13 Best Customer Success Software To Check Out In 2023

Ever heard the saying, ‘Happy customer, happy business’? As 2023 unfolds, this couldn’t be truer. Remember when we used to rely on spreadsheets and manual tracking to understand our clientele?

The days of sticky notes and endless Excel tabs are (thankfully) behind us. Now, it’s all about leveraging top-notch Customer Success Software to ensure our patrons are as satisfied as kids in a candy store. And guess what? The market is buzzing with tools that promise just that. Dive in with me as we explore 13 standout software options that are changing the customer success game this year.

These platforms not only make our lives simpler but keep our customers satisfied. If you’re hunting for the best of the best, you’ve come to the right place. Here are 13 customer success software options making waves this year!”

• Explore the 13 best customer success software you need to consider

What is a Customer Success Software?

Customer success software is a type of platform or tool designed to help businesses ensure that their customers achieve the desired outcomes while using their product or service. Its primary aim is to foster strong, long-lasting relationships with customers, leading to higher customer retention, increased customer lifetime value, and advocacy.

What are the Benefits of Good Customer Success Software?

A good customer success software will help you :

• Improve Customer Engagement
• Recognize the cross-selling and up-selling opportunities
• Bring down churn rate
• Hyper-target customers
• Predict Customer Behaviour

13 Best Customer Success Software of 2023

Data is the new gold, and customer success teams often have to study complex customer KPIs. A customer success platform can help them manage customer data efficiently, engage with them proactively, and monitor customer satisfaction.

Well, we’ve made things more accessible here. We have listed the best customer success software of 2023 as per our experts’ recommendations. Go on, take a look!

1. SurveySparrow
2. Gainsight
3. Totango
4. Natero
5. ChurnZero
6. ClientSuccess
7. Amity
8. Planhat
9. Customer SuccessBox
10. Akita
11. Strikedeck
12. SmartKarrot
13. Custify

1. SurveySparrow

Best Customer Success Software for Engaging, Conversational Feedback

SurveySparrow is one of the best customer success platforms on the market. Simply put, SurveySparrow enables you to maintain healthy customer relationships by gathering feedback from the customers at every touchpoint – online and offline.

In addition, this omnichannel customer tool has a dynamic dashboard feature that lets your CS teams monitor customer health indicators. These include product adoption rates, engagement levels, and customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores.

Standout Features

• Customer surveys: Measure customer satisfaction using customer feedback, CSAT surveys, and CES scores.
• NPS software suite: Roll out relational and transactional NPS surveys. Track NPS trends over time.
• Omnichannel engagement: Proactively interact with customers through in-app messaging, email automation, social media, and SMS.
• Customer journey mapping: Track customer experience at interaction points for smoother customer lifecycle management.
• Customer segmentation: Group customers using the Smart List feature. Tailor communications based on specific customer needs and milestones.
• Ticket management: Collaborate on and respond to customer feedback. Close the feedback loop once and for all.
• AI surveys: Enable one-shot survey creation for infinite situations with the help of AI.
• Analytics dashboard: Visualize insights into customer behavior, team performance, and overall customer success metrics.
• Pricing: Starts at $19/month. CX Basic plan starts at $199/month.

SurveySparrow also offers a Forever Free plan with limited features and a free trial for users to test out the product. Sign up below to try it out. 

2. Gainsight

Best for Task Management & Workflow Automation

Gainsight has established itself as a top-tier client success software. It’s hard to find a customer success executive that hasn’t heard of this platform.

Looking to streamline customer success operations? Gainsight offers a comprehensive set of tools for task management, workflow automation, and communication. Furthermore, this customer success tool enables collaboration and knowledge sharing among team members, fostering a culture of teamwork.

Do watch out for the steep learning curve and unannounced ‘banishment’ of the not-so-popular features.

Standout Features

• Customer Health Score: Measure and assign a score to each customer based on their level of satisfaction.
• Customer 360: Get an overall view of your customer relationships and health with powerful dashboards.
• Smooth workflows: Optimize workflows with seamless integrations, automation, scorecard, and Call to Action functionalities.
• Predict customer actions: Make customer retention and churn forecasts based on customer data and previous customer behavior powered by machine learning.
• AI playbooks: Get actionable recommendations for every customer action with the help of AI.
• Survey tool: Conduct customer surveys and collect feedback using their survey tool.
• Pricing: Contact to get a quote.

3. Totango

Best for Business & Enterprise Needs

Totango is yet another popular customer success software with an eminent clientele that includes business giants like SAP, Zoom, etc. As its website says, it’s a “composable CS platform that’s flexible, scalable, and built to power exceptional customer journeys.”

With its advanced features and analytics-driven approach, Totango enables proactive customer engagement, health monitoring, and personalized experiences. Moreover, the platform provides an extensive range of customer success solutions.

Standout Features:

• Track customer trends, health, and usage via an array of top-notch features like easy-to-use account management, customer relationship hierarchy, and segmentation.
• This enables automated workflows for revenue forecast, visual representation of customer relationship hierarchies across various product lines, and customer segmentation. Your customer success team can deliver personalized services to the clients.
• Yes, the customer success software does have some drawbacks to name; like its limitation in providing reliable integrations and the complications in the initial set up.
• But the friendly UI, customizable dashboards, insightful reports, and the myriad of features really make up for its downside.
• Pricing: Contact for a quote

4. Natero

Best for Predictive Analytics and Automated Customer Health Tracking

Essentially a client success platform for SaaS enterprises, Natero follows a purely data-driven approach to help you get into the good books of customers.

Using machine learning, this customer success tool aids in managing the customer journey, retaining consumers, and predicting project complexity to provide comprehensive views on customer success.

Standout Features:

• You can schedule emails based on customer behavior.
• Keep track of customer health scores in Natero, which are assigned as per product usage, support tickets, NPS, and CSM scores.
• Get custom dimensions and computed metrics.
• Intuitive dashboards, easy-to-edit accounts, a responsive customer support team, and other useful features.
• Pricing: Contact for a quote.

5. ChurnZero

Best for Real-time Customer Retention and Engagement Analytics

If you have flexibility in mind, then ChurnZero should be your go-to customer success tool. The platform is designed to integrate with CRM systems, making workflow much more effortless and faster!

The real-time customer success platform boasts of a sleek UX, a series of integrations, an intuitive dashboard, and insightful analytical reports. It also boasts customer lifecycle management, usage tracking, account management, health score and revenue management, etc., to ease the workflow.

Standout Features:

• Customer Success AI™: Use artificial intelligence to analyze customer data and provide actionable insights.
• Customer Success Daily Dashboard: Let your teams start their day with tasks and customers in a single pane.
• Account insights: Gain deep insights for individual accounts through customizable dashboards.
• Customer health scores: Measure and monitor customer health scores with custom criteria.
• Customer lifecycle management allows teams to visualize and manage the entire customer journey.
• Pricing: Request for a quote. Free demo available.

6. ClientSuccess

Best for Proactive Client Management and Relationship Building

ClientSuccess is one of the best customer success tools that can support you in retaining customers and growing your customer base.

As a customer success platform, one of the unique things about ClientSuccess are its personalized solutions for different customer success roles. For example, its SuccessCycles feature enables CSMs to set workflows to manage the lifecycle of their customers. This substantially cuts the time required to train new CSMs on processes. 

Standout Features:

• Tailored CS solutions: Choose a solution according to your customer success role or stage of your customer journey.
• ClientSuccess scores: Procure and track specific, detailed scores on customer health, product usage, engagement, and advocacy.
• ClientSuccess Goals: Use SMART goal setting to achieve key customer objectives.
• Third-party application integrations
• Communication management
• Super-intuitive user interface and its ever-responsive customer support system.
• Pricing: Request for a quote. Free demo available.

7. Amity

Best for Customer Lifecycle Management and Engagement

Claiming to be the ‘ flexible customer success platform’, Amity has all that it takes to streamline and implement your customer success strategies.

This intuitive tool supported by a multitude of integrations offers a specific view of data from the CRM, support, email, etc. that pertains to individual customers.

Standout Features:

• Like any other standard customer success software, Amity too offers features like health score, analytics, customer segmentation, knowledge management, and many more.
• The SmartPlayBooks of Amity is simply automation at its best! You can automate manual, data-driven, repetitive processes with so much ease.
• Easy configuration and task management help further in amping up your customer success solutions.

Pricing: Request for a quote. Free demo available.

8. Planhat

Best for Unified Customer Success Operations and Insights

Planhat is a customer success platform that can be considered one of the best among its peers. This powerful tool allows you to set triggers and build playbooks to automate processes, thereby providing a virtual workspace for your customer success teams.

Planhat too offers fail-safe features for product engagement, data security, analytics, scorecards (representing customer health), etc. along with a series of seamless integrations.

Standout Features:

• Customer Success Inbox: An inbox for emails and chats so that you don’t miss any interactions with the customers.
• NPS surveys: For relational and transactional NPS.
• Customer health scores: Create health scores to meet your specific priorities and objectives.
• Churn management: Identify at-risk customers based on your health scores and take preventive action.
• Pricing: Starts at $500 per month and $1 per customer a month

9. CustomerSuccessBox

CustomerSuccessBox is yet another customer success software designed specifically for SaaS.

This intuitive client success tool helps you track customer success by considering various aspects like product adoption, usage analysis, relationship, risks, and financial services. Accordingly, you get a 360-degree view of your customers, health scores, and detailed visual analytics.

Standout Features:

• Trigger email campaigns and automate workflows
• Segment, and focus on individual customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle
• Upsell signals: Monitor product usage and know when an account is ripe for an upsell
• CSM Day Planner: Track all the activities that your customer success managers need to do on a given day.
• Relationship and Account Health: Track every touchpoint to measure account health and get a holistic view of your customer relationship.
• Pricing: Starts at $499 per month.

10. Akita

Best for Tracking User Behavior and Boosting Retention

Though comparatively new to the industry, Akita is quite popular as a customer success software, and has been helping enterprises improve retention by providing smart customer success solutions.

As a customer success tool, Akita offers plenty of features like 360-degree customer view, customer segmentation, customer lifecycle management, customer health scores, and analytics.

Standout Features:

• Automate your workflow supported by playbooks, 100+ integrations, and data-driven alerts.
• Customer segmentation: Create lists of accounts and contacts with custom filters.
• 360 degree customer view: Get an overall view of each account with customer data from 100+ integrations.
• Analytics dashboard: Create personalized dashboards for important insights at a glance.
• Pricing: Monthly plan starts at $300 for 3 users ( Akita charges $100 for each additional user)

11. Strikedeck

Best for Seamless Integrations

Strikedeck is a customer success tool that was later acquired by Medallia. Enhanced by AI and machine learning, the customer success software can help you spot churn risks, cross-selling as well as up-selling candidates. With a click-free dashboard powered by the Customer 360 feature, you can view the real-time analytics of your entire customer base.

Standout Features:

• Strikedeck also provides you with a live customer happiness score by combining data from CRM allowing you to segment customers and provide personalized services.
• The customizable dashboard, intuitive UI, integrations, smart playbooks, triggers, and action-based workflows, well-disposed customer support systems, etc. make Strikedeck a powerful customer success software.
• Pricing: Contact for a quote.

12. SmartKarrot

Best  for Crafting Personalized User Journeys

SmartKarrot Inc. is a highly effective client success platform dealing with aspects of managing and creating awesome customer experiences, customer product adoption, comprehensive customer success solutions, and operations as one integrated platform.

The customer success tool helps track customer health and trends, and detect early warning signs using an array of customizable customer success solutions like upselling and cross-selling, user adoption, churn reduction, and product success. SmartKarrot continues working towards innovating aspects like automation, prediction, and prescription to provide a great experience for its customers.

Standout Features:

• With SmartKarrot, you can manage multiple stakeholders at various touchpoints in a unified dashboard.
• Product usage heatmaps, popular product features, and client opinion can be easily accessed, making it easy for client servicing teams.
• You can retain and grow your customer base with streamlined, specific, and detailed scores on customer engagement and advocacy.
• SmartKarrot is a real-time customer success platform and is designed to integrate with multiple CRM systems, making workflows not only faster and effortless but also intuitive.
• Pricing: Request for a demo.

13. Custify

Best for Automated Health Tracking and Client-Centric Solutions

Custify is a great proactive tool for customer success teams because it allows them to oversee product adoption and usage, and get a full view of the customer lifecycle.

Custify’s customer success software comes with customer 360 profiles as well as customer segmentation.

Standout Features:

• If you want to keep an eye on your customers, the alerts and notifications from Custify will help you see who you need to reach out to.
• The platform lets you proactively outreach in order to gain new customers. This tool helps you keep track of the health scores of your customers as well as their KPIs. Keeping your customers happy is easier with Custify.
• Price: Starts at $199/month

These are our best picks for you. By now, you probably would have realized how important it is for an organization to have customer success software. Well, it is better late than never, isn’t it? Read through our list, compare and find your best fit, employ the customer success tool, and see for yourself how it makes all the difference!

How to Choose the Right Customer Success Platform: A Checklist

Here are 10 features to consider:

#1. Customer Data Management:

This allows teams to store, organize, and access complex customer information in a centralized location. This information can include contact details, communication history, product usage data, support tickets, and more!

#2.Customer Feedback and Surveys:

Features enabling customer feedback capture and analysis through surveys, NPS tracking, and sentiment analysis are valuable. This helps identify areas for improvement.

#3. Communication & Engagement Tools:

An effective customer success tool should provide communication and engagement tools like messaging, task reminders and customer segmentation. This enables faster and more personalized interactions with customers.

#4. Task & Workflow Management:

Look for features that help customer success teams manage their tasks, set reminders, and automate workflows. This ensures that critical activities – such as onboarding, check-ins, and renewals – are executed smoothly.

#5. Reporting & Analytics:

Look for features that allow you to:

• Generate custom reports
• Visualize data
• Track key performance indicators (KPIs) relevant to customer success

#6. Customer Success Planning & Goal Tracking:

Ideally, the software should support the creation and management of customer success plans. This ensures a structured approach to customer success management.

#7. Integration Capabilities:

Consider software that integrates well with other tools and systems like CRM platforms, helpdesk software, and marketing automation tools. This enables data sharing and provides a holistic view of the customer journey.

#8.Customer Health Monitoring:

Look for features that enable tracking of key metrics – such as CSAT scores and renewal likelihood. This helps identify at-risk customers and take the right actions.

#9. Collaboration & Knowledge Sharing:

This can include features like:

• Internal messaging
• Document sharing
• A knowledge base to store best practices, playbooks, and customer success resources

#10. Scalability & Customizability:

Your software should be two things:

1. Scalable to accommodate the growing needs of your team.
2. Flexible enough to adapt to your specific workflows and processes.

Remember, the importance of specific features may vary depending on your team’s objectives, industry, and customer base. So your priorities matter more here.

Athira Unnikrishnan

Content Marketer at SurveySparrow

Just a plain soul enthralled by the power of words and the aroma of food!