11 min read
Dan Wilson
:
Jan 6, 2025 9:28:01 AM
Congratulations! You’re exploring Customer Success Software, which means you’re running a successful business with room to elevate your customer success program. That’s already a win—well done!
I don't envy you, frankly. There are hundreds of customer success platforms out there, each with its own pros and cons. Nail this choice, and you’ll get the perfect tool for a fair price. Miss the mark, and you'll overpay for bloated software that takes up to 2 years to implement and may even require special headcount just to operate. You did budget for that, right?
So, how do you pick the right one? Start by asking yourself these key questions:
If you’re short on time and prefer quick insights, we’ve created comparisons to show how Churn Assassin stacks up against other platforms. We aren't the perfect choice for every scenario, but these comparisons will help you learn more about the products on the market so you find the tool that aligns best with you.
Let’s tackle the big one: pricing. Budgets are tight. While unlimited funds would let you simply bribe customers to renew and call it a day, reality has other plans. Price matters.
In Customer Success Software, pricing models vary widely. Platforms like Churn Assassin offer free tiers for up to 25 customers with full feature access and transparent pricing. On the other end, some tools exceed $100,000/yr, before factoring in implementation costs.
Your task? Find where your budget meets your needs. Be aware that pricier options hide their pricing behind “Contact Sales” forms, giving quotes based on your budget and perceived value. As the saying goes, “If you have to ask, you probably can’t afford it.”
Good question! Nobody wants to invest in software that falls short of expectations. To avoid this, consider how different products let you evaluate them.
Some offer a free trial, letting you explore the features in your own environment. Others rely on vendor-led demos, sometimes importing your customer data for a tailored experience.
Free trials are great if you like hands-on exploration, are tech-savvy, or have clear use cases. Demo-based access, on the other hand, is better if you’re new to the software’s domain, need guidance, or prefer a more personalized walkthrough. Either approach will eventually give you a clear sense of what works best for your needs.
Hands-on Experience: Explore the software at your own pace and see how it fits into your workflow. It’s a chance to test-drive the product without any pressure.
Low Commitment: There’s no need to schedule meetings or negotiate upfront. You can get started quickly and decide if the product feels right for you.
Convenience: You’re in control of when and how you use the trial, making it easy to fit into your schedule.
Transparency: A free trial gives you a clear picture of what you’re getting with no surprises.
Limited Guidance: Without someone showing you around, you might miss out on some features or not use the software to its fullest potential.
Overwhelming Complexity: If the software is complex, figuring it out on your own could feel frustrating or time-consuming.
No Personalization: You don’t get a chance to see how the product can be tailored specifically to your needs during a free trial.
Potential Misalignment: Without help, you might evaluate the product in a way that doesn’t align with its strengths or your goals, which could leave you with the wrong impression.
Personalized Presentation: A demo gives you a tailored walkthrough, focusing on the features that matter most to you and your business.
Expert Guidance: You’ll have someone to answer your questions, highlight key benefits, and ensure you understand how the software solves your challenges.
Time-Saving: Instead of exploring on your own, you can get straight to the good stuff with the help of a product expert.
Builds Confidence: Seeing the product in action with a professional reassures you that it can meet your needs and handle your use cases.
Higher Commitment: Scheduling a demo takes time and might feel like a bigger step than you’re ready to take, especially early in your search.
Potential Pressure: Sometimes, having a salesperson on the call can feel like you’re being pushed toward a decision before you’re ready.
No Hands-on Time: A demo shows you the product, but it doesn’t let you personally try it out to see how it works in your day-to-day operations.
Less Flexibility: You’re working on someone else’s schedule, which might not always align with when you’re available or in the right mindset to evaluate the product.
Just like with pricing, the best choice depends on your needs and what you’re willing to navigate. For a straightforward solution without enterprise-level requirements, products with transparent pricing and free trials are a smart starting point. If your needs include complex integrations and advanced features, be prepared for a more involved demo and sales process.
You’ve made the purchase, now comes the fun part: making it work. Ironically, software built to simplify customer onboarding doesn’t always have the smoothest onboarding experience itself.
The time it takes varies by product. Some tools are quick to set up, while others involve complex configurations that can stretch into years.
For instance, installing Churn Assassin is as simple as adding a JavaScript snippet to your app and publishing it. From there, it automatically learns your application, customer journey, and users. CRM integrations, like HubSpot, add just another five minutes for configuration. For usage-based SaaS, it’s a game-changer.
When evaluating vendors, ask about their time to value. A longer time to value isn’t necessarily bad—it just depends on your timeline and expectations.
Customer satisfaction and account health might seem like the same thing, but they’re not.
Customer satisfaction focuses on how happy users are with the product, features, design, and support. It’s about day-to-day usability. Frustrations like glitches or missing features might annoy customers but don’t always lead to cancellations. Think of a time you stuck with a product despite some frustrations because it was still useful.
Account health, on the other hand, is about long-term retention. It looks at how the product is used, the value it brings, and whether it stays aligned with the customer’s evolving needs. For instance, if customer interactions drop or a key decision-maker leaves the company, it could signal trouble. Even satisfied customers might leave if the product no longer fits their goals, like when you stopped using something you liked but no longer needed.
Once your shiny new customer success platform is up and running, you’ll quickly learn about the upkeep it requires. Maintenance can range from almost nothing to needing a dedicated specialist to manage it.
Enterprise-level platforms demand more ongoing attention, as they’re built to automate well-established processes. A heavy administrative load isn’t necessarily a downside if you’ve planned for it.
A good way to gauge maintenance needs? Check the average implementation time. The more effort required to set it up, the more consistent care it'll need to keep running smoothly.
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. Despite what the marketing teams want you to believe, companies have both unique attributes and best practices that drive customer success. So, the right choice depends on your budget, meaning time, money, and resources, plus the features your customer success team needs to get those exceptional customer results.
Customer success tools often offer a range of features, but not all are relevant for every stage of a company’s growth. The key is finding software that matches how your business manages customer relationships without overloading you with unnecessary features (and costs).
To dive deeper, let’s break this down in a few different ways.
This one is easy. Companies with fewer than 50 employees are often founder-led, with customer success managed by early leaders or a small team of CSMs, if it exists at all. At this stage, enthusiasm and commitment compensate for product gaps, as smaller teams act quickly on customer feedback, foster more personal customer relationships, and maintain a clear view of customer behavior.
For such teams, simple tools are best. Easy to buy, implement, and maintain. Complex, enterprise-level platforms sound appealing but would create more problems than it solves, adding unnecessary costs and burdens. Think of it like handing a swimmer a boat anchor, it might be useful later, but right now, it’ll just drag you down (Glug glug).
It’s also easy to get distracted by shiny features, like automated messaging triggered by customer events. While tempting, these tools backfire if your processes and customer insights aren’t fully developed, frustrating the very customers you’re working to support. Keep it simple and focused on what your team can handle effectively.
Nimbleness is everything.
Focus on personal engagement. Build relationships with your customers, monitor their health directly, and dive deep into their experiences. These first-hand insights are invaluable for improving your product, sales, support, and engineering. When you genuinely enhance customer success, they’ll become your best advocates, driving growth through referrals.
Choose tools with transparent pricing, straightforward features that meet your needs, and a quick time-to-value. As your business grows, reassess and maybe adopt a more complex platform. For now, the priority is retaining as many customers as possible while steadily growing revenue and your addressable market.
Choose software that’s easy to buy, quick to set up, and simple to maintain. Your time is better spent connecting with customers, not wrestling with software. If you’re ready to leave behind manual data collection, cleanup, and endless spreadsheets, prioritize tools with features like:
At this stage, repeatable processes matter. The focus shifts to scaling while allowing your offerings to mature and stabilize. Many misaligned customers have churned, leaving a clearer target audience for sales, upsells, and cross-sells.
While losing customers isn’t ideal, it can be strategic. Aligning with customers who fit your product’s direction allows you to focus resources on delivering scalable value, rather than getting sidetracked by one-off needs.
This is where you must have a strong customer success strategy. You need tools to monitor your customer base, analyze customer health, predict customer churn, and identify pre-churn behaviors so you can intervene. Streamlined onboarding processes help new customers learn your product without extensive hand-holding. Additionally, customer success teams have access to resources and content that help users maximize product value.
While building these features into your app is an option, it’s not a good use of internal engineering time. Instead, look for solutions that help you scale efficiently and deliver excellent customer support.
Customer Health Scoring: Highlights at-risk customers early, enabling proactive retention efforts.
Advanced Onboarding Tools: Simplifies onboarding, speeding up adoption and reducing frustration.
Scalable Resource Management: Centralizes support content, easing access and reducing team workload.
Integration with CRM and Support Tools: Unifies scattered data for clearer insights and smarter decisions.
Churn Forecasting Models: Predicts churn early, allowing teams to act before issues escalate.
Upsell and Cross-Sell Opportunities: Identifies high-potential customers for targeted revenue growth.
Customizable Reporting Dashboards: Focuses on key metrics, saving time and delivering actionable insights.
Team Collaboration Features: Aligns teams, preventing miscommunication and improving customer retention.
At this stage, your product growth has likely plateaued, and leadership wants to boost customer lifetime value. You may have added new products through development or acquisition and are prioritizing cross-sells, upsells, and renewals. Your customer success function should now include a refined onboarding process, centralized customer data to track customer retention and growth, and strong content and training to optimize experience for specific customer preferences.
From a staffing perspective, the focus shifts from founder-driven enthusiasm or standout individuals to emotionally intelligent Customer Success Managers who excel at executing your well-defined processes. With maturity comes the wisdom to enhance customer engagement through consistent, scalable methods. A comprehensive customer success platform becomes essential, along with well-documented customer playbooks to ensure continuity even as team members transition.
Leading customer success at this level is about consistency and empathy. The days of relying on heroic individual efforts are behind you, replaced by a structured, sustainable approach that prioritizes long-term customer relationships.
At this stage, customer success software provides the opportunity to layer in additional features or integrations, adding sophistication and capability, such as:
Congratulations! You’ve made it to the big leagues. As one of the largest companies with a complex need to optimize customer lifecycles, and satisfy your many internal stakeholders, its time for a sophisticated customer success platform designed help you as much as possible. At this level, you can afford dedicated specialists to maintain the platform, so system maintenance is no longer a barrier to unlocking full functionality.
However, don’t just default to the leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant. While top-tier platforms are all pretty capable, they differ in user experience, features, and how they alter your approach to customer success. A thorough evaluation, or “bake-off,” among recommended systems is critical. Choose one that aligns with your processes and offers a great customer experience for your team. Keep in mind that switching from one complex system to another is far more challenging than upgrading from a simpler platform.
At this stage, success hinges on leveraging the carefully refined systems and battle tested automation you’ve built over time. Consistency becomes key, as your company’s longevity requires an emphasis on process over individual contributions. While quality people remain vital, headcount naturally fluctuates with business cycles. A system that ensures continuity and excellent results can help bridge these changes.
Additionally, segmentation becomes an even higher priority. Your CSP should allow for advanced customer segmentation, enriched with first-party customer information from CRMs, surveys, and customer histories. This capability lets you understand customer segments and target segments with tailored success initiatives and measure the impact on overall customer value.
For companies offering complex software with extensive onboarding requirements, consider CSP functionality that enables collaboration with customers during onboarding. Think of it as a built-in project management tool where you assign and track tasks within the platform. This helps both your team and the customer stay aligned and ensures no steps are missed. Long implementations may be unavoidable, but no customer wants to wait longer than necessary to start benefiting from their purchase. A CSP with these capabilities can streamline the process and enhance the overall experience.
Thanks for sticking with us to the end! In a world overflowing with content, finding practical advice on choosing the best platform and partner for customer success is tough. We believe many excellent tools to enhance the customer success function are available. The right one for you depends on factors beyond the scope of this article.
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