But let’s face facts: happy customers don’t leave.
Or to be more specific, customers that are meeting their goals, maximizing the value of your product, and feel supported by your team aren’t going to walk away from that experience.
If you’re serious about reducing churn, you’ll need the right tools for the job. That’s why we’ve put together a list of the seven customer success tools you’ll need to keep your customers on the path to long-term growth.
Customer Success Tools
Listen, we get it.
The phrase “customer success” has become a bit of a buzzword over the years, but make no mistake. If you’re serious about increasing your conversion rate and improving your customer satisfaction, you’ll need to focus on customer success.
Gainsight
Gainsight offers plenty of bang for your buck, that’s for sure. Looking for real-time data analytics based on specific KPIs? No problem.
Want to aggregate customer data from a variety of data sources? Sure.
Gainsight even lets you establish triggers, helping you adapt to whatever state your customer is in.
But it’s not just about the robust list of features that Gainsight offers. The real strength of this tool is its deep appreciation for customer success.
They’re fully committed to the concept of customer success, and it shows. Gainsight aims to offer actionable insights, so you can take giant streams of data and turn them into tangible solutions for your customers.
Gainsight’s Health Scorecard makes it easy to track relevant customer data. Want to measure your customer’s product usage? No problem. Need an update on support tickets? Gainsight offers an easy, comprehensive look at the state of your customer experience.
You’ll be able to create individual Scorecards for individual customers, highlighting the key metrics you’d like to see prioritized.
Gainsight even acts as an early detection system for any potential customer success issues. As individual scores drop, Gainsight will alert you and make sure you can proactively address customer health issues before it’s too late.
They offer AI-powered analysis, so you can accurately monitor customer feedback and keep track of trends (both positive and negative).
Gainsight has created a system where it can track signals in customer data and intuitively adapt to a particular customer’s path, offering each customer a higher level of personalized engagement.
ChurnZero
ChurnZero doesn’t just offer you a list of features. They understand what it takes to elevate the customer experience, and they make sure you do too.
These days, analytics and data tend to sacrifice ease of use for complexity. While there’s nothing wrong with having access to deep insights, you’re going to want a tool that will help you easily predict future customer behavior.
Fortunately, ChurnZero can help you quickly determine which customers are maximizing your product’s potential, and which customers are struggling.
ChurnZero uses Segments as a series of customer “smart lists”, highlighting key data changes as they happen.
In other words, ChurnZero will automatically track changes in:
Not only will you be able to clearly assess how successful your customers are, but you’ll also be able to preemptively determine whether or not they’re on the right path.
ClientSuccess
The reality of customer success is that you’ll need to split your focus.
On one hand, you want to have an encyclopedic knowledge about how your customers are using your product.
On the other hand, having strong relationships with your customers inspires a deeper connection with your product and makes managing their success significantly easier.
It’s a balancing act, and you’re going to need a tool that helps you excel in both areas.
Enter ClientSuccess, a platform designed to help keep both executive and customer success teams on the same page.
ClientSuccess wants to help you retain and grow your existing customer base, and they plan to do that by ‘building relationships that last’.
In their own words, ClientSuccess believes that SaaS is about more than just software and service. It’s also about building relationships centered around value.
The SuccessScore tracks everything from product usage to engagement, in real-time. The SuccessCycle is how ClientSuccess helps you create a comprehensive customer journey.
Onboarding Tools
Too often, we see businesses that think signing up a customer is the end of the onboarding experience.
Just to be clear — it’s not.
Once they’ve signed up to use your product, it’s vital that your customer understands what their next steps should be.
Chameleon
Chameleon doesn’t just have a few features that support onboarding. It was designed as a software solution specifically for onboarding customers and communicating product improvements quickly and easily.
And the best part? You won’t need to rely on a team of developers to help you.
Chameleon can help you highlight new/critical features to help drive deeper customer engagement. It makes getting product feedback easier than ever and can announce brand updates to your customers.
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Using Chameleon, you’ll be able to create guided product tours and tutorials for your customers, all without ever needing a single developer.
Chameleon can even help you reduce support tickets by providing customers with interactive guidance where they need it most.
Appcues
Appcues gets rid of the usual onboarding hassles by offering in-app messages and walkthroughs to users, all without you having to write a single line of code.
You’ll be able to create custom experiences (or “flows”) that let you welcome customers, drive them to Aha! moments, and encourage them to see the value in upgrading.
Appcues lets you personalize your onboarding flows to fit different customer types, separating the experiences by customer attributes or behaviors.
Customer Relationship Tools
When social media marketing first started to take off, an unfortunate amount of brands treated it as an extension of traditional media channels.
In other words, they looked at Facebook and saw another place to put billboards.
Of course, we now know how counterproductive that approach really is.
Social media marketing works primarily because it helps bridge the gap between businesses and their target audience, making it easier to inspire faith in your brand and build brand loyalty.
Freshsales
Here’s what you need to know about Freshsales CRM. It offers more than just basic contact and lead management tools. After all, most CRMs already do that.
Where Freshsales excels is its other features. Freshsales offers a complete 360° customer view, tracking their social profiles, website, products, and interactions.
By monitoring these customer touchpoints, Freshsales empowers you to make smarter decisions when it comes to customer success.
And speaking of making smarter decisions, Freshsales uses Intelligent Workflows to help you upgrade your customer success relationship. More specifically, it enables you to automate the components that are absolutely essential, but vulnerable to human error.
Once you’ve set up the Intelligent Workflows automation, you can rest assured knowing that you’re relying on a service designed to perform the action of your choice (send an email, update a record, etc.) whenever your customer relationship changes.
You’re not just ensuring that all the right emails are being sent, you’re freeing up time and energy so you can focus on your customer’s big picture — how to keep their business growing. Growth keeps them happy. And a happy customer is a repeat customer.
Stunning
Losing customers to expired credit cards and involuntary churn can be pretty frustrating. Fortunately, Stunning prides itself on helping you recover those failed payments.
The process is relatively simple. Start by connecting your Stripe account to Stunning, using Stripe Connect. Stunning will then monitor your Stripe account for important events. Once a customer triggers an event that you’ve set up notifications for, Stunning messages them on your behalf.
Stunning helps you communicate with your customers, sending the right message to the right customers and lets you recover those failed payments.
When you use Stunning, you can integrate an in-app notification bar that lets customers know that their card has expired or is about to expire.
Stunning also lets you SMS and email customers when payments fail, increasing your chances to recover failed payments.
You can even incorporate backup payment methods using Stunning. By encouraging customers to add a backup card, Stunning can switch to the backup if the initial payment fails.
Conclusion
Here’s the bad news. There is no one-size-fits-all solution to churn reduction.
Each individual team will need to evaluate the state of their own customer experience and establish which aspect of their customer journey needs fixing.
But here’s the good news. If you keep these three principles in mind and arm yourself with the right tools, it’s inevitable that you’ll reduce churn, increase customer retention, and maximize your CLV (customer lifetime value).