Customer expectations keep rising, and recurring revenue models reward teams that anticipate needs, address issues fast, and deliver value consistently. In this guide, we explore the customer success platform landscape, focusing on the customer success strategy and motions that lead to better outcomes. We share how to link customer data to actionable insights, how customer success managers execute playbooks, and how customer success software drives your revenue growth.
Key takeaways: Top 8 customer success software
Lark: An all‑in‑one customer success platform to turn customer signals into coordinated execution.
Gainsight: An enterprise‑grade customer success suite centered on robust, transparent health scoring and scalable journey orchestration.
Totango: A modular platform using SuccessBLOCs to deploy and iterate customer journeys quickly by segment and outcome.
ChurnZero: Real‑time subscription intelligence that leverages live usage signals for proactive playbooks and renewal management.
Vitally: A data‑flexible workspace that molds to your model with configurable health, views, and analytics.
Custify: Automation‑driven customer journeys with proactive health scoring and lifecycle playbooks for B2B SaaS.
HubSpot Service Hub: Customer success and support tightly integrated with HubSpot CRM for a unified front‑office view.
Salesforce Service Cloud: A highly extensible, CRM‑native platform that scales service and success with deep customization.
What is customer success software
Customer success software is the post‑sale operating system that helps teams drive retention, growth, and loyalty by turning scattered customer data into coordinated action. A modern platform centralizes profiles and signals, monitors customer health and risk, orchestrates success plans, automates repeatable workflows, and delivers reporting that leaders can trust. In practice, that means moving beyond reactive support to proactively guide customers toward outcomes they value—so renewals and expansion become predictable, not accidental.
Why customer success matters more than ever for SaaS companies
SaaS has shifted from one‑time sales to recurring relationships, so predictable growth now depends on what happens after the contract is signed. When customers adopt core features, achieve outcomes, and expand usage, revenue compounds; when they stall, churn erodes the model. A thoughtful customer success strategy operationalizes this reality by uniting product, sales, marketing, and account management around shared lifecycle goals—onboarding, activation, depth of use, renewal, and expansion—guided by consistent data and clear ownership.
Before we dive deeper, here are the core reasons it matters now:
Retention drives stability: Strong customer retention lowers acquisition pressure and stabilizes forecasts, helping teams reinvest with confidence rather than continually replacing lost revenue.
Renewals fuel growth: A programmatic renewal process and timely upsell opportunities increase customer revenue by aligning value realization with buying cycles and executive priorities.
Simplicity accelerates execution: A user‑friendly, one‑platform approach reduces context switching, shrinks manual tasks, and accelerates time savings across success managers and adjacent teams.
LTV beats CAC: Rising acquisition costs make lifetime value the profit lever; preventing churn is typically faster and cheaper than sourcing and ramping new customers.
Adoption powers expansion: Product‑led growth raises the stakes—adoption, in‑app engagement, and customer health signals directly translate into expansion potential and net revenue retention.
Insights guide action: Modern customer success software turns behavior and feedback into actionable insights—real‑time alerts, playbooks, and dashboards—so teams address issues early, prove value continuously, and focus where effort yields the highest return.
Core features of customer success software
The best success software connects insights to execution. Below we outline essential features that support a robust customer success strategy:
Health scoring and alerts: Combines product usage, support tickets, sentiment, and milestones into customer health scores; triggers real-time alerts so teams detect potential churn early and intervene promptly.
Onboarding and adoption: Structures onboarding plans by segment and desired outcomes, tracks milestones visibly, and drives product adoption at scale to reduce downstream churn risk.
Renewals management: Orchestrates the renewal process with timelines, stakeholder maps, and risk signals tied to customer health, surfacing upsell opportunities and reducing surprises.
Feedback-to-action loop: Captures customer feedback (CSAT, NPS, interviews, community signals), synthesizes themes, and routes insights to owners, closing the loop and informing product and process improvements.
Reporting and visibility: Delivers custom dashboards for cohorts, adoption depth, churn drivers, and lifetime value trends, giving leaders clear visibility to guide strategy and accountability.
Automation and workflows: Uses triggers from health scores, usage, or tickets to launch playbooks, assign owners, and enforce SLAs, reducing manual tasks and improving consistency.
Data unification and identity: Centralizes customer data with identity resolution and clear governance over fields and sources of truth, ensuring reliable, actionable insights across the customer journey.
Top 8 customer success software in 2025
Lark: Collaborative customer success platform for scalable customer journey and actionable insights
Lark is a unified, all‑in‑one platform that brings Base, Docs, Wiki, Mail, Messenger, and Meetings into a single workspace. This connected environment lets teams document success plans, share context, coordinate in real time, and close the loop from insight to action—reducing context switching and accelerating outcomes across the customer journey.
Among all powerful features, Lark Base sits at the core for customer success teams, offering powerful workflow automation, flexible data models, and actionable views that turn signals into execution. Teams can centralize customer health inputs, automate playbooks for onboarding and renewals, trigger real-time alerts, and track follow‑through—so tasks move from dashboard to done with clear ownership and auditability.
Key features
Workflow automation: Automate onboarding, renewals, and escalations with triggers, tasks, approvals, and logged outcomes for consistent execution.
Clear dashboard: View portfolio health, risks, milestones, and renewals at a glance; filter and drill down by segment and account.
AI-powered analysis: AI clusters customers, labels risks and opportunities, and surfaces predictive signals to inform playbooks and actions.
Mobile-friendly: Manage alerts, tasks, notes, and approvals on the go; update plans and message stakeholders from anywhere.
Rich template sources: Start with templates for plans, onboarding, QBRs, renewals, and risk reviews; customize to your motion.
Customization: Configure tables, fields, views, and permissions; define health drivers, segments, and lifecycle stages securely.
Seamless collaboration: Collaborate via chat, docs, and meetings alongside account data; link decisions to records to close loops.
Different from other expensive customer success solutions, Lark offers a generous free plan.
Free plan: Includes 11 powerful products, supporting up to 20 users, 100 GB storage, 1,000 automation runs and unlimited AI translation in chats, docs and email.
Paid plans: Starts at $12/user/month, supporting up to 500 users. Includes unlimited message history, 50,000 automated Base workflow executions per month.
Enterprise plan: custom pricing.
👉Try Lark’s Savings Calculator: Switching to Lark’s Pro plan can lead to significant cost savings— for example, a 100-employee company using Slack, Google Workspace, and Airtable could save approximately $25,200 annually by consolidating their tools with Lark.
Gainsight: Enterprise customer success platform with customer health scores
Image source: gainsight.com
Gainsight is a market-leading CSM platform for mid-market and enterprise, known for robust health scoring, journey orchestration, and advanced analytics.
Key features:
Health scores with transparent drivers and trend analysis
Playbooks and Journey Orchestrator for scaled outreach and lifecycle programs
Renewal and expansion workflows with forecasting and pipeline views
Success plans, timeline notes, and stakeholder mapping
Deep integrations with Salesforce, product analytics, and data warehouses
Pricing: Custom/quote-based, typically enterprise-tier pricing.
Totango: Modular customer success with SuccessBLOCs
Image source: totango.com
Totango offers modular “SuccessBLOCs” to deploy lifecycle programs quickly, with strong segmentation and outcome tracking.
Key features:
Prebuilt SuccessBLOCs for onboarding, adoption, renewals, and churn reduction
Real-time health monitoring and target segments
Automated campaigns and tasks aligned to outcomes
Executive dashboards and goal tracking
Integrations with CRM, support, CDPs, and data tools
Pricing: Custom pricing.
ChurnZero: Real-time signals for subscription businesses
Image source: churnzero.com
Overview: ChurnZero focuses on real-time product usage, in-app communications, and renewal management for subscription/SaaS companies.
Key features:
Account and user health scores driven by live usage data
Playbooks and task automation for CSMs
In-app messages, walkthroughs, and surveys
Renewal countdowns, risk flags, and forecasting
Native CRM and help desk integrations
Pricing: Quote-based; commonly mid-market friendly bundles.
5. Vitally: Data-first customer success with flexible workspaces
Image source: vitally.io
Vitally emphasizes a data-forward approach with customizable views, collaboration, and strong visibility for CSMs and leaders.
Key features:
Configurable health models and account/product views
Playbooks, tasks, and automated alerts
Customer hubs/portals for shared plans and QBRs
Revenue reporting, NRR/GRR analytics, cohort tracking
Integrations for CRM, billing, warehouse, and product analytics
Pricing: Tiered plans; growth and enterprise pricing via quote.
6. Custify: Customer success platform for proactive health and scaled journeys
Image source: custify.com
Custify helps B2B SaaS teams drive retention with real-time customer health, proactive alerts, and lifecycle automation. It unifies product usage, CRM, billing, and support data to surface risks and opportunities and guide CSM actions.
Key features:
Customer health scoring with configurable KPIs, alerts, and churn risk signals
Playbooks and automated workflows for onboarding, adoption, QBRs, and renewals
Customer journey mapping with tasks, timelines, and goal tracking
In-app and email campaigns for scaled engagement and surveys (CSAT/NPS)
Revenue and expansion reporting including MRR/NRR, cohorts, and forecasts
Integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Intercom/Zendesk, Segment, and data warehouses
Pricing: Tiered, quote-based pricing depending on seats, data volume, and features
7. HubSpot Service Hub: Customer success and support on one CRM
Image source: hubspot.com
Overview: HubSpot Service Hub extends HubSpot CRM with customer service and success capabilities for SMB to mid-market teams.
Key features:
Customer portal, tickets, knowledge base, and help desk
CSAT/NPS surveys and feedback analytics
Playbooks, sequences, and task automation
Reporting on retention drivers and customer health proxies
Native alignment with Marketing and Sales Hubs
Pricing: Paid plans start at $90/month/seat.
8. Salesforce Service Cloud: Customer service and success at scale
Image source: salesforce.com
Built on Salesforce, Service Cloud provides service, success workflows, and analytics at enterprise scale with deep extensibility.
Key features:
Case management, Knowledge, and omnichannel service
Customer health proxies via custom objects and reports
Playbooks via Flows, tasks, and approvals
Einstein AI for recommendations and insights
Broad AppExchange ecosystem and data model flexibility
Pricing: Tiered per-user pricing; paid plans start at $25/user/month.
How to choose customer success software for your business
Selecting customer success software is about fit—your motion, company stage, and tech stack. Anchor evaluation to outcomes (retention, expansion, NRR) and operational realities. Validate time‑to‑value with a pilot and a clear success plan. Pay attention to these key features when choosing:
Integrations: Connect CRM, billing, analytics, support, and your data warehouse to unify customer data, eliminate manual work, and power health scoring, risk detection, and renewal forecasting.
Usability: An intuitive workspace for customer success managers and account managers that accelerates team adoption, shortens training, and embeds insights into daily workflows (tasks, notes, alerts).
Playbooks: Deep automation for onboarding, adoption, and renewals with event‑based triggers, SLAs, and alerts—tie actions to measurable outcomes and health scoring to prioritize effort.
Security: Granular permissions, audit trails, SSO/SCIM, SOC 2 and GDPR compliance, plus data residency and retention controls to safeguard customer data.
TCO: Consider licenses, implementation, change management, and ongoing admin/integration upkeep—factor in the hidden cost of low team adoption and the ROI from improved outcomes.
Why all-in-one customer success software stands out
How unified tools optimize customer experience and boost customer revenue
All-in-one customer success solutions close the gap between insight and action by eliminating fragmented workflows. When data, communication, and execution live in separate tools, teams suffer from context switching, version drift, and delayed responses. A unified environment consolidates customer data, conversations, plans, and timelines so everyone works from the same source of truth.
The benefits compound: less friction, faster coordination, and better alignment across CS, sales, support, and product. This translates into shorter time‑to‑resolution, clearer ownership, and more consistent customer experiences. Instead of stitching together alerts, tasks, and meetings across apps, teams can move seamlessly from diagnosis to decision to delivery, which ultimately reduces churn and accelerates expansion.
Why Lark is special in all customer success solutions
Lark stands out in all customer success software as Lark exemplifies these advantages by bringing collaboration and execution into a single, native suite:
Centralize success plans, notes, and customer artifacts, preserving context alongside living documentation.
Align CS, sales, support, and product in real time, turning issues into coordinated actions without losing the thread.
Powered by Calendar and Meetings to keep momentum with structured agendas, decisions captured to record, and next steps auto‑tracked.
Solves the last mile from alert to action—insights trigger discussions, decisions become tasks, and tasks link back to the customer record.
Faster, clearer coordination that reduces churn, improves renewal readiness, and creates a shared operating rhythm with fewer handoffs and tighter execution.
Security and compliance for customer success data
Security underpins trust. When evaluating a customer success platform, confirm controls for access, monitoring, and data protection align with company requirements and customer expectations.
Role‑based permissions, auditability, and secure collaboration.
Encryption, SSO, and governance for sensitive customer data.
Clear data residency, retention, and incident response practices.
Lark supports collaboration on customer data while maintaining control, so teams can move fast without sacrificing safety.
Conclusion
Customer success software gives teams the actionable insights to guide customers to value. The real advantage appears when customer success team members collaborate quickly and clearly to address issues, support product adoption, and align on contract renewals.
With tools like Lark as the collaboration fabric, centralizing data, decisions, and conversation, signals are connected to action across one platform. That’s how companies reduce churn, grow customer lifetime value, and create a calmer path to success across the customer journey. If you’re ready to align tools, team, and strategy, Lark is here with solutions and resources to help you get there.
FAQs
What is customer success software?
Customer success software centralizes customer data to monitor customer health, score risk, and reduce customer churn. It guides account managers through the customer journey, turns customer feedback into actionable insights, and helps grow customer revenue and customer lifetime value via proactive account management.
What is the difference between CRM and customer success software?
CRM focuses on pre‑sale contacts, deals, and pipeline; customer success software focuses post‑sale on customer health scores, usage and feedback, and the customer journey. It equips account managers with actionable insights to protect churn, expand customer revenue, and maximize customer lifetime value through ongoing account management.
Is Zendesk a customer success platform?
Zendesk is primarily a support platform that improves customer experience by managing tickets and aggregating customer feedback. It can provide actionable insights but lacks native customer health scores, journey playbooks, and churn prediction. For teams needing unified collaboration plus deep customer success capabilities, Lark offers an all‑in‑one solution that fuses support, collaboration, and customer success tooling to address Zendesk’s gaps.
Which software is best for customer management?
“Best” depends on goals, data, and team. For sales‑led management, a CRM; for retention and expansion, customer success software that unifies customer data, tracks customer health, and delivers actionable insights across the customer journey. As a comprehensive option, Lark combines CRM‑style sales management with advanced customer success health analytics, giving cross‑functional teams a unified platform for customer management.
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