Customer experience (CX) is everything for a SaaS and it is a total of different customer success activities together. No single tool can cover every aspect of these activities comprehensively.
Considering that customer success is a top priority for %72 of companies surveyed, the effectiveness of a strategy often depends on the combination of the right tools used.
Breaking down the tools under 5 different categories, let’s talk about 20 different customer success tools:
- Engagement Tools
- Support Tools
- Onboarding Tools
- Relationship Tools
- Analytics Tools
20 Customer Success Tools
- Intercom for customer communication and chatbot
- Close for customer communication and task management
- Capsule for contact management and interactions
- Efficy for customer relationship management for EU-based companies
- Help Scout for shared inbox and help center
- Tidio for ai chatbot and help desk
- Kayako for support ticketing and collaborations
- Helpjuice for knowledge bases and search algorithms
- Storylane for interactive product demos and tours
- Navattic for product demos and onboarding
- Rocketlane for onboarding and implementation management
- Product Fruits for onboarding flows and checklists
- Typeform for surveys, forms and quizzes
- Fireflies for AI meeting notes taking, transcriptions and summaries
- Refiner for surveys for digital products
- Upscope for interactive screen sharing and cobrowsing
- Mixpanel for customer analytics and metrics
- UserMotion for customer health scoring
- InMoment for customer experience data
- Woopra for customer journey analytics
What is Customer Success Tool?
A customer success tool is a platform that helps creating better customer experiences by improving customer interactions, support, onboarding, relationship and analytics.
Most common features of a customer success tool are:
- Customer data management
- Customer segmentation
- Onboarding flows
- Chatbot
- Help center
- Customer messaging
- Mail and message automations and workflows
- Surveys
- Calendar
- Reporting
How to Categorize Them?
To categorize customer success tools effectively, it’s useful to think about the specific functions they perform within the customer journey. There are both all-in-one platforms that serve for all of these purposes and dedicated platform focus on one of them.
- All-in-one platforms: These platforms are designed to provide a full package of features that cover many aspects of customer success. They typically include functions for managing customer interactions, support, onboarding, relationships and analytics.
- Specialized Tools:Unlike all-in-one platforms, specialized tools focus on focusing on specific area of customer success. For example:
- Engagement Tools improve direct interactions with customers through live chat, social media, and other real-time communication channels.
- Support Tools enhance the customer service process by managing inquiries and issues more efficiently through ticketing systems and help desks.
- Onboarding Tools facilitate a smoother introduction of new users to a product or service, often through guided tutorials and interactive walkthroughs.
- Relationship Tools help manage and analyze customer relationships, ensuring personalized experiences and high customer retention.
- Analytics Tools focus on collecting and interpreting data related to customer behavior and satisfaction, providing insights that drive strategic decisions.
Top 20 Customer Success Tools
Engagement Tools
1. Intercom
Intercom, known as one of the most popular CRMs, isa customer engagement (or communication) platform that combines live chat, chatbots, a help desk, and automated messaging services in a single solution.
You can choose Intercom for your engagement strategy as it provides all solutions needed, from chatbots to analytics, covering your customer success strategy with a full view.
Features
- Contact management
- Omnichannel communication
- Fin AI agent
- Help center
- Inbox
- Reporting
- Workflows
- Outbound messaging
- News feed
- Tickets
Pros
✅ It has all basis features you need
✅ It supports startups with special offers
✅ Easy to implement across teams
Cons
❌ The platform can be expensive as you add more features
❌ The mobile app experience is not as effective as desktop
2. Close
Close CRM is a customer success tool designed as a simple CRM solution, but its focus is on sales.
It emphasizes speed and productivity, making it ideal for teams that need to hit the ground running without the lengthy setup and learning curves often associated with traditional CRMs.
Features
- Workflows
- Email and calendar sync
- Power dialer
- Pipelines
- Custom activities
- Task management
- Reporting
- Sales automation
Pros
✅ Smart views and flow timelines
✅ Communication features like call, SMS, and email support
✅ Easy to implement across teams
Cons
❌ Lack of custom views
❌ Insufficient built-in automations
❌ Only company-level view; not contact
3. Capsule
Capsule is a straightforward CRM designed to help businesses manage relationships and track interactions with customers.
It simplifies the process of managing sales pipelines, contacts, and customer histories, making it suitable for small to medium-sized enterprises.
Features
- Contact management
- Sales pipeline
- Workflow automation
- Email marketing
- Sales analytics
- AI content assistant
- Tasks and calender
- Proejcts
Pros
✅ Integration with tools like Microsoft Outlook
✅ Tracks is useful as a ready made set of tasks to follow
✅ Easy integration
Cons
❌ Overly comprehensive for simpler needs
❌ Advanced reporting features and visualizations
4. Efficy
Efficy is a CRM that offers a wide range of functionalities to help businesses streamline their customer relationship management.
It supports a variety of business sizes and types, providing tools for sales management, marketing automation, and customer service. It is a popular CRM solution especially in Europe.
Features
- Customer management
- KPI dashboards
- Quotes
- SMS
- Marketing automations
- Sales automations
- Reporting
- Gamification
Pros
✅ It prioritizes data security as Europe-based company
✅ Simplifies daily operations
✅ Pipeline set up that enables manage sales stages
Cons
❌ New users might find the features a bit overwhelming
❌ Customer support could be improved
Support Tools
5. Help Scout
Help Scout is a unified platform for customer success, that focuses on support with shared inbox and help center.
It helps customer success teams with a fast and effective support communication, with our without contacting support representatives.
Features
- Inbox
- Help center
- Messaging
- Customer data
- Insights
- AI
Pros
✅ Easy and self-service support with knowledge base
✅ Assigning tickets to other team members
✅ Callouts, embedding videos, and inserting images
Cons
❌ Lack of different help center templates
❌ Unable to download CSV files after filters and tags
❌ Docs are hard to refine
6. Tidio
Tidio stands out as an AI customer service that helps creating better customer experiences with sales and support automations.
It offers your support functions, website visitor interactions, and chatbot to solve challenges with customer support and service.
Features
- Live chat
- Help desk
- Multichannel
- Analytics
- Flows
- Visitor lists
- Reply assistant
- Lyro AI chatbot
Pros
✅ Shopify app integration for B2C businesses
✅ IOS app
✅ Lyro’s empathy and adaptability is high-level
Cons
❌ The panel and settings are a bit confusing
❌ Advanced chatbot customization is limited
7. Kayako
Kayako is another customer success tool that emphases customer services for all size of companies. It helps mainly with support ticketing, chats and FAQs.
As all support tools, Kayako also enables customers help themselves by answering their own questions, based on your knowledge base development and FAQs.
Features
- Tour
- Live chat
- Collaboration
- Self Service
- Social
- Walkthrough
- Ticketing
- Shared inbox
Pros
✅ Layout is nice
✅ Customize auto-responders
✅ Company-wide adoption
Cons
❌ The ability to customize reporting can be improved
❌ Need more integrations
8. Helpjuice
Helpjuice is a knowledge base software that enhances the way teams capture, create, and share knowledge.
It is designed to supercharge both team and customer knowledge, improving information accessibility and self-service capabilities.
Features
- Authoring and content formatting
- Intelligence analytics
- Customization
- Google-like search
- Integrations
- Collaborative articles
- Control of visitors
- Structured content
Pros
✅ Extensive customization
✅ Multiple knowledge bases
✅ Upcoming AI support and search functionalities
Cons
❌ The search algorithm can be improved
❌ More ready-made templates
❌ Expensive for small companies
Onboarding Tools
9. Storylane
Storylane is a customer success platform that aim to better customer experiences in onboarding with engaging product demos and tours.
With interactive demos, Storylane helps creating engaging and adapting product showcases that can be embedded in your website or other marketing platforms.
Features
- Guided demos
- Clickable demos
- Analytics
- Account reveals
- Personalization
- Integrations
Pros
✅ Chrome extension
✅ Elements like hotspot, modal box, tooltip, media model, video modal, etc.
✅ Inbuilt AI feature to create content and voiceover
Cons
❌ Event tracking has some problems
❌ Analytics are not very accurate
❌ No custom templates
Navattic is an onboarding tool that enable creating sharable product demos, embedding them on your website, share in the sales cycle, and send in email campaigns.
Like other customer success tools that focus on onboarding, its first and foremost aim is to make customer onboarding experience as smooth as it can be and convert them.
Features
- Product demos
- Custom themes
- Website embed
- Input triggers
- Custom share links
- Checklists
Pros
✅ Share demos in a lot of different ways
✅ Edit captures in Navattic
✅ Capture feature and then automatic flow creation
Cons
❌ Analytics could be more informative
❌ Dynamic adjustments to tours to support return viewers
❌ Unable to customize different form fields
11. Rocketlane
Rocketlane is a customer success platform for customer onboarding and implementation.
It different from other onboarding and demo tools as it combines project management, document collaboration, and communication along with built-in resource management and time tracking.
Features
- Project management
- Financial management
- Onboarding templates
- Onboarding checklists
- Monitoring
- Collaboration
- Task prioritization
- Drag & Drop
Pros
✅ Extensive customization
✅ Multiple knowledge bases
✅ Upcoming AI support and search functionalities
Cons
❌ The search algorithm can be improved
❌ More ready-made templates
❌ Expensive for small companies
12. Product Fruits
Product Fruit is a no-code onboarding tool that enables creating onboarding flows.
Their values point to two outcomes: creating guided tours and checklists or highlighting new features through tooltips and contextual help.
Features
- Tours & walkthroughs
- Onboarding checklists
- Hints & tooltips
- NPS & surveys
- Life Ring Button
- Feedback widget
- In-app announcements
- Knowledge base
Pros
✅ Its licence model is very fair and transparent
✅ Customizations
✅ In-app announcements for visibility
Cons
❌ Editor is a bit hard to understand
❌ Analytics can be improved
❌ Tour builder could be improved to be more visually
Relationship Tools
13. Typeform
Typeform is a survey and form builder that you can use for different purposes. But for customer success, it offers great capabilities to create surveys and forms into customer feedback, research or product and feature adoption.
The template library is already rich in different survey types and styles like, Customer Satisfaction Survey, Voice of Customer Survey or Customer Needs Survey. You can also start from scratch to create your own, track responses and gain insights into your strategy.
Features
- Form builder
- Survey maker
- Quiz maker
- Templates
- Analytics
- Data export
Pros
✅ Rich templates library
✅ Analyzing survey answers
✅ Embedding in websites functionality
Cons
❌ Pricing for small businesses
❌ More native integrations needed
❌ Would be better to be able to save blocks
14. Fireflies
Fireflies is a meeting note taking tool that can automate your meeting notes. It transcribes, summarizes and analyzes conversations during video conferences with its plugin bot.
Perfect for customer success meetings such as business reviews or support, as it helps CS teams work more closely on meeting notes: never miss any important point and don’t waste time trying to take notes during the meeting.
Features
- Video conference bot
- Audio file upload
- Chrome recorder
- Threads and reactions
- Smart search
- Topic trackes
- Soundbites
- Embeds
Pros
✅ AI model that do not really need human touch
✅ It spits out accurate summaries
✅ It supports multi-language transcription
Cons
❌ Would be better to have a deeper integration with HubSpot
❌ Sometimes the bot recognizes multiple people as one person
❌ Sometimes the speaker is changing in the transcript although the sentence was not finished
15. Refiner
Refiner is another survey software that is designed specifically for SaaS and digital products.
It offers customizable in-product surveys with segmenting functionalities and insights.
Features
- Survey templates
- Customized surveys
- In-product surveys
- Email surveys
- Survey links
- Reporting dashboard
- User segmentation
Pros
✅ Integration capabilities with popular tech stack
✅ Surveys flows
✅ Easy to install
Cons
❌ Customer support could be better
❌ Short limit of live surveys
❌ Dashboard can be improved
16. Upscope
Upscope is a visual communication tool with interactive screen sharing for support and customer success teams.
Its HelloScreen cobrowsing is a screen sharing functionality that remove the need of long Zoom or Google Meet sessions, and work together on the problem with the customer in real time.
Features
- Cobrowsing
- Browser to browser audio
- See, draw, click, type and scroll
- Screenshot
Pros
✅ SOC 2 and ISO27001 certified
✅ View on specific page instead of whole computer screen
✅ It works on both mobile and computer
Cons
❌ The search algorithm can be improved
❌ Need to use Chrome
❌ Can become laggy very easily – good internet connection is a must
Analytics Tools
17. Mixpanel
Mixpanel, as a popular analytics tool, helps companies measure what matters and build better customer experiences and products through data.
Its product analytics solution lets teams analyze how and why people engage, convert, and retain, which is important for a better customer success strategy.
Features
- Engagement metrics
- Retention metrics
- Event tracking
- Conversion metrics
- Funnels
- Real-time reporting
- Segmentation
- Custom reports and dashboards
- Account-level analytics
- User-level analytics
Pros
✅ Support engineers are great
✅ Reliable tracking of every user end-to-end
✅ Beautiful graphs
✅ Instant reflection of the user’s movement on the platform
Cons
❌ The formatting of dashboards is not very user-friendly
❌ Learning curve
❌ Implementation of each event/property need a different effort
18. UserMotion
UserMotion works as a customer intelligence platform for customer success teams with its customer health scoring and churn prediction capabilities.
It helps your customer success teams monitor accounts in 360° view with customer health scores, spot upsells, cross-sells, renewals, and churn risks.
Features
- Predictive scoring
- Customer segmentation
- Intent signals
- Customer-fit scoring
- Activity tracking
- Event tracking
- Churn prediction
- Customer 360
- Customer health scoring
- Customer success playbooks
- Customer journey tracking
- Real-time churn alerts and intent signals
Pros
✅ It helps you detect accounts at risk of churn before it really happens
✅ Unlimited intent signals
✅ ICP-fit and intent at the same time
✅ Integrates with CRMs with embedded score cards
Cons
❌ More native integrations
❌ For accurate scoring, AI should be trained with customer data for some time
19. InMoment
InMoment helps collect and integrate customer experience data to uncover the insights that enable the smartest actions.
InMoment platform allows support team to segment feedback by agent and other relevant business drivers to uncover insights that help optimize support experience.
Features
- Customer feedback
- Digital listening
- Employee experience
- Market research
- Conversational intelligence
- Analytics
Pros
✅ Invalid vote detection
✅ View on specific page instead of whole computer screen
✅ Integrates with our CRM so we can send emails based on the survey score.
Cons
❌ Date picker resets every time logging in
❌ Limitation where you can only run one survey
❌ The filters for products do not always work
20. Woopra
Woopra is an end-to-end customer journey analytics that you can track everything your users do. It helps you retain customers based on the insights you get.
The platform helps customer success teams with journeys, trends and retention. Hence, gaining knowledge into all in one lets taking customer success decisions.
Features
- Customer journey tracking
- Customer trends
- Event tracking
- Segmentation
- Reporting
- User data
Pros
✅ Useful background information
✅ User attributes that are merged together from Stripe, BigQuery and a number of other sources
✅ Visitor profiles that provide comprehensive information about individual customers
Cons
❌ No easy search feature to quickly search for specific data
❌ Some of the app integrations can be a little tricky during setup
❌ Report organizing can be a bit better
Key Takeaways
- Successful customer success combines different tools like engagement, support, onboarding, relationships, and analytics.
- The tools are grouped into five types: Engagement, Support, Onboarding, Relationship, and Analytics.
- Some customer success tools do everything (all-in-one), while others focus on just one area (specialized).
- Important customer success tools’ features include managing customer data, helping new users, chatting, and analyzing data.
- Examples include Intercom for talking to customers, Help Scout for support, Storyline for onboarding, Fireflies for CS meeting notes and UserMotion for customer health scoring.
