15 Customer Success Tools to Help You Fight Churn and Retain Happy Users

Let’s talk about customer success management. If you’re here, then your mind’s already in the right place, and you know the importance of keeping your users happy. With customer success tools, you can drastically improve customer engagement and take it to the next level. 

That being said, there’s a lot out there. Not to worry, though, we’ll give you an overview of some of the top customer success platforms on the market right now. We’ll also run you through some up-and-coming software that you may not have heard of, but could be exactly what your SaaS business needs. 

There’s a lot to cover, so let’s dive right in.

A customer success platform will help your SaaS business retain users by ensuring they are successful with your product. 

Stellar customer success software seamlessly integrates with your SaaS in order for you to provide a better product experience to your users—keeping customer health scores high, increasing their lifetime value, and constantly coming back for more. 

What does success look like? Pleased you asked. 

G2 defines customer success tools as tools that enable you to capture user data and understand your user behavior via: 

• Building or identifying customer profiles

• Engaging customers throughout their lifecycle

• Providing customer success scores based on the analysis of historical data

• Capturing customer feedback including survey results, invoice history, marketing engagement, and/or team interactions

• Predicting future customer growth or red flags based on data related to interactions, payments, inquiries, and more

The best CS tools enable you to use data to engage with existing customers in a way that's relevant and unique to their experience with your SaaS.

Customer success software should be able to represent this data for your teams, predict future customer growth, or highlight red flags you’ll need to act on if you want to keep certain accounts around. 

Lastly, your customer success tool will scale as your company scales and as your method of customer adoption or your user engagement strategy evolves.  

Fab, we've got the why out of the way. Let’s get into the what, and help you build better customer success with a tool that suits your needs.

Chameleon’s top-rated features are: 

• Styling and customization: Make your in-app messages consistent and on-brand with styling that automatically populates your account-wide templates, or use case-specific design and custom CSS when you need them

• Self-serve support for your customers: Help your customers succeed with your product from day one by offering a list of useful resources with links to product walkthroughs, help docs, videos, and more

• Deep integrations with your tech stack: Track the performance of your in-product experiences in the Chameleon Dashboard and choose from a wide variety of integrations to connect data with your CDPs, product analytics, CRMs, communications platforms, and other tools to get a holistic overview of your customer success.

Best for: 

Chameleon works best for product-led SaaS companies that run their product as a browser-based web app or a Single Page App (SPA).    

Pricing:

Chameleon offers a Startup plan (starting at $279/month), a Growth plan (starting at $849/month), and an Enterprise plan that's customized to your needs. You can start with a free trial to explore at your own pace or schedule a demo to have one of the product specialists walk you through it.

Gainsight’s top-rated features are: 

• Monitor Customer Health Scores: Provide your team with a score that will determine how you need to engage with each account to fight customer churn or upsell your SaaS products

• Customer monitoring: Enabling you to monitor in-app actions as well as other touchpoints with various customer-facing teams 

• Customer profiles: Build fully-developed data-driven profiles by integrating them with your CRMs, customer support service tickets, marketing platforms, and financial SaaS tools   

Best for: 

Gainsight is a fit for larger corporates, or those with at least a Series C funding round or IPO. Some of Gainsight’s customers include SurveyMonkey, Athenahealth, and Pluralsight. If you run a smaller team, you can check out Gainsight alternatives like Vitally or Catalyst (more on these below).

Pricing:

Gainsight offers Basic, Professional, and Premier plans for customer success managers to choose from. However, to get an idea of pricing, you’ll need to get in touch with their team directly as they don’t share this information publicly. 

Catalyst’s main features include:

• Reporting and analytics: Consolidate reports across data sets; from Salesforce to Mixpanel or Zendesk 

• Emails: Automate recurring email cycles so your CS team can focus on personal service

• Lifecycle management: Catalyst moves new customers through their entire customer journey, so you no longer need to tag accounts in new workflows 

Best for:

Catalyst is the best fit for small to mid-market level businesses. 

Pricing:

Although you’ll need to get in touch with Catalyst to understand their price points, mid-market companies have reviewed the platform as advantageous for a growing user base and product success.

HubSpot Service Hub’s main features include:

• Omni-channel messaging: Give your CS team context, no matter how many contact channels a customer is using  

• Knowledge base functionality: Answer common questions with a self-serve knowledge base to better support customers 

• Help desk automation: Live chat lets you route customer queries to exactly where they need to go

Best for: 

HubSpot is renowned for providing software solutions to SMBs and things aren’t changing with HubSpot Service Hub as their customer service platform. 

Pricing:

Their Starter plan starts at €41/per month and includes two paid users. Their Enterprise plan starts at €1,104/per month and includes ten seats plus a ton of advanced features. 

ChurnZero’s main features include:

• Account insights: Custom dashboards for better customer health and account health tracking

• Real-time alerts: To alert you on the channels you already use, as soon as something happens

• Plays & automation: Automate playbooks depending on the actions your users take

Best for: 

ChurnZero is a good fit for small to medium businesses. 

Pricing:

ChurnZero’s pricing is tricky to come by. If this is a tool you think could work for your SaaS you’ll need to book a demo with their team.

CustomerSuccessBox’s main features include: 

• Customer segmentation onboarding: Watch and segment all new accounts for faster user activation

• Active user alerts: To signal when an account is ready for an upsell 

• 360-degree view: Connecting with your CRM, helpdesks, and billing systems under one roof

Best for: 

CustomerSuccessBox is a perfect fit for mid-market businesses looking to retain users, and build out a larger ROI per account with upsells. 

Pricing:

There are three pricing plans to choose from: Grow, Business, and Enterprise. As the G2 overview for small-sized companies shows, their small-biz plans are just 2% above the industry average for customer success platforms, and their mid-market pricing is 7% more expensive than average.

Akita’s main features include:

• Customer segments: Powerful filters for every account and contact 

• Task management: Stay on top of customer-related tasks 

• Customer health scores: Customer health scores for your SaaS model to build customer retention

Best for: 

As far as customer success platform pricing goes, Akita is on the affordable end of the spectrum, which makes it a great option for smaller businesses looking to invest in customer success. 

Pricing:

Akita comes with three plan options. Their “Start” plan is $159/per month and comes with three seats. The “Connect” plan is $480/per month, it also comes with 3 seats, everything in the Start plan, and 80+ app integrations.  Their last plan: “Customize”, will differ depending on your needs.

InMoment, previously known as Wootric, has a few stand-out features: 

• In-app surveys: Deliver NPS, CSAT, CES, and more at critical customer journey milestones

• Real-time customer sentiment measures: To ensure you’re gathering actionable, qualitative data

•  Customizable dashboards: Use your own systems of record to keep all stakeholders in the know

Best for: 

Although InMoment says they’re a fit for any type of business size, there’s definitely a trending customer base of small to medium-sized businesses. 

Pricing:

There are three payment plans available; Core CX, Enterprise, and Custom plans. However, you’ll need to inquire with the team to see the costs of each of these plans.

Involve.ai’s main features include:

• AI-driven actionable insights: Recognize trends, problems, and opportunities to better inform your customer success team 

• Automated workflows & playbooks: Power-up next steps, fueled by industry best practices

• Customizable reporting: To dissect data depending on the team and their KPIs

Best for:

Involve.ai is the best fit for small businesses that are looking to use AI to make data-driven decisions while automating as many of their customer success processes as possible.

Pricing: 

Involve.ai doesn’t publically share any of its pricing or plans, you’ll need to book a demo to learn more.

UserIQ’s main features include: 

• Customer Health Scores: Understand the impact your efforts have on customer accounts

• Reporting & Analytics: Visual insights on your product adoption curve and ongoing customer feedback

• Purpose-driven Plays: Outcome-driven plans for every step in the customer lifecycle

Best for: 

UserIQ is the best fit for mid-sized businesses, and customers average 17 days to a customer success win. 

Pricing:

Although UserIQ doesn’t share their pricing online—inviting you to get a quote—G2 mid-market overview shows that for mid-market companies they’re 7% below average in cost. However, for small businesses, they’re close to 30% more expensive than average.

Vitally’s main features include: 

• Project management: Customize and replicate agile processes for your customer success team

• NPS Surveys & analytics: Send targeted surveys to bring your teams the data they need to make customer-centric decisions 

• Customer health score: A proprietary health score model enabling CS teams to track customer success and act on every account

Best for: 

Vitally is a great fit for all-sized businesses. There are solutions for SMBs that focus on efficiency and scaling workflows. There are also solutions for Enterprise companies that focus on data protection and better time to value (TTV).

Pricing:

There are Performance and Custom plans available, with pricing upon request. There’s also a Startup plan at $299/per month, which you’ll need $4 million in funding and under 25 employees to qualify for.

Sherlock’s main features include:

• Engagement scoring: Score product engagements to give your data context 

• Actions: Trigger automated flows and win your success teams more time 

• Stories: Humanize your data with AI, so your team can understand and act on it more easier

Best for: 

Sherlock is a great fit for small businesses, looking to make the most of their customer data to empower teams and their CRM. 

Pricing:

The Basic Sherlock plan starts at $199/per month, it comes with three seats, +500 MAUs, and two scoring profiles. The Pro plan will set you back $499/per month, it has seven seats, +10k MAUs, and five scoring profiles.

Planhat’s main features include: 

• Product analytics: Understand users, engagements, actions, and other customer behavior analytics to personalize the product experience for every account

• Opportunities: Automate tasks and alerts when users show expansion opportunities and better predict revenue 

• Customer surveys: Send via email or in-app and get real-time brand and product feedback 

Best for: 

Planhat is the best fit for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for a tool they can expand and grow their customer engagement with. There’s also a product-led growth solution for those businesses looking to build better UX from trial to launch. 

Pricing:

Planhat doesn’t reveal any of their pricing, and you’ll have to get in touch with the team. From there, you’ll receive a custom quote going on the size of your business.

Totango’s main features include:

• Customer Health Score: Multidimensional health scores allow you to break down customer health into operational priorities of your business

• 360 Customer view: Display the most important metrics to you, per account, and automate customer success actions

• Success plans & customer portal: Measure and track customer goals and share fellow success tactics in an online portal to better meet customer needs

Best for: 

Totango is a great fit for all-sized businesses. Although it doesn’t have some of the highest reviews, it also has many happy customers from all company sizes.

Pricing:

Totango is one of the few customer success tools that offers users a free trial with their ‘Enterprise free trial’, and the ‘Community Edition.’ Asides from this, their Starter plan comes in at $499 and has five seats. Get in touch for an Enterprise plan.

Custify’s main features include:

• Customer 360: Collect all of your customer data in one place and customize your view depending on your priorities

• Tasks & alerts: Automate task creations and stay in touch on the platforms you already use 

• Surveys: Run Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to specific customer segments

Best for: 

Custify is definitely a better fit for smaller businesses with tighter budgets. The tool doesn’t offer as many bells and whistles as some of its competitors but can take care of the customer success essentials.

Pricing:

Although you’ll need to get in touch for a custom quote. G2 shows that Custify costs 45% less than the market average for small and mid-market businesses.

The decision about which tool is the right for you will be based on your company’s needs and goals.

However, keep in mind that you’ll want it to integrate into your existing tech stack; including your CRMs, CDPs, analytics tools, customer feedback tools, and product adoption tools. Your tech stack is most probably pretty expansive and this tool needs to work hand-in-hand with it all. 

Lastly, it’s always a good idea to filter specific reviews on third-party platforms to see what current users are saying about the tool you’ve got your eye on. 

Good luck—you’ll soon be creating a better experience for your users with one of these 15 top customer success tools.

Would you like to try Chameleon straight away? Get started today to explore the possibilities, or book a demo call with one of our team members to learn the ways it can help you improve your customer experience.