12 Essential Customer Success Tools for Every Budget

My experience with customer success software shows they are helpful for reaching the revenue target of businesses. But don't take my word for it — I have data to back it up. Getting a customer success software propelled Cloudnova’s project value from $7K to $100K. Lyte’s outcome is a remarkably low customer churn of 3%. And Swapfiets shortened response time to customer inquiries with 40,000 tickets resolved per month.

I like customer success management (CSM) tools because they are beneficial for handling customer inquiries, tracking and fixing poor customer experiences, and reporting on the performance of customer support reps. CSM tools also help me stick to customer success best practices and workflows — like collecting and analyzing customer feedback, managing customer communications, and setting up self-service customer education.

In this article, I’ll share 12 of the best customer success tools that work for every budget, whether you're a startup, mid-level, or an enterprise company.

Table of Contents

• What Is a Customer Success Tool?
• Customer Success Tools for Every Budget
• Features of Great Customer Success Software
• How to Choose the Right CSM Tool
• Test Your CSM with a Demo or Free Trial

Customer Success Management Platforms: An Overview

Here’s a quick overview of the 12 top customer success tools that I put together. Each CSM tool has its starting price, average G2 rating, and availability of a free plan to help you make an informed buying decision.

Customer Success Tools for Every Budget

CSM Tools

1. HubSpot Service Hub

• Price: Starter $20/month per seat, Professional $100/month per seat, Enterprise $130/month per seat
• Free trial: Yes (+ free plan that doesn’t expire)

HubSpot is my favorite out of all the CSM tools I checked out. As an all-in-one customer success solution, I like how HubSpot allows users on a budget to use the tool free. The HubSpot CSM is also great for small to enterprise teams who want to access more features. This makes HubSpot best for customer success teams of all sizes and the first choice for 216,000+ customers in over 135 countries.

Another reason I like HubSpot is the integrated access to its service, marketing, sales, operations, content, and commerce Hubs.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Ticketing system to organize incoming customer requests and issues logically.
• Team inbox to share messages and assign tickets amongst your reps and agents.
• Customer feedback tools to deploy surveys, analyze feedback, and calculate customer satisfaction scores.
• Knowledge base to create educational resources so customers can self-serve.
• Conversations to connect all customer communication channels so you have context whenever you talk to customers.
• Automations that use customer feedback responses to kick off workflows that route customers to the solutions they need.
• Integrating with over 1,500 software means the Service Hub allows your team to have its favorite tools on a single platform.
• Service Hub includes HubSpot’s CRM functionality, and it integrates with the Marketing, Sales, Content, Operations, and Commerce Hubs, which gives your team a complete view of the customer.

Pro tip: Use HubSpot’s inbox tool to make emailing and chatting easy. Create email templates, snippets, quotes, documents, knowledge base articles, etc.

2. Zendesk

• Price: Basic Support Team plan starts at $19 per month per agent, Support Professional $55 per month per agent, Enterprise $115 per month per agent
• Free trial: Yes (14 days)

Zendesk is a freemium CSM used by 100,000+ customers to boost the experience of customers at every stage of their journey. My experience with the sign-up process was seamless, and I like the uncluttered and intuitive dashboard, which shows an overview of ticket stats, open tickets, and tickets requiring attention. Zendesk also has lots of really good features that make it a great omnichannel support tool.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Omnichannel support tools allow customers to connect with you on their preferred channels, keeping customer effort low.
• In-depth reporting and analytics help you learn more about customer sentiment and satisfaction.
• Customizable automation and ticket forms to ensure you provide the best support possible for specific issues.
• Service Level Agreement (SLA) views to see how your team is stacking up against sales and marketing.
• Automated AI workflows to help with any increase in support ticket volume.
• Engagement features to identify and reduce odds of customer churn.
• Feedback surveys to know what your customers like and what requires improvement.
• Seamless integration with the HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: Use Zendesk's Group feature in the dashboard to categorize open tickets. This allows support agents with more experience on a topic to address customer requests faster.

3. Intercom

• Pricing: Essential starts at $39 per seat per month, Advanced $99 per seat per month, and Expert $139 per seat per month
• Free trial: 14-day free trial

Intercom is AI-first customer service software used by over 25,000 global organizations. It offers individual tools or a suite of tools to use together. I find Intercom’s customer success tool easy to use right from the sign-up. The articles icon in the dashboard area is cool, as it allows me to create help docs for customers.

However, what I noticed is that compared to HubSpot and Zendesk, Intercom is simplistic and has fewer robust functionalities. Additionally, my learning from Dominic, a CX expert, shows that Intercom’s reporting may not be 100% accurate.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Live chat tools help you provide in-the-moment support when your customers need it most.
• Proactive targeted messaging helps you reach customers at the right time when they’re on your website or site pages.
• Re-engage customers with custom bots and tailored messages.
• A team inbox helps you store and easily access all customer conversations from one place.
• Macros let you save time on repetitive tasks by creating saved replies and action for your team.
• Intercom integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: Keep an eye out for Intercom’s “What’s New” section to take advantage of new Intercom features.

4. Custify

• Price: Contact for pricing
• Free trial: Free Demo

I like the Custify customer success platform because it keeps customer acquisition costs low by reducing churn, retaining customers, and growing revenue. Though I find the view dated, the Custify platform has robust features for CS teams to deliver an amazing experience using automation, analytics, and custom health scores.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Customer tracking to monitor your customers' interactions and communications with various departments, including support teams.
• Proactively address customer queries and issues by distributing feedback surveys to assess satisfaction levels. Leverage feedback to decrease customer turnover and enhance their overall sentiment.
• Automated workflows to streamline processes by such as dispatching welcome and onboarding emails, allocating accounts to team members, and beyond.
• Use customer engagement data to assess the probability of churn or product or service renewal.
• Seamlessly integrate customer success metrics to match your objectives and accurately examine trends. Turn complex data into straightforward, actionable insights.
• It integrates with the HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: Integrate Custify with HubSpot or your CRM to get a 360 view of your customer

5. Akita

• Price: Starts at $160 per month for three users; Connect tier costs $480 per month for three users
• Free trial: 14-day free trial

Akita's customer success software helps you quickly ramp up a customer success program to ensure you satisfy customers and meet their needs. Like Custify, this tool is useful for nurturing, onboarding, delighting, and retaining customers. And while it’s not very intuitive, I like how Akita does a fine job of showing accounts at risk for prompt follow-up.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Integrate with your SaaS applications to get a 360 view of your customers and their characteristics.
• Use custom filters to create lists of accounts with specific attributes to ensure you offer a tailored customer experience.
• Track how different customer segments stack up.
• Customer health monitoring helps you identify customers at risk of churn ahead of time so you can meet with them and uncover any pressing issues.
• A shared team inbox helps you keep customer conversations in one place and in context.
• Akita integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: Integrate Akita with your CRM to capture new customers and save time with manual data entry.

6. Planhat

• Price: Custom
• Free trial: Free demos

Planhat offers high-quality onboarding tools to get your customers started quickly and efficiently. I find this tool useful for converting data into actions that deliver value to customers. While I find Planhat to be techy, I am glad they offer training to hold the hand of users who want to get started.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Create custom onboarding playbooks to ensure a consistent and seamless onboarding experience for every customer.
• Unique customer portals for each customer lay out their unique onboarding process so they know exactly what to expect.
• Customer insights and health scores help you understand customer sentiment to ensure you’re meeting expectations and helping customers solve their needs.
• Large collaborative workflows that save time.
• Universal filtering system for running sophisticated no-code cross-model queries.
• Planhat integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Customer Support Strategy & Planning Template

Outline your company's customer support strategy with this free template.

• Customer Support Vision
• Team Structure & Hiring Plan
• Support Process
• And More!

Download Now for Free Learn more Download Now for Free

Download Free

All fields are required.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Download Now

Tools for Customer Success

7. Front

• Price: Starter $29/month per user; Growth $79/month per user; Scale available on custom pricing
• Free trial: 7-day free trial

Front is an AI-powered customer service tool for building a satisfying customer experience. I like this tool because it covers the entire gamut from SMS messages to live chat, X, Facebook, and web mails. Over 8,500 customers use Front’s real-time collaboration, automation, and AI capabilities to take service to the next level.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Connect all of your preferred communication channels in one team inbox.
• Email templates and canned responses keep you prepared to answer all customer inquiries as they come in.
• Sort and tag messages with custom filters to ensure you understand customer requests and provide the most relevant solutions.
• Analytics track team performance and customer experience metrics to sentiment and stay on top of customer issues.
• Ability to summarize conversations with AI.
• Front integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: Add your personal inbox to Front to prevent switching between apps. Note that you need to tag, invite, or mention team members in the comments if you want them to see messages in your personal inbox.

8. Survicate

• Price: The Starter plan is free; Business plan is $99 per month; Scale plan is $299 per month
• Free trial: Yes. Free 10-day trial with all Business Plan features

Survicate is a customer survey tool for gathering continuous feedback across email, web, links, in-product, and mobile apps. Its user base of 1,500+ companies suggests it’s a great tool for generating and acting on relevant customer insights.

I found the sign-up process super easy after checking out the Survicate demo. Its 400+ templates include sample questions and the survey length.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Easily create customized surveys to receive customer feedback within minutes.
• Capture partial survey responses and strategically target your surveys to engage the right audience at the optimal time, increasing response rates and ensuring more relevant insights.
• Integrate Survicate with your existing tools through one-click, native integrations for a more holistic understanding of your customers.
• Analyze customer insights using AI, which sorts feedback into topics and categories, making it easier to reach smart decisions and plan better.
• Survicate integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: If you user Intercom, you can use Survicate to survey users directly in the Intercom messenger.

9. InMoment

• Price: Custom
• Free trial: Available

InMoment collects data from your customers at all touch points to help you create a satisfying customer experience based on data and analytics. The tool is useful for gathering customer feedback, which supports engagement, retention, and loyalty. While InMoment is easy to use, what I don’t like is the limited number of integrations.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Quickly create and send surveys to customers based on custom filters for trigger events or specific audience segments.
• Real-time sentiment analysis helps you understand current customer trends and feelings.
• The customer profile view summarizes a customer's entire journey and conversations over time.
• The reputation management feature lets you collect and respond to customer reviews.
• Predictive customer analytics powered by AI helps to glean insights from unstructured feedback.
• InMoment integrates with HubSpot CRM.

10. Vitally

• Price: Flexible pricing based on usage, contact sales
• Free trial: No

Vitally is an all-in-one customer success platform. Its 500+ clients use their real-time customer data with dedicated workspaces to power visibility, productivity, and collaboration. With Vitally, I find task management and visibility easy because of its several views.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Hubs for individuals and teams to organize their data and work.
• Table, board, and project views to visualize data in several forms.
• Ability to create multiple workflows to reduce the number of agents' touchpoints.
• Message templates and communication workflows streamline conversations and save time when reaching out and responding to queries.
• Communicate with customers by sending email campaigns.
• Customer profiles help you get a sense of customer needs and help you personalize engagement on every channel.
• Health score tracks customers who may be at-risk and identifies opportunities for growth.
• HubSpot integration is available.

11. CloudTalk

• Price: Starter $25/month per user; Essential $30/month per user; Expert Plan $50/month per user
• Free trial: 14-day trial

CloudTalk is a call center software that you can use to create an inbound talk center to communicate with your customers in-office and remotely. One feature of Cloud Talk that I like is the click to call. This allows support agents to start a call from a website or CRM or add all the phone numbers on the page to the smart dialer’s queue for automated dialing later.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Custom rules and skill-based call routing to sort queued calls ensure customers speak with the right agents.
• Set a preferred agent for clients so their calls are always routed to an agent familiar with their case and needs.
• Call recording to listen back for training and process improvement.
• CloudTalk integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Pro tip: Use the Statistics feature of CloudTalk to assess the performance of your support team.

12. Helpjuice

• Price: Starter $120/month for four users; Run-Up $200/month for 16 users; Premium Limited $289/month for 60 users; Premium Unlimited $499/month for unlimited users
• Trial: 14-day free trial

Helpjuice helps you create a knowledge base to supply customers with self-service solutions. Since 2011, over 1 million businesses have used Helpjuice to help customers troubleshoot their issues before reaching out to their service team. For me, elements that stood out for Helpjuice are its ease of use, import tools, and customization options.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• Customizable knowledge base templates and designs help you to seamlessly create a knowledge base addition to your current site.
• A/B testing for specific pages to see what performs best so you can provide the optimum customer experience.
• Detailed analytics show you the topics your customers are searching for, allowing you to provide up-to-date and relevant information.
• Collaborative features let you choose which employees see what when working on pieces of content.

Bonus tool: WhatHub

• Price: Starter $10/month; Basic $25/month; Professional $40/month
• Free trial: 30-day free trial

WhatHub is a WhatsApp integration that connects messages from the platform to your CRM, helping you leverage WhatsApp as a customer success channel.

Image Source

Why I like it:

• 1:1 messaging with your CRM contacts through WhatsApp.
• Automatically record conversations within your contacts profile, so your teams have 24/7 access to customer information when they need it.
• Automated features triggered by keywords mentioned during your conversations.
• WhatHub integrates with HubSpot CRM.

Customer Support Strategy & Planning Template

Outline your company's customer support strategy with this free template.

• Customer Support Vision
• Team Structure & Hiring Plan
• Support Process
• And More!

Download Now for Free Learn more Download Now for Free

Download Free

All fields are required.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Download Now

Features of Great Customer Success Software

Here are some important features to look out for in customer success software:

Client Data Management

Customers leave trails of insightful data as they interact on your online platforms, and customer success software can help you collect, store, and analyze the data on one dashboard. This lets your customer success managers know your customers' needs and identify ways to ease their situation.

AI Workflow and Automation

78% of customer success managers say AI helps them spend more time on the most important parts of their roles. With AI, you can provide round-the-clock support, save hours daily, automate responses to frequently asked questions, and send customers to best-fit human agents.

AI also provides customers with self-serve services like sharing links to relevant knowledge bases or FAQ pages.

Customer Segmentation

This feature allows you to categorize clients based on behavior, demographics, and churn risk. It also lets you understand how to meet the unique needs of people in different segments and personalize your communication.

For instance, Ving, an employee compliance and engagement platform, uses cross-functional data insights from HubSpot's sales, marketing, and service hubs to identify and retain customers that pose a churn risk.

CRM and Tech Stack Integration

An excellent customer success software should integrate with your tech stack, especially your CRM. This allows you to collect data from customer interactions to the CSM tool automatically. Afterward, you can analyze the data so your customer success reps gain strategic insights.

The outcome is time savings and simplified workflow, which boosts your team’s efficiency. An example is Sandler. The company adopted a CRM with solid integration capabilities. The result? One full-time employee got freed up from manual data collection.

Self-Service Through Help Center Options

CSM software with self-service tools enables you to meet customer expectations for prompt solutions by providing a knowledge base of support articles, FAQ pages, guides, video walkthroughs, and other resources. This reduces customer support requests and frees your team to focus on strategies to increase customer success.

Customized Dashboards and Live Reporting

To holistically assess a customer’s experience and analyze customer sentiment based on live data, your CSM software should support customized dashboards and real-time reporting as it lets you track important metrics like NPS and churn rate.

How to Choose the Right CSM Tool

Before choosing a CSM software, list out the functionalities you need as this helps you navigate through the array of CSM software options in the market. Here are some things to do:

Estimate the total cost of the CSM.

Apart from the upfront software price, find out the total cost of ownership. This includes any additional expenses like payments for extra features, maintenance, training, and dedicated support.

Confirm that it integrates with the tech stack.

A customer success tool that can‘t seamlessly integrate with your CRM and other software isn’t suitable. Opt for CSM software that offers APIs, pre-built integrations, or manual data pull from other tools in your tech stack. This gives you a complete view of your customer without switching between software. It also avoids data silos and enhances collaboration.

Case in point: Functionally, an interactive org design company, increased site performance by 400% and boosted organic growth with a $200,000 cost-saving by centralizing its operations in HubSpot’s Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, and Content Hub.

Choose a tool that's easy to use with responsive support.

A CSM should be user-friendly and easy to navigate to ensure easy adoption and implementation across departments in your organization. And when you run into issues, you shouldn’t wait forever to get the help you need. Confirm that your provider offers adequate support and accessible resources to solve common challenges.

Ensure it has adequate data security.

Using CSM software with poor data security can negatively affect your sales and revenue, as 94% of organizations say customers won't buy from them if their data isn’t properly protected.

You’ll want to ensure your preferred CSM has data security measures like end-to-end encryption. It should also comply with regulations like GDPR, which protects you and your customers’ data.

Check reviews on platforms like G2 and Capterra.

Visit review sites like G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot to learn from the experience of clients using CSM platforms. Read through feedback responses from users in your vertical to learn how the software performs in scenarios similar to yours.

Test Your CSM with a Demo or Free Trial

Choosing a CSM is a crucial decision that shapes your team’s productivity and your business’ revenue. Take advantage of free trials and demos to ensure your CSM tool is easy to use and works smoothly with your current tech stack.

To learn how to scale support and improve vendor lock-in, here’s a helpful post-sale playbook to get you started.

Customer Support Strategy & Planning Template

Outline your company's customer support strategy with this free template.

• Customer Support Vision
• Team Structure & Hiring Plan
• Support Process
• And More!

Download Now for Free Learn more Download Now for Free

Download Free

All fields are required.

You're all set!

Click this link to access this resource at any time.

Download Now