As a customer success manager, do you often face challenges fostering and sustaining customer relationships and find yourself losing out on long-standing customers? Opting for a customer success solution can help you prevent such instances from happening and ensure that your customers always get the support and services they need from your team.

Customer success software helps you better manage customer relationships and enable high quality interactions that lead to increased loyalty and customer satisfaction. The software also helps create reports showcasing how customers interact with your websites for additional analytics.

This guide provides all the information you need to choose the right customer success software for your business.

What is customer success software?

Customer success software is a software solution that helps customer success teams maximize customer lifetime value by fostering long-term, mutually beneficial relationships. It helps automate manual customer service processes such as onboarding new clients and helping them set up a product or service.

Customer success software sends contract expiry alerts and provides tools to track software usage data. It also helps measure customer satisfaction levels via surveys, allowing businesses to identify improvement areas in customer experience.

What are some common features of customer success software?

Customer onboarding: Sets up user accounts and provides resources such as training materials and tutorials to help customers best utilize product features. Customer onboarding allows your customer success team to ensure a smooth transition into using your products with minimal disruption and maximum efficiency.
Customer engagement: Tracks customer interactions to help you better understand their needs, preferences, and interests and deliver tailored solutions to ensure more successful outcomes. You can set up automated messages to interact with customers, receive notifications on account activity, and run surveys or polls to measure satisfaction levels after customers interact with your product or service.
Usage tracking/analytics: Monitors and measures customer interactions, usage patterns, and product adoption rates, providing valuable insights into user behavior to help identify improvement areas or opportunities for further engagement. Analytics also provides real-time data on the performance of various software features as well as trends in how users engage across different channels over time.
Net promoter score (NPS): Measures customers' willingness to recommend your product or service to others. NPS provides easy-to-understand insights into how likely your customers are to refer you to their friends, family, colleagues, and acquaintances. NPS helps your customer success team understand customer sentiment to improve retention rates, boost loyalty, and create a better customer experience.
Account management: Tracks customer account interactions, manages contracts, and provides insights into software usage data. With account management, you can better understand what individuals or groups of customers need to succeed, and you can tailor your products or services accordingly.

What are the benefits of using customer success software?

Improves customer retention: Customer success software provides valuable insights that help you understand customer behavior, preferences, and needs. You can then tailor your offerings to better meet customer expectations and boost retention. The software also helps monitor how well your business is delivering on promises while simultaneously tracking client interactions, ultimately leading to lower customer churn rates.
Enhances customer satisfaction: Customer success software automates processes such as running customer feedback surveys and offering personalized support. These features provide valuable insights into customer needs, preferences, and experiences to help your business identify where to focus to ensure customers are consistently happy with your products or services.
Boosts customer loyalty: By offering insights into customer behavior and preferences, customer success software helps your business better understand customer needs and provide personalized offerings to increase satisfaction levels. This boosts loyalty, as your customers feel valued. You can also use the software to promote customer retention campaigns, such as discounts and incentives, to strengthen customer loyalty over time.

What are the potential issues with customer success software?

Data security: Customer success software solutions manage and store customer data that can be confidential or sensitive in nature. Any breach, unauthorized access, or misuse of such data can have serious consequences for your business, leading to legal action or loss of customer trust. Therefore, take data security seriously when shortlisting a customer success tool for your small business.
Cost: Purchasing a customer success platform can be costly and requires significant upfront investment. Software implementation, maintenance, and ongoing support all require resources that may not fit your organization's budget. Also, there are often additional costs associated with customization or integration with existing systems, which could further add to the overall expenses.
Poor user experience: User experience is a crucial factor in the success of any customer success platform. Poor user experience will result in your teams struggling to navigate the software or finding it too difficult to use. The ideal user experience should make any interaction simpler and more efficient by offering intuitive menus, clear instructions, easy navigation options, and helpful support resources. You can achieve good UX through feedback loops, which allow for continuous improvement of product features as well as customizations that meet your business’s individual needs better than generic solutions.

How much does customer success software cost?

Most customer success software products are priced on a "per month" basis, and their entry-level pricing plan ranges from $13 to $30+* per month. An enterprise product that’s priced higher may include additional features such as customizable dashboards, automated customer journey mapping, and a customer health score finder.

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offerings found on vendor websites as of Jan. 7, 2023.

Key considerations when purchasing customer success software

Assess whether the software tracks customer interactions and customer data. An ideal customer success solution should track customer interactions and customer data to help you understand your clients better, identify improvement areas and growth opportunities in customer experience, and provide personalized services. Tracking customer interactions also helps uncover trends that could lead to new service or product offerings while providing valuable insights into what motivates your customers. It allows you to understand how you engage with customers, enabling teams across departments to focus on the same goals and objectives when interacting with clients.
Check the level of automation the software offers. A customer success solution automates customer-related tasks such as onboarding, customer support ticket tracking, account management, and renewal notifications, saving your team time and allowing them to focus on more strategic activities that drive revenue growth. Automated customer service processes also reduce the risk of costly errors due to manual input or oversight while providing valuable insights into customers’ needs.
Evaluate the integration capabilities of the software. Integrating a customer success tool with other customer-facing platforms, such as CRM software, allows you to gain a holistic view of a customer's journey and identify potential opportunities for improvement. This lets you offer a personalized experience, improve customer engagement and loyalty, track key performance metrics, and ultimately drive success. Integration also helps streamline processes by eliminating manual data entry or duplicate records.

Sources

Products evaluated for the pricing calculation were taken from Software Advice’s Customer success software directory, sorted by the number of reviews. The pricing ranges exclude freemium versions of the products. The features highlighted were identified based on their relevance and the percentage of products in Software Advice’s directory that offer them.

Disclaimer

This customer success software buyers guide was authored by SoftwareAdvice’s content team. We develop our guides using the author’s expertise, insights from 2M+ unique user reviews, and our proprietary data science algorithms to identify trends in user sentiment, preferences, and priorities. Some text was generated with assistance from AI tools.

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