Customer success managers often wear several hats at work. From onboarding new users to fielding support tickets to advocating for the customers, CSMs typically have their hands full. Fortunately, you don’t need to handle everything all by yourself. You can leverage the right customer success tools based on what you’re trying to achieve.
From onboarding to supporting to advocating, there’s a tool for every stage of the customer lifecycle. Your job can become much easier and streamlined if you equip your team with the right CSM tools.
With hundreds of CS tools in the market, it can get a bit overwhelming. Well, to make the process faster, we’ve curated the best customer success tools that you should try. Let’s get started.
Capturing Customer Insights
Capturing and sharing insights from your customer calls has several benefits. Particularly, it helps the product team prioritize the right features and allows you to advocate for your customers. Now, what’s the best tool to capture and share customer insights?
Grain
Grain helps you capture and share insights from your customer call seamlessly. Once you sign up and connect your Calendar, Grain will automatically detect and join your customer calls to record, transcribe, and save the meetings in your workspace.
Ditch manual notes and just focus on the conversation. Grain AI will analyze and synthesize your customer meetings—allowing you to instantly clip and share key moments and insights.
Highlight clips can also be organized and stitched together to create a video story—allowing you to share feedback and insights from a group of calls. Recording your customer calls using Grain helps you build a video library of customer knowledge—enabling your entire company to use customer insight to make informed decisions.
Survicate
Survicate is all about using surveys to capture customer insights. Surveys can be as simple or complex (CSAT, CES, and NPS) as you'd like. With Survicate, you can collect customer feedback through multiple channels including website, app, and email.
Also, Survicate doesn't wait for you to run a survey to collect data. It constantly scours your team's everyday conversations in tools like Intercom, HubSpot, and Salesforce for new insights. All of the data is then organized into dashboards that are easy to interpret, so you can make sense of it all and act on it. Plus, you can opt to receive automated reports right in your inbox for further convenience.
With plenty of integrations and automation, Survicate empowers you to meet your customers on their terms and know what they want from your product.
Educating Users and Customers
A huge portion of your week is spent on onboarding and educating users and customers. What if that could be offloaded to a tool?
Intercom
As a customer-centric messaging app, Intercom focuses on understanding your audience's needs and strives to help them based on their responses and interactions. It doesn't replace your standard customer service channels, but rather gives you a way to stay on top of users' needs and proactively help them before they contact your team.
On the spot, Intercom can deliver answers to common questions in the form of a pop-up, so users can get the help they need without waiting for a support ticket or call. Alternatively, it can redirect users to a help center article if the answer is more in-depth.
Intercom can reach your customers across all channels including websites, web apps, email, and more. And the best part is that customers won't feel like their questions are being relegated to a "queue" as they'll receive a personalized response instantly.
Pendo.io
With Pendo, you can design and create guides that live right within your product. Whether the goal is to onboard new users or to educate existing ones, Pendo guides can be an effective route to communicate and inspire your customers to take action.
Pendo’s retroactive analytics automatically collect every click, screen, and page load, all without a tracking code. Then, you can identify the events you would like to track by navigating through your product and tagging the features and pages with a simple point-and-click interface.
Customer Dashboards and Reporting
Naturally, you’d like to track how your efforts are impacting your customers' success. That's where dashboards and reporting come in, giving you a bird's-eye view into what matters most: the activity and health of your customer base.
Retool
When you think of customized dashboards, what comes to mind? May be a complex, extensive process that requires the help of developers. But with Retool, building custom dashboards has never been easier.
You can create visualizations, automate data flow, or even share your dashboard(s) with team members—all through an intuitive interface that makes it easy to build a customized dashboard using a drag-and-drop builder.
And with real-time notifications and automated alerts, you'll always be in the know about what's going on with your customers—allowing you to address any issues promptly and efficiently.
Vitally.io
When Vitally is in your corner, you'll have critical customer metrics at your fingertips. The tool tracks user behavior and engagement metrics across the customer journey, allowing you to dive into a granular level of data to make informed decisions about your product and strategy.
From a live happiness score based on custom metrics to automated risk and opportunity alerts, you'll always have a pulse on what's happening with your customers. Plus, you can create custom dashboards for your team so they can see their progress right alongside you.
And with comprehensive reporting capabilities that pull in metrics from across all your channels (web, app, email), you won't have to worry about missing anything.
Subscription Analytics Tools
Without staying on top of your subscription data, you'll risk letting revenue slip through the cracks and losing customers who aren't getting the support they need.
Profitwell
If you're looking for a comprehensive, intuitive platform to help you stay on top of your subscription analytics, Profitwell (especially Retain) is the tool for you. It excels in collecting and analyzing customer data, allowing you to easily track metrics like MRR, churn, revenue per account, and more.
Profitwell also gives you actionable insights so that you can take steps toward improving customer relationships, boosting retention rates, and even winning back canceled accounts. It does that based on algorithms that track both behavioral data and activity, giving you a better understanding of what's happening with your customers—and how you can improve the situation.
If you're looking for a tool that won't only help you get an accurate snapshot of your subscription analytics but also act as a catalyst for growth and help you stop guessing about what's going right and wrong, go for Profitwell.
ChartMogul
If your goal is to automate your subscription analytics so that you can easily spot trends and have one point of truth for all your revenue data, ChartMogul is the platform you need.
As a searchable database that keeps your revenue numbers in one place, you'll be able to analyze your numbers in a snap. With both real-time and historical data at your fingertips, you can quickly identify trends as they're happening or look back to get an accurate picture of how you were doing in the past.
That's along with plenty of data cleaning and enrichment features, so you'll always know you're looking at the most accurate and complete numbers possible. Plus, ChartMogul also gives you various exporting options, so you can easily add it to your existing dashboard or share your data with others to get their insights.
All-in-One Tools
All-in-one tools combine all the features you need to run a successful customer success program and here are our picks.
Zendesk
Zendesk combines a wealth of features to help you build stable and scalable customer success programs. From real-time analytics and reporting to custom dashboards to customized alerts, it has everything you need to run customer success.
It especially shines in its customization, guaranteeing that you can create a solution that works for your unique needs. Plus, with the ability to integrate across all your customer channels, you'll be able to tackle any problem no matter where it happens and keep an eye on everything in one place.
With its extensive capabilities and simple-yet-powerful interface, Zendesk should be your go-to solution if your team can't afford to use multiple tools simultaneously and you want a solution that can grow with your business.
Gainsight
Among the customer success management tools that cover the entire customer spectrum, Gainsight is another great choice. Besides offering a wealth of analytics, reporting, and forecasting tools to help you track performance at every stage of the customer lifecycle, Gainsight also gives you various tools for building your strategy.
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It empowers you to scale your customer communication, automate your outreach and follow-ups, incorporate feedback loops to improve retention and win-back efforts, and much more. Its Success Plans feature is additionally a massive advantage, allowing your entire team to get on the same page and work together to reach your goals.
Conclusion
There's no shortage of tools for customer success. To make your choice, try to find the tool that aligns with your team's goals, and use it as a catalyst for growth.
If capturing the voice of the customer is a key part of your customer success strategy, then a tool like Grain would make the most sense for you. And if repetitive inquiries are eating up a lot of your team's time and resources, then Intercom could be the perfect solution.
Looking to curate and analyze data through custom dashboards and tables? opt-in for Retool. If you’re running a SaaS business and hoping to reduce cancellation rate/churn, Profitwell Retain can put you back on track.
Finally, for a platform that offers the full range of tools needed to build and grow an effective customer success strategy, look no further than Zendesk or Gainsight.