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.
Want to Stay Competitive? You Need the Best Customer Success Tools
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:
- Get access to more customer data: Data is immensely important for customer success—and for sales. These tools help gather information about buying behavior, preferences, and customer satisfaction levels. This data can then be used to find buyer trends, predict customer needs, and tweak sales strategies.
- Stay organized: The right tools help teams keep track of interactions, monitor the progress of each client's journey, and provide better customer support. This also helps sales reps stay organized and take advantage of important customer touchpoints.
- Improve the customer experience: Better customer engagement helps teams deliver a more personalized experience. By tracking customer interactions and preferences, sales reps can provide targeted recommendations and ensure that each customer receives the attention and support they need.
- Lower churn: By using customer success tools, your teams can identify customers who are at risk of churning and take steps to win them back. We're talking about giving additional support, offering incentives, or adjusting pricing or product offerings.
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.
What Features Should Customer Success Tools Include?
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:
- Minimal learning curve. When onboarding, it should only take one or two days for your team to understand and use the new tool effectively. Choose a customer success tool that is user-friendly and intuitive, even for those who aren't tech-savvy.
- No-Code. Customer success tools shouldn't require a software engineer for set-up. It should integrate easily with your sales software, and (ideally) have a no-code install so you can start using it quickly.
- Integrations. Make sure your new tool is compatible with the other tools in your tech stack. Customer success is all about a smooth transition from sale to post-sale care. Check that the tool integrates with your CRM, so the data can be accessed easily.
- Analytics. Customer success tools should offer in-depth analytics and reporting capabilities, such as customer engagement metrics or churn rates. This data helps you spot at-risk accounts and optimize your customer success strategies.
- Automation. Automated email campaigns, real-time notifications, and onboarding sequences save teams lots of time and increase efficiency.
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.
10 Customer Success Tools to Improve the Customer Experience + Drive Growth
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.
1. Close: The Best Tool for Customer Success + Sales
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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:
- Emailing. With email sequences and automation, sales reps manage all customer communication within the CRM. This data is centralized and easy-to-access, so customer success can later find info about the customer's journey and pain points.
- Task management. Customer success teams can create task reminders, follow up with customers, and build automated sequences to avoid things falling through the cracks.
- Analytics. Real-time reporting keeps everyone in the loop. It tracks customer engagement and spots customer accounts that are at risk of churning.
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:
- Easy-to-use interface
- Powerful email management system
- 100+ integrations with other sales tools
- Detailed reporting and analytics features to track every account
- Task management system for follow-up and engagement
Pricing: Close starts at $25/user/month.
Find out why a well-crafted email template is crucial for a successful sales to customer success handoff.
2. SavvyCal: Smart Call Scheduling
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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:
- Easy-to-use and customizable to your team's needs
- Automatically reminds customers (and your team) of upcoming meetings
- Integrates with other popular tools, meshing easily with your existing tech stack
Savvycal cons:
- Limited customization for meetings and appointments
- Free plan is restrictive, most teams must pay to use the features effectively
Pricing: Basic plan starts at $12/user/month.
3. ProfitWell: Drive Subscription Revenue and Improve Retention
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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:
- Powerful optimization tools to improve pricing decisions and product adoption
- Spot customers at risk of churning early, allowing you to intervene
- Integrates with many other tools like Twilio, Chargify, and ReCharge
ProfitWell cons:
- Feature overload for small teams
- Advanced features may be expensive for startups and small businesses
Pricing: ProfitWell Metrics is free. The pricing of more advanced features, like algorithms and optimization, vary—contact their team.
4. EverAfter: Give Every Client the VIP Treatment
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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:
- Customer feedback tools help you understand what they’re thinking
- “Success hub" gives customers and internal teams a centralized location to share information
- Integrate tools like Slack, and even custom embeds, into the dashboard
EverAfter cons:
- Learning curve to figure out all of the features
- Lacks transparent pricing on the website
Pricing: No pricing info available, contact their team for a demo first.
5. Totango: Simple Customer Support for Growing Companies
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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:
- Analytics and KPIs track the health of every deal and customer account
- Ready-to-use customer journey templates for onboarding that can be tweaked to suit your customers
- Automated campaigns allow you to onboard new customers and implement products at scale (huge timesaver)
Totango cons:
- Totango has lots of features, so it may have a steep learning curve (unless your team is super tech-savvy)
- The price tag is a little … ouch. Paid plans start at $249/month and only include two users. The free plan is limited and only includes 100 customer accounts.
- It collects a ton of data (not a bad thing), but the analytics can be overwhelming
Pricing: Restrictive free plan available, paid plans start at $249/month.
6. CustomerGauge: Easily Collect Feedback from Multiple Stakeholders
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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:
- Powerful in-built survey tools like NPS, feedback forms, and response tracking
- Visual representations of feedback results, provided in real-time
- Customizable dashboards and reporting to suit your needs
CustomerGauge cons:
- Limited customization options for certain features
- No “out-of-the-box” reports when you buy the tool—each one must be built from scratch
Pricing: Range of pricing options, contact their team for a custom quote.
7. UserIQ: Predict Customer Behavior and Improve Retention
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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:
- Easy-to-use interface and visual maps of customer health scores
- Streamline contract renewals with customer success playbooks
- Pre-built micro-feedback forms, surveys, and NPS to learn about the customer journey and current sentiment
UserIQ cons:
- No live-user session tracking, making it hard to help customers in real-time as they use the product
- Certain features are difficult to set up and require technical help from UserIQ's team
Pricing: Free trial, customized paid plans available on request.
8. Catalyst: Bring Value to Every Customer Deal
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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:
- Customer health scoring and detailed surveys like NPS and CSAT
- Pipeline breakdown and account stages to track every customer
- Contract lifetime values, customer data, and churn risk are centralized
Catalyst cons:
- Custom modules and workflows can be complicated to set up
- Some users report that the app is a letdown
Pricing: Plans are custom-built, so pricing is only available on request.
9. ChurnZero: For Subscription & SaaS Teams Focused on Cutting Churn
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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:
- Health scores, tailored customer journeys, and segmentation for personalization
- In-app messages and campaigns, to easily stay in contact with customers
- Pre-built plays and automations to make customers feel valued
ChurnZero cons:
- Data isn't pushed in real time, which may delay reports and actionable insights
- No free trial or freemium version for SaaS businesses
Pricing: Only available upon request.
10: TaskRay: Help Your Team Nurture Customers Post-Purchase
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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:
- Customizable templates to streamline the new customer onboarding process
- Daily task lists and reminders, so teams know exactly what needs to get done
- Built-in messaging tool to centralize team discussion about customer onboarding and engagement
TaskRay cons:
- Slightly technical to set up and customize to specific needs
- A poor choice for sales teams that don't use Salesforce
Pricing: TaskRay plans start at $25/user/month.
Better Customer Success Tools = More Revenue
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.
