With a growing list of demands and service niches, customer success managers are often on the hunt for the best CSM software that can automate various tasks effectively, leaving them more time to tend to more high-value customer success initiatives.
Research suggests that 51% of customers discontinue business after a negative experience. This alarming rate highlights why companies are rapidly focusing on customer success. One study confirms that 93% of customers make repeat purchases when they receive excellent customer service. These metrics outline a clear case as to why you should invest in CSM software that saves your customer success manager’s time, allowing them to deliver more attentive customer support.
So let’s dive into our list of industry-standard (plus some unusual picks!) for the best CSM software.
In this article:
How can CSM software help?
Unexpected CSM software for Customer Success Managers
How can CSM software help?
CSM Tools have come a long way to now offering a suite of tools from customer success automation, chatbots, full-funnel tracking, email automation, SMS, push notifications, and a white plethora of help desk and other customer support operations.
Thus, with a wide array of goals to achieve at any given time, it is important to pick the best CSM software and tools, to help get the job done!
Best CSM software for customer success managers
The suite of CSM tools can be a complicated place for many buyers thanks to a range of alternatives available at our disposal. We’ve checked out some of the industry standards, along with a few of our own personal CSM software favorites.
This is our list of the best and our favorite CSM software and tools:
1. Zendesk
Price: Offers a free trial period. From here on, prices start from $19 per user per month.
Website: https://www.zendesk.com/
A renowned CSM platform known for its easy usability and multiple benefits is Zendesk! This CSM software is built to improve SAAS customer success. It is a flexible and powerful application that is widely used for all business sizes. Moreover, they offer full-stack solutions that cater to all stages of a customer journey.
Features:
- They offer channel integration that lets you interact with customers across different categories to cater without any hindrances.
- Easy segregation through ticket forms helps you keep track and organize various customer requests.
- It offers an overview of your performance against the sales target, helping you understand team efficiency and its efforts towards the target.
- Best for multinational brands that are looking for multi-brand support as it’s a one-stop solution for all customer needs.
- Analytics and feedback help measure your performance and predict customer satisfaction scores over a while.
USP: Businesses use Zendesk for its high-quality solutions that are credible and trustworthy. They are well-known to empower several customers across the globe by offering exceptional after-sales services. Moreover, their easy-to-use software and complete sense of ownership makes them a key player in the CSM software market.
Notable Clientele: Uber, Slack, Printful, Ola Cabs and Showpo.
2. Gainsight
Price: They don’t offer a free trial period or a free version for their users. One must request pricing depending on the plan they opt for.
Website: https://www.gainsight.com/
Gainsight is easily among the highly rated tools for customer success managers. The tool offers a wide range of capabilities that can help you drive success. They are known to help businesses in retaining their customers and enhancing engagement rates.
Features:
- Offers customer health scores to map your progress and understand ways to improve one’s performance.
- Caters to different customer segments and profiles
- Well-equipped with machine learning, improving score predictions and customer satisfaction
- An amazing feature of customizing according to business needs to enhance customer monitoring
- Instantly collects feedback, eases monitoring through dashboards and notifications
USP: Gainsight stands out from other CSM software all thanks to its health scores for customers. This has been a gamechanger for the brand as it helps them understand their position in the market. Moreover, they can enhance this metric by allocating more resources and serving towards excellent customer success.
Notable Clientele: Dropbox, Singular, Green House, Anaplan and Tessian.
3. tl;dv
tl;dv is a game-changer if you want to master a more effective remote meeting culture as a customer success manager. This simple Google Meet Chrome extension or Zoom app unlocks the full potential of meetings and helps you extract key call moments for easy sharing, documentation and analysis. The free call recorder, transcriber and timestamper turns every customer call (or internal meeting!) into a collection of viewable, shareable, digestible – and actionable – takeaways.
Price: Free! You can record, transcribe, share and edit online meeting video without upgrading to any paid tl;dv Plan. The Paid Plan comes with premium features, for example if you want to download recordings or customize share settings.
Website: https://tldv.io/
Features:
- High-quality Google Meet and Zoom recording and transcriptions for any call
- Timestamped highlights that function as clickable links to important call moments
- Catch up quickly on past meetings or customer calls in your own time
- Store and share all of your important meeting insights for future reference, documentation purposes, knowledge sharing, upskilling and onboarding
- Edit and clip recorded calls into shareable clips
- Tag colleagues at specific meeting moments, so they can instantly see when their input or awareness is needed
- Search through a library of past calls to find moments in which specific topics are discussed
- Slack integration for instant meeting notifications
- Download calls to catch up offline
- Customize default share settings for call participants and organization members
- CRM and collaborative platform integrations with Salesforce, Hubspot, Notion, Google Docs and many more…
USP: tl;dv is the only one of these tools that enables unique customer insights to be extracted from customer calls. With a tl;dv account, you can collect and organize all important customer call moments in one place, then pinpoint (timestamp) key moments to share with other teams. Recording a customer’s pain points, desired features and overall feedback in their own words is the simplest way of empowering your organization to act upon real customer input. Capturing and analyzing customer emotion via tl;dv helps amplify customer voices across your organization. tl;dv is especially great for user research and Sales calls, in particular because of how easy it is to to clip and share meeting moments, and follow-up effectively using the tool.
Notable Clientele: PricewaterhouseCoopers (pwc), Cloudflare, YNAB, Xendit, Zalando, Zapier and Botmock.
4. Amity
Price: Pricing is only available upon request. Users can also request a demo to make a better decision.
Website: https://getamity.com/
Amity is a powerful CSM software for SAAS. It is renowned to offer real-time playbooks and intelligence that can help to enhance customer success. Additionally, it understands the changes in the customer experience or journey. Keeping that in mind, it offers recommendations and suggestions to improve this journey and measure effectiveness.
Features:
- Offers real-time insights through a shared and customizable database across all accounts
- You can reduce repetitive and manual work with the help of Smart Playbooks that are well equipped with information-driven princesses.
- Combines deep customer insights with the help of customer score that can be effectively used by your team to maintain healthy customer relations
- Excellent reporting and analytics help in closing the loop while keeping all team members updated.
USP: Amity separates itself from the rest of the crowd with its impeccable customer triggers and scoring ability. They offer valuable insights that help reduce churn rate. It can place you a step ahead by understanding how customers react so you can be in a better position to act.
Notable Clientele: Promo Mash, Active Prospect, Cobalt, Mention Me and Lasso.
5. Planhat
Price: Planhat offers 3 different packages. The start-up package starts from $950/ month for unlimited users and an additional $1 per customer. This is usually suited for companies with less than $500k ARR. The professional package includes features of the start-up package, starts from $1500/ month for unlimited users and an additional $1 per customer. This CSM software is recommended for companies with up to $5m ARR.
Website: https://www.planhat.com/
Features:
- Keeps a check and evaluates the success and risk of customer churning with customer health score feature
- Categorizing of customers into groups based on their profiles, product, and segments for efficient communication
- Trackability and information management like revenue tracking and forecasting to prepare for bottom line circumstances
- Surveys to measure customer sentiment, satisfaction, and collecting feedback
- Tracking and summarizing of customer retention and churning
- Overview facility for quick glances and reporting facility
- Customization, API integration, and workflow capability
USP: Planhat offers the feasibility to have unlimited KPIs allowing users to track their customers’ performance. It has efficient customer behavior analysis, which allows users to gather information in one place and provide a complete overview of customers’ performance. Additionally, this CSM software is also known for its end-to-end solution with an easy onboarding module and reporting of big data.
Notable Clientele: Recruitee, Workato, Zenloop, Storehub and Elucidat.
6. Akita
Price: This CSM software by Akita offers one single package that includes three users but has the flexibility of two payment options. First offers monthly billing that costs $200/month and $67/ additional user a month and second annual billing that is at a 20% discount rate at $160/month and $54/additional user a month.
Website: https://www.akitaapp.com/
Features:
- Help keep track of customer journey through lifecycle management and support
- Trackability of reviews and customer feedback
- Effective communication with grouping mechanism of customers
- Customer health score and churn rate tracking facility
- Strong technical customer care support
- Easy integrability with different software
- Alerts and an easy reporting facility for users
USP: Users often choose Akita for the ease of accessibility and array of integration opportunities. Users can cross-brand their products and effectively track their progress in a simple, automated, and effective manner. It has expertise in catering to small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Thus, it is great for startups, and this is backed up by strong customer success and technical support offered by Akita.
Notable Clientele: CSL Global IPA Procurement.
7. Customer Success Box
Price: The pricing plans are categorized into 3 buckets-Grow, Business, and Enterprise categories. Prices are available upon request.
Website: https://customersuccessbox.com/
CustomerSuccessBox provides AI-generated proactive recommendations for CSMs to drive retention by learning and analyzing historical data. It analyzes past data and customer behavior to give proactive recommendations that drive retention and unlocks LTV proactively. Now the CSM need not configure rules to get alerts. This Customer Success tool tracks each customer’s product adoption health, relationship health, financial health, and service health to give a 360-degree customer account view.
Features:
- The AI-powered platform which delivers Customer Success.
- The platform guarantees its client to get to 130% MRR retention.
- Provides a 360-degree customer health account view to track real-time progress. It refers to the customer’s data including every interaction, from product usage, the financial status of an account, touchpoints maintained and tracked, high-level risk score, segment level health to the efficiency and the effectiveness of the customer support system.
- Creates alerts for upsells, renewals, and high license utilization.
- The platform allows you to create playbooks not only to determine when an account is ready for an upgrade, but also for onboarding, renewals, and upsells.
USP: Sheldon-[AI]. It provides AI-powered SMART recommendations by analyzing historical product adoption and engagement data, monitoring all accounts, knowing all past renewals, learning which actions lead to retention, and then recommends the next best action.
Notable clientele: LeadSquared, NetCore, Fleetx, Extraaedge, Jacando, and more.
8. Churn360
Price: Monthly billing is $99 per CSM per month. When billed annually, the pricing is $79 per CSM per month. Read Only users are unlimited.
Website: https://churn360.com/
Churn360 is a data-driven AI customer success platform that helps SaaS businesses reduce churn and increase the lifetime value of customers. Churn360 combines customer’s data that is spread across multiple SaaS products like CRM, Helpdesk, billing software, etc. This data is consolidated into a single dashboard and allows your customer success managers to get a 360-degree view of the customer. Churn360 also provides features like playbook automation, customer onboarding, customer journey mapping and tracking and surveys. assist the customers in various circumstance leading to reduced customer churn and thus increase retention.
Features:
- The AI-powered bot, Eddy, gives insights and tips to manage customers
- Get a complete view of the customer in one click
- Manage customers at scale by segmenting them and grouping them based on common attributes
- Automate customer success processes using plays and automations
- Track customer journeys and manage their lifecycle and help customers that are stuck
- Get notified of at-risk customers
- Built-in functionality to send NPS, CSAT and CES surveys to customers
- Allows marketing team to send targeted messages to existing customers via email and in-app
- Fully configurable health score calculation based on any of the parameters available in the system
USP: Simple and clean UX/UI makes this tool easy to use
Notable clientele: Ozonetel, Material Exchange
Final thoughts on the best CSM software
Upgrading your customer experience is no longer an uphill task. With the help of this CSM software, different businesses can reach greater heights of customer offerings and enhance their journey. Moreover, these are easy to use and provide myriad benefits to businesses. You must rest assured that you can produce happy and loyal customers for your brand with no hassles!
Scaling your customer success team? Why not check out our article on the best Help Desk tools for 2021!
