Anyone who’s had a long career in software sales will tell you that a large part of your long-term success will depend on the customers’ post-conversion experience with the product.
It’s no secret that customers who have a great experience with a given tool will be easier to retain as loyal repeat customers. If you want to provide this level of experience for your customers, you’ll need to devote enough resources to customer success management.
If you’re a CS manager with a growing base of customers, and you’re finding it hard to keep on top of all your responsibilities, adopting a good customer success software suite may be the perfect way to help you reach more targets with less effort.
In this post, we’ll look at 7 of the best software for customer success managers, and help you find the next perfect partner for all your CSM duties.
Hubspot Service Hub
In today’s fast-paced, interconnected business arena, it’s essential to give your customers a route to immediate resolutions across several channels and to have some kind of availability both inside and outside of working hours.
Unfortunately, when you’re working with several disparate data sets and tools, providing the kind of prompt response that modern customers have come to expect can be a major challenge.
This is one area where Hubspot Service Hub excels, giving you a quick and easy way to bring all your data and comms together, and manage it from a single platform. As your operations expand, it will also equip you and the wider customer success team with a number of automation functions, which can be used to scale up automation efficiently, and nurture a happier, more loyal customer base.
Gainsight
Gainsight is another versatile CSM tool that makes life easier for customer success managers by collating customer data from a number of separate sources, and empowering you and your team with insights, feedback, and new ways to transform your customers’ product experience for the better.
One of the best features of Gainsight is that it provides you with a ‘Customer Health Score’. This leverages Gainsight’s multitude of data sources to give each customer account a score displaying their level of satisfaction with the product experience. This, combined with its impressive machine learning capabilities, will help you see which accounts are performing best, and distribute your resources for optimal efficiency.
Freshsuccess
Data-driven and user-friendly, Freshsuccess, formerly known as Natero, is a popular customer success software suite designed specifically for companies in the SaaS niche.
Drawing on and collating data from a wide range of sources, Freshsuccess will equip you with a diverse range of features that will help you optimize your customer journeys, minimize churn, and present the results of customer success projects with ease. It also has a number of innovative features that will allow you to schedule new email campaigns based on how your customers behave.
Like Gainsight, Freshsuccess also assigns health scores to customers, based on their habits when using your products, how their support tickets are handled, and other metrics. These handy features, along with an array of customizable account templates, customer response tools, and highly detailed dashboards, make Freshsuccess an excellent choice for any CSM in the modern software industry.
Planhat
Planhat is one of the best software for Customer Success Managers for small customer success teams at start-ups. Ask any long-time user, and they’ll tell you it excels at drawing insights from complex data and presenting them in a clear, easy-to-understand way.
With its clean and simple user interface, Planhat will draw patterns from a broad range of customer data sets, and use these to present you with account health scores and actionable insights to help optimize every customer’s experience.
Past the interface’s no-frills design making it exceptionally easy to navigate and use, Planhat also has a number of smart optional automation features that can be adopted as your team and business scales. The platform has several pre-made automation options that will function smoothly right out of the box, keeping your team updated on key points in a standard customer journey. It also empowers you with no-code tools for creating your own customized bots, helping you save time and streamline your customer journeys with the power of automation.
Customer Success Box
Customer Success Box is another popular customer success tool designed for the SaaS industry, with a rich array of features that will make any CSM’s life easier. This tool is driven by fantastic AI mechanics, which is used to ensure a positive experience when it comes to managing customer relationships, product adoption, tool usage analysis, and finances, providing you and your team with the kind of clear and multi-faceted view it needs to succeed.
Customer Success Box also has a fair degree of overlap with common CMS features, with tools that will allow you to set up and manage email campaigns, automate common workflows, and manage your customer lifecycles from beginning to end.
With these helpful features, you and the wider CS team will soon find it easier to optimize your customer onboarding process, achieve stronger results from upselling, and drive up both monthly revenue and the lifetime value of each customer account.
Totango
A relatively new CSM software suite, Totango has still managed to gain an impressive degree of success in a short time on the market, with Google, Zoom, SAP, and other high-profile brands making up part of their clientele.
Totango is made for customer success teams that require highly granular monitoring, offering detailed views of every touchpoint making up the customer lifecycle, as well as a real-time view of your customer accounts’ health, and prompt notifications to alert you to new opportunities and risks. There are also a number of features specifically designed to streamline evaluation and onboarding, drive up product adoption, and generally carry out actions that will contribute to growing your company’s revenue.
Furthermore, Totango’s automated workflows are able to translate complex data sets into visualizations of your relationships with your customers, sorting them into a hierarchy that will help inform the efficient use of your precious resources.
Fireflies.ai
Every customer success manager knows that good communication is key to successful post-purchase journeys. If a software company doesn’t have a good way to engage its customers, it will be operating without understanding its customers’ problems, and its service offering will suffer as a result.
As so much of modern customer success management involves effective communication via regular calls and video conferencing, making sure you have an effective method for minutes-taking is essential for your overall success.
Fireflies.ai is a great tool for CSMs who feel like some of those regular check-ins with customers aren’t as effective as they could be. Using its powerful machine learning infrastructure, this tool will automatically produce detailed, digital notes of every call in your calendar (whether with customers or internally), all the while letting you focus on helping the people you’re communicating with.
Aside from allowing you to create great meeting notes without lifting a finger, Fireflies.ai also boasts easy integration with popular CRM suites, allowing you to automatically collate meeting notes on HubSpot, Salesforce, and other platforms.
Wrapping Up… Best Software for Customer Success Managers
If your current approach to customer success isn’t as strong as it could be, we hope this round-up of our best software for Customer Success Managers has helped you find the tools you need to survive and thrive.
If you’d like to learn more about customer success management and the wider world of tech sales, be sure to check out our other tips and guides, or browse our job board for your next sales opportunity.