12 customer success software tools to drive loyalty and growth

Finding the right customer success (CS) platform feels impossible when you’re assessing multiple tools, comparing similar-sounding features, and trying to decide which pricing model is best for your business. But what if you focused on tools that align with your company’s context and goals? 

To cut through the noise, this article groups 12 customer success software and tools by core CS functions and use cases.

You’ll also learn the 3 parameters to evaluate before you buy, so your team can confidently help customers achieve their desired outcomes—while driving higher retention and expansion revenue for your business.

Key insights

• A successful CS strategy is proactive, data-driven, and deeply integrated with the customer journey, from onboarding to expansion

• AI can enhance CS efforts in ways that go beyond basic automation, such as predictive churn modeling, outreach content personalization, and intelligent task prioritization

• Siloed data is a thing of the past—smart customer success teams collaborate with others to create a unified view of the customer experience

Most CS platforms can be classified based on these core functions:

• Customer management 

• Data analytics and reporting

• Customer onboarding and adoption

• Customer communication and engagement

It’s important for every CS team to understand the core functions they need to prioritize. Once you do, it becomes easier to find dedicated CS tools that align with your needs, optimize your strategy, and drive growth. Let’s dive in.

Customer management platforms

Customer management platforms focus on what happens after sales—deepening relationships, driving adoption, and delivering delight throughout the customer lifecycle.

They differ greatly from traditional CRM software, which is designed to track the sales pipeline and close new deals.

1. Custify 

Best for SaaS companies

Custify offers subscription-based businesses a 360-degree view of their customer data, ranging from product usage and adoption to health scores and lifecycles, in a single dashboard. You can also set up automated alerts when key metrics change, allowing you to quickly identify and proactively address accounts at risk of churning.

Custify’s unified dashboard view

Unlike competitors that assign equal weight to multiple product features, Custify tracks a separate health score for each feature, giving more weight to the most important ones, and then calculates the weighted average (Global Health Score). This allows you to know exactly what’s driving your Global Health Score up or down. 

Besides comprehensive customer data tracking, you can use this platform to 

• Find and act on upsell opportunities by seeing which customers are ready for an upgrade

• Create custom playbooks for different scenarios, like logging lifecycle progress or CS interactions

• Loop in sales and marketing teams to ensure everyone’s aligned on your customer success strategy

• Import billing information, support tickets, CRM data, and marketing stats

2. Gainsight

Best for enterprise customer health

Gainsight centralizes customer data to help CS managers deeply understand their customers from all angles. It’s particularly valuable for companies handling complex clients, for example, those involving multiple contacts within an account and requiring extensive onboarding, training, and change management.

Gainsight’s centralized dashboard for customer data

Meanwhile, its advanced scoring system lets you drill down deeper to accurately predict retention and expansion, and then automatically generate tailored success plans for specific segments or individual accounts. 

Gainsight is also a great choice if you want to

• Automate calls to action (CTAs), playbooks, and processes to boost your team’s efficiency at scale 

• Enhance your adoption and onboarding

• Operationalize your entire customer lifecycle across all segments 

• Connect seamlessly with other tools in your tech stack 

3. Totango

Best for predicting churn

Totango is a leading composable customer success platform. It features customer success program templates called SuccessBLOCs. Customizable and pre-loaded with industry best practices, SuccessBLOCs are designed to streamline every stage of the customer journey, from onboarding to expansion revenue.

Screenshot of Totango’s Reports SuccessBLOC

On top of that, Totango gives you powerful data tools. You can segment customers, combine health scores with sentiment and engagement insights, and predict churn using AI with greater accuracy.

Totango also helps you

• Automate data collection, reducing manual effort

• Generate detailed overviews of customer health, engagement, and attributes instantly

• Create success plans reflecting clients’ objectives and tasks they can perform on their portal

• Build customer email templates—no need to write them from scratch

Data analytics and reporting platforms

Solid data analytics and reporting software provide invaluable insights into customer behavior, needs, and experiences—crucial to businesses wanting to form genuine customer relationships.

4. Contentsquare

Best for product usage and experience intelligence analytics

Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that empowers teams to collect, analyze, and act on anonymized product usage and digital customer experience (CX) data.

Contentsquare’s anonymized customer data collection

It captures interactions across web and mobile sites and applications, uncovering critical customer success metrics and behavioral patterns. This holistic approach gives teams the confidence to make improvements impacting lifecycle progress, personalization, and outreach content recommendations.

Whether you’re from a small to medium-sized business or an enterprise, you can use Contentsquare to

• Swiftly identify friction areas and get frustration sources for each session—and prioritize accordingly by chatting with the platform’s AI, Sense

• Sync frustration scores and behavioral data with CRM systems using Data Connect to help improve churn prediction

• See firsthand where customers get stuck and why, using the platform’s Journey Analysis and Session Replay capabilities

• Segment customers by lifecycle stage and drill into their engagement patterns with Heatmaps 

• Use Impact Quantification to compare sessions where errors did and didn’t occur to identify missed opportunities and revenue impact 

💡 Pro tip: create Jira tickets directly from capabilities like Contentsquare’s Error Analysis or Session Replay to provide context on fixes. Instantly flag and report any errors you’ve identified while analyzing user sessions on your site, app, or product.

5. HubSpot

Best for social media analytics

HubSpot is a customer success platform with omnichannel campaign tracking capabilities, making it a great choice for advanced social monitoring among small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs).

HubSpot’s social media monitoring feature

For example, when an existing customer mentions your brand on social media, HubSpot shows you their full relationship history and allows you to respond appropriately. You can then share this data with your marketing team to track your company advocates and keep them satisfied.

You can further leverage HubSpot’s social media-specific functions to

• Flag potential case study candidates when high-value customers mention you positively on social media

• Connect the dots between submitted tickets and online mentions

• Personalize responses by addressing specific concerns in the comments

• Integrate social media campaigns into your proactive customer success strategy

6. Planhat

Best for customer acquisition insights 

Planhat is a customer success platform specializing in insights that impact acquisition. It reveals which channels bring in the most engaged customers, helping mid-market and enterprise businesses double down on high-value acquisition strategies.

Planhat’s KPI dashboard

Beyond acquisition, the platform also ensures customers get the best experience once they’re onboarded. It lets you track support tickets and individual chat conversations all in one place, helping you uncover customer sentiment and stay on top of customer experience, whether positive or negative.

Moreover, Planhat serves as a platform where you can

• Access customer health scores, usage trends data, and subscription dates in one place

• Customize your health score indicators 

• Set up alerts for tasks that your team needs to prioritize

• Effortlessly manage data analytics, health scoring, and tasks on a highly secure platform

Customer onboarding and adoption software

Customer onboarding and adoption tools help streamline the introduction of new customers to your products or services. Must-have features include automated workflows, interactive tutorials, and personalized learning paths.

7. UserGuiding

Best for in-app onboarding

UserGuiding caters to businesses offering digital products or services, boasting no-code tools for customer onboarding and product walkthroughs. 

UserGuiding product walkthrough

Digital companies can leverage UserGuiding to launch product tours that walk users through key features without causing them to feel overwhelmed. The platform also enables you to create a goal-oriented list to motivate a specific segment of new customers to complete onboarding.

Additionally, UserGuiding allows you to

• Capture real-time feedback during the onboarding phase

• Create and serve help articles inside your app, right when users need them

• Analyze user engagement patterns during onboarding to identify upselling opportunities

• Integrate with platforms like Salesforce, Google Analytics, Segment, and Amplitude

8. Vitally

Best for product onboarding automation

Vitally is a CS platform with a reliable automation feature for launching onboarding processes fast. It helps growing business-to-business (B2B) companies reduce manual work while keeping the customer experience consistent from the get-go.

Vitally’s account health dashboard

Its engagement templates allow you to create repeatable tasks, ensuring no step is missed and the experience stays cohesive, from initiating conversations through kickoff calls or follow-ups, sharing documents, or creating notes. Meanwhile, playbooks for onboarding projects let you set up triggers and add critical actions related to onboarding. 

Vitally works best for CS teams looking to

• Automate and visualize their workflows

• Get accurate health score equations with custom metrics and weights

• Monitor lifecycle stages to identify new risks and opportunities

• Collaborate with team members via centralized team documents

9. Tableau

Best for visualizing data and scaling product adoption

Tableau, now part of Salesforce, is a leading visual analytics platform providing holistic and high-quality data for CS teams. The platform’s visibility into adoption patterns and underused features lets you guide customers toward higher-value use cases and drives product adoption at scale. 

Tableau’s visual analytics

Using Contentsquare’s integration with Tableau, you can analyze users’ mouse movements, rage clicks, and hesitations alongside other behavioral data, such as how often they log in, which content they consume, and what’s blocking them from using certain features. These detailed insights allow you to craft and align enablement initiatives to help increase product adoption across certain segments.

🤔 Did you know? Contentsquare’s partner ecosystem provides 100+ tech integrations that extend the platform’s rich behavioral insights to third-party applications so you can make smarter and faster decisions with the customer experience front and center.

Depending on your subscription, Tableau’s advanced analytics capability also enables you to

• Clean and organize your data for analysis using the platform’s agentic AI

• Set up email alerts to track crucial CS metrics

• Measure Customer satisfaction (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score® (NPS®) and understand their relationship to product usage

• Apply data-driven insights to optimize CX, increase customer happiness, and earn customer loyalty

Leveling up your analytics game? Watch this video to learn how data-driven teams cut through the noise to focus on the most vital insights:

Customer communication and engagement solutions

Customer communication and engagement tools allow CS teams to cultivate ongoing and meaningful 2-way interactions across all channels, making the experience seamless using AI, automation, personalization, and an omnichannel strategy.

10. Intercom

Best for inbound and outbound customer engagement

Intercom has established itself as a reliable platform for help center support, omnichannel communication, and AI-powered customer service. 

Intercom’s Copilot in action

Its Helpdesk ranks highly as an example of software that combines various functions, from responding to inquiries, to ticketing, reporting, and collaboration. This tool also allows you to send in-context outbound messages to customers to reduce support volume and improve the customer experience.

Intercom can be your go-to customer success tool if you want to

• Provide Copilot training to support agents, helping them resolve issues faster and deliver exceptional CX

• Convert conversations into tickets to resolve more complex issues

• Deploy personalized and contextual live chat support across your app, site, or product

• Create detailed support articles and serve them across your channels 

11. Zendesk

Best for building customer trust remotely

Zendesk empowers businesses of all sizes by offering a comprehensive help desk solution that includes an AI Copilot, 1,700+ app integrations, and enterprise-grade security.

Zendesk’s AI-powered help center solution

Its AI-powered customer support helps CS teams drive customers to achieve their goals. Zendesk AI agents provide quick answers and perform complex tasks, helping reduce support tickets. The platform’s self-service and knowledge management tools work to enhance customer education and identify content gaps.

With Zendesk, CS teams can also 

• Deliver responsive customer support across channels and journey stages

• Pinpoint and address common issues that surface in support tickets

• Use generative AI to create high-quality content based on historical tickets

• Automate workflows to ensure consistent delivery across touchpoints

12. Zoom

Best for building customer trust remotely

Zoom is a cloud-based video conferencing platform that helps teams and customers hold remote sessions when meeting in person isn’t possible.

A Zoom client call

Video calls have become the norm, whether you’re kicking off a discovery call or facilitating training. Zoom has become the default online communication tool for many customer success teams working to build trust with end-users.

You can maximize Zoom, which has also rolled out an AI tool, to

• Generate transcripts for client calls and customer story interviews

• Set it as the online venue for weekly office hours with clients

• Invite subject matter experts from other teams to help out during training or issue resolution

• Schedule webinars and Ask Me Anything (AMA) sessions targeting certain customer segments

How to choose the right customer success tools

When it comes to selecting the right tools for your customer success team, it’s not just about what’s best on the market, it’s also about what works for your business. Here are 3 considerations to help guide your decision:

1. Maturity of your customer success strategy

Identify where you stand in your current CS journey. You can categorize your team’s approach referencing the 4 phases of the maturity model:

• Reactive: you’re focused on addressing customer issues—including risks and opportunities—as they arise 

• Informed: you’ve started collecting and analyzing customer data but have yet to operationalize it

• Proactive: you’re actively engaging customers, offering support, and guidance to prevent issues

• Predictive: you’re taking advantage of advanced analytics and predictive modeling to optimize your lifecycle, drive scale, and manage risks

2. Customized to your team’s needs

Besides visible factors like business size, context matters when choosing customer success software. For example, you can be a 15-year-old SaaS business and still run a lean CS team. Think about your metrics, resources, and workflows to evaluate the pros and cons of the tools above.

3. Roadmapping or advanced planning

Consider sustainability if and when you scale. Reduce the need to rework your tech stack later by having an idea of how you’ll

• Use AI in customer success. Will your needs eventually evolve from basic analytics to include churn prediction, next-best-action recommendations, or usage pattern detection?

• Integrate with other tools and platforms. How will your customer success tech stack consolidate data from disparate sources, including billing, CRM, collaboration, product usage analytics, and support and ticketing tools?

Lead your customer—and your company—toward success

The best customer success software and tools are the ones that align with your company’s individual context and needs. They should also integrate well with each other to help fulfill different functions of customer success. 

Contentsquare fits the criteria for teams looking to integrate valuable behavioral insights into their customer success strategy. By employing integrations, personalization, and AI in customer success, Contentsquare’s experience intelligence analytics supports proactive CS strategies and complements tools built for predictive ones. 

FAQs about customer success software