Customer success software enables businesses to proactively guide customers toward achieving their desired outcomes through continuous lifecycle management. Customer success managers (CSM) use these platforms to monitor customer health, increase product adoption, expand and upsell accounts, and drive retention across their portfolio of accounts. To accomplish this, customer success platforms have multi-faceted health scoring metrics that predict churn risk by combining product usage data, engagement activity, support interactions, and commercial metrics. Playbooks support these core responsibilities by making best practices scalable, responses to health signals systematic, and customer interventions consistent across portfolios, regardless of the CSM's experience level. These platforms are especially helpful for companies with subscription-based business models to systematically grow an established customer base, identify any red flags, and increase customer retention rates.
Unlike customer service software that reactively resolves support issues, these products are used by customer success and post-sales teams as off-the-shelf solutions to drive customer outcomes and revenue growth. Customer success initiatives are vital to preserving and expanding revenue, boosting customer advocacy, and sustaining corporate profitability and growth. Customer success software often integrates with CRM software for account and revenue data, help desk software for support-related metrics, and product analytics software for product usage data.
To qualify for inclusion in the Customer Success category, a product must:
Monitor and score customer health using native, multi-factor models combining product usage, engagement, support interactions, commercial data, and historical data
Predict future customer growth and churn risk with built-in dashboards or graphs using data related to account engagement, product usage, satisfaction, payments, and more
Provide automated playbooks for lifecycle stages (onboarding, adoption, renewal, expansion) triggered by time, behavior, and health changes
Have revenue tracking metrics built-in (ARR, NRR, GRR, churn, contraction, expansion) and attribute outcomes to customer success activities
Enable digital customer engagement through in-product messaging, surveys (NPS, CSAT, CES), self-service portals, or success planning tools
