is a set of AI and automation tools named SmartCS; this provides automated customer communications and generative AI, allowing businesses to achieve customer outcomes more efficiently.

ClientSuccess has a dedicated onboarding platform and customer portal that offers real-time visibility and insights during customers’ onboarding experience, supplemented by automated project templates, plans, and collaborative customer engagement. ClientSuccess can be integrated with the most used CRM, support, and communication platforms, offering comprehensive customer data management.

Custify

Custify specifically engineered for B2B SaaS businesses. It works to fulfill customers’ needs, curb down churn rates, and amplifying lifetime value. Custify brings together in-product usage insights as well as data sourced from CRM, support, and billing along with other systems in a singular, easy-to-decipher dashboard.

With Custify, client interaction and critical customer success KPIs are readily visible. The platform is peculiarly beneficial in enhancing customer satisfaction during the onboarding process, securing contract renewals, and converting customers into advocates. With Custify, it becomes simpler to identify up-selling opportunities for business expansion. Custify comes equipped with functionalities that create actionable tasks, fostering an actionable way forward each day. The platform facilitates the automation of low-hanging customer success workflows, thereby enabling focus on significant tasks requiring custom involvement. Additionally, integration with existing apps is seamless, eliminating the need for engineering support.

The platform’s predictive insights and analytics eliminate the need for utilization of sheets, allowing the creation of customized dashboards and tracking of performance scores within a single view. Overall, Custify helps in an effective evaluation of your portfolio’s health, identifying growth opportunities, automating workflows, and benefiting from complex insights through calculated metrics.

Freshsuccess

Freshsuccess is a Customer Success Management platform that is used by B2B businesses for processes like preventing churn, boosting account expansion, and enhancing customer relationships. This capable data platform with its user-friendly design allows Customer Success professionals to evaluate customer health, proactively manage risks, and proficiently streamline customer workflows and reporting.

By automatically alerting teams to potential business opportunities, Freshsuccess aids in converting more trials, upsells, and cross-sells. Additionally, businesses are equipped with the ability to understand why customers churn and manage renewals successfully in real-time through early warnings. Informative alert rules assist their users in quickly assessing customer health and identifying at-risk customers. This systematic detection allows for better management and support for customer accounts that may require attention, and also helps prevent jeopardizing business performance due to late discovery of customer issues. Freshsuccess offers the ability to efficiently manage important milestones in the customer lifecycle, such as churn, renewal, and expansion trends.

Freshsuccess provides an automated management process for recurring account actions like onboarding, check-ins, and business reviews. This platform equips customer support leaders with critical account trends to better understand product adoption, the effectiveness of support, and financial health, effectively contributing to business performance.

Gainsight

Gainsight offers a comprehensive platform designed to aid businesses in attaining sustainable growth. The platform is composed of four key products: Gainsight CS, PX, DH, and Customer Education. This range of products equips customer success, product, and community engagement teams with tools that enable them to scale efficiently, establish alignment, and maintain a comprehensive view of their customers.

The platform eliminates retention and expansion blind spots by delivering accurate forecasts through robust health scores, a complete customer overview, and automated playbooks. It also equips managers with powerful dashboards aggregating all customer data in a single view. Gainsight allows businesses to scale efficiently by integrating human and digital touch, automating customer interactions to ensure timely engagement with customers while reducing team workload. The platform enables the capture of customer success qualified leads and provides workflows for identifying expansion opportunities. AI-supported health scoring allows the prediction of renewals and expansions.

Gainsight employs Natural Language Processing to deliver actionable insights and trends based on customer feedback, coupling this with a multi-dimensional feedback loop tracking sentiment, NPS, engagement, and feature usage. Gainsight ensures customer feedback forms a central part of business strategy development.

Planhat

Planhat serves as a customer success platform and works to gather insights, oversee workflow, and enhance customer experiences. Planhat centralizes operations around customers, equips users with features like the ability to formulate customer-centered plans, processes, and culture. It is utilized by hundreds of modern technology companies worldwide to maximize customer success and lifetime value.

The solution streamlines onboarding procedures leveraging clear, repeatable processes to steer customers efficiently through the customer lifecycle. Planhat defines milestones to gauge overall progress and spurs customer engagement. One of the essential elements of Planhat’s platform is the customer health score, which acts as a leading indicator of churn and a tool to track current or future customer satisfaction. Planhat also helps businesses to identify dissatisfied customers and provides insights into their needs and has functionality for tracking high churn cohorts and creates an early warning system with alerts and triggers based on usage and health.

Planhat provides data-driven insights by integrating all customer-related data in one place, including conversations, usage trends, subscription dates, health scores, user data, and billing details. The platform also offers features like product analytics to understand user behavior, customized surveys for real-time feedback, and revenue management.

Totango

Totango is a customer success software designed for unlimited scalability and speedy deployment. It supports business growth, while achieving optimal outcomes at every customer journey stage. Totango’s central feature is SuccessBLOCs, which are pre-designed program templates enriched with industry best practices and expert insights. These enable quick start-ups and customization to fulfill varying business objectives.

A key feature of Totango is its adaptability and scalability. The platform is conceived in a way that facilitates crafting distinct moments at each customer journey point. It seamlessly gels with entire team dynamics. With Totango, businesses can assimilate data from various customer data sources across their existing tech stack. This integrated model aids in risk assessment, opportunity identification, and task delegation among teams. Totango also facilitates collaboration for customer portfolio management. It assists in creating strategic account plans, handling day-to-day chores, and offering large-scale visibility to stakeholders.

This software harnesses integrated data to prompt and automate customer communication. It steers engagement via multiple channels including email, in-app communications, videos etc., for different customer engagement models. With Totango, businesses can engage with customers precisely when it matters.

The Top 7 Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions

Everything You Need To Know About Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions (FAQs)

What Are Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions?

Customer Success Management (CSM) is a useful business discipline which is focused on customer success and satisfaction. The goal of CSM is to maximize the value customers are receiving from your business’s services and products, with the aim of creating a strong sense of brand loyalty and trust over time.

CMS solutions support the orchestration of activities between customers, customer service representatives, middle-office employees, operations teams, back office departments, and IT teams to swiftly and fully resolve customers issues and requests.

Customer Success Management platforms are typically comprised of tools for onboarding, customer communication, usage tracking, data analytics, risk prediction, and reporting. These work together to provide a comprehensive understanding of the health of customer relationships and to guide data-driven decisions on how to improve them.

Why Are Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions Useful?

Customer Success Management (CSM) solutions are crucial for businesses seeking to build and maintain strong, profitable relationships with their customers. By using these platforms, businesses can track and analyze customer behavior, identify potential churn risks, implement strategies for customer retention, and improve their relationships with their customer base overall.

Implementing a customer success management solution is a great way to improve customer satisfactions at your business, as well as improve retention rates and profitability. More specific benefits of utilizing on of these solutions include:

Operational Efficiency. By streamlining processes related to customer health monitoring, renewal management, and onboarding, these solutions enhance operational efficiency and allow teams to put their focus on strategic initiatives rather than routine tasks.
Data Driven Decision Making. A customer success management solution can provide users with valuable insights through their reporting and analytics capabilities, which can then be leveraged to make informed decisions regarding strategies, leading to continuous improvements based on real-time feedback.
Maximize Customer Lifetime Value. With effective onboarding, ongoing engagement, and valuable insights that can indicate good upselling and cross-selling opportunities, a customer success management solution works well to support business in extracting the most value for their customer relationships and strengthen them in the long run.

A customer success strategy is very important for ensuring customers are getting what they need out of your products or services. The primary goal of this strategy should be to create a roadmap for aligning the businesses actions with the customers’ end goals, and this strategy should be flexible enough to undergo tweaks and changes in accordance with customers’ changing needs.

What Features Should You Look For In Customer Success Management (CSM) Solutions?

Customer success management solutions are designed to support businesses in managing and enhancing their customer relationships in the most effective, unobtrusive way possible. The goal of this is to drive customer satisfaction, retention, and loyalty. Some of the core features you should expect from these solutions include:

Customer Onboarding – Organizations should make the onboarding process as smooth and unobtrusive as possible for their customers. Once implemented, a good CSM solution should work to support the organization in facilitating a smooth introduction for new customers to their products or services. It does this via tools for personalizing user guidance and training, allowing businesses to curate tailored onboarding plans, automate workflows, and track progress.
Reporting and Analytics – Any CSM solution you consider should come equipped with the right tools to properly analyze and report on key performance metrics related to customer success. Using robust reporting and analytics tools is important as this information can be used by businesses to inform their decision making and fine-tune their customer success strategies.
Health Monitoring – A good CSM solution will actively monitor customer behavior to gather data on things factors like engagement and product usage patterns. A health score is then assigned to each customer based on the analysis of this information, which works to give an indication of the overall health of the customer relationship. This is good information to know as it allows organizations to take deliberate steps to improve these relationships, based on real insights.
Churn Prediction and Protection – Data analytics can also be used to identify potential indicators of customer churn (which is the name given to the percentage of customers who stop using a company’s product or service within a certain timeframe). A good CSM solution should provide a range of ways for businesses to take proactive actions to address issues, thereby helping to prevent high rates of customer churn.
Customer Feedback – By facilitating the gathering of customer feedback, a CSM solution provides businesses with insights into the customer experience, with specific details of how their products and services might be improved. This is typically achieved using surveys and reviews.
Strategies for Customer Success – Strategic planning for customer success is essential is it makes managing customer success actions and outcomes far easier, which in turn helps to ensure that customer objectives and the valuable delivered by the product or services the business provides are well aligned. A CSM solution helps with this by providing ways for users to create and manage success plans that outlines specific goals and milestones.
Automation – Automating repetitive tasks and workflows associated with customer success management is a great way to streamline the process, which helps to ensure efficiency and consistency. This means customers get a better experience while businesses experience fewer errors, less stress, and better compliance.
Integrations – A good CSM solution should be capable of integrating seamlessly with other enterprise systems, such as CRM, support, or marketing platforms. This is to make sure the flow of information between various teams is as seamless as possible, which ultimately results in better customer success management.

Mirren McDade

Journalist & Content Writer

Mirren McDade is a writer and journalist at Expert Insights, spending each day researching, writing, editing and publishing content, covering a variety or topics and solutions, and interviewing industry experts. She is an experienced copywriter with a background in a range of industries, including cloud business technologies, cloud security, information security and cyber security, and has conducted interviews with several industry experts. Mirren holds a First Class Honors degree in English from Edinburgh Napier University.

Laura Iannini

Cybersecurity Analyst

Laura Iannini is an Information Security Engineer. She holds a Bachelor’s degree in Cybersecurity from the University of West Florida. Laura has experience with a variety of cybersecurity platforms and leads technical reviews of leading solutions. She conducts thorough product tests to ensure that Expert Insights’ reviews are definitive and insightful.