12 Essential Customer Success Tools for Every Budget

We've written before about the importance of laying a strong foundation of customer support down when you start a new business — you need to be able to answer questions and solve problems for your first customers before you can start building new products and expanding.

Once you've reached the point where you're keeping customers satisfied and happy using your products, and you're earning recurring revenue every month or every year, you can start thinking about customer success. 

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In order to keep track of your customer success best practices and workflows - like collecting and analyzing customer feedback, managing customer communications, and setting up self-service customer education - you need tools to help you track, organize, and manage everything.

So I've made this list of out-of-the-box customer success tools that work for every budget, whether you're a startup or an enterprise company. 

It's worth noting that there are other customer success tools available that didn't disclose their pricing structures, so I didn't include them on this list. To learn more about solutions not listed here, you could request a demo or speak with a salesperson.

I also didn't include tools that were strictly customer support tools - tools on this list needed to include an element of customer analytics that allowed agents to work proactively to prevent churn. Read on to learn more about the different solutions to see which would be the best fit for your team, your budget, and your customers.

12 Helpful Customer Success Tools for Every Budget

1. HubSpot Service Hub

• Price: Starter $45/month for two users, Professional $450/month for five users, Enterprise $1200/month for ten users
• Free trial: Free (but limited) access that never expires

HubSpot's all-in-one customer success solution starts free and grows to meet the needs of an enterprise team. 

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• Ticketing system to organize incoming customer requests and issues logically. 
• Team inbox to share messages and assign tickets amongst your reps and agents.
• Customer feedback tools to deploy surveys, analyze feedback and calculate 
• customer satisfaction scores.
• Knowledge base to create educational resources so customers can self-serve. 
• Conversations to connect all customer communication channels so you have context whenever you talk to customers.
• Automations that use customer feedback responses to kick off workflows that route customers to the solutions they need.

2. Zendesk

• Price: Starts at $49 month per agent
• Free trial: Yes

Zendesk is a freemium, full-stack customer success solution to use at every stage of your customer's journey. 

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Why we like it:

• Omnichannel support tools allow customers to connect with you on their preferred channels, keeping customer effort low. 
• In-depth reporting and analytics help you learn more about customer sentiment and satisfaction. 
• Customizable automation and ticket forms to ensure you provide the best support possible for specific issues. 
• SLA views to see how your team is stacking up against sales and marketing.

Zendesk integrates with HubSpot CRM.

3. Intercom

• Pricing: Starts at $49/month for eligible startups; $136/month depending on users/customers
• Free trial: 14-day free trial

Intercom helps you create a conversational platform to meet your customers needs. It offers individual tools or a suite of tools to use together. 

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Why we like it:

• Live chat tools help you provide in-the-moment support when your customers need it most. 
• Proactive targeted messaging helps you reach customers at the right time when they’re on your website or site pages. 
• Re-engage customers with custom bots and tailored messages. 
• A team inbox helps you store and easily access all customer conversations from one place. 

Intercom integrates with HubSpot CRM.

4. Customer SuccessBox

• Price: Starts at $999/month
• Free trial: Yes

Customer SuccessBox is a data-powered tool that helps you understand customer insights and sentiment to best serve your customers and their needs. 

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Why we like it:

• Combine all of your communication tools in one place to keep records of customer interactions in one shared, accessible place.
• Account health monitoring gives a full picture of customer sentiment and customers at risk of churn, so you can reach out to them and work to solve their issues. 
• Receive alerts at key points in the customer journey so you can be there if anything goes wrong. 
• Integrate with your preferred CRM to merge customer data and billing information to get a full picture of your customers and their satisfaction levels.

5. Akita

• Price: Starts at $160/month for three users
• Free trial: 14-day free trial

Akita's customer success software helps you quickly ramp up a customer success program to ensure customers are satisfied and getting their needs met at every level. 

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Why we like it:

• Integrate with your SaaS applications to get a 360 view of your customers and their characteristics. 
• Use custom filters to create lists of accounts with specific attributes to ensure you offer a tailored customer experience. 
• Customer health monitoring helps you identify customers at risk of churn ahead of time, so you can meet with them and uncover any pressing issues.
• A shared team inbox helps you keep customer conversations in one place and in context. 

Akita integrates with HubSpot CRM.

6. Planhat

• Price: Starts at $500/month
• Free trial: Free demos

Planhat offers high-quality onboarding tools to help you get your customers started quickly and efficiently.

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Why we like it:

• Create custom onboarding playbooks for your customers to ensure a consistent and seamless onboarding experience for every customer. 
• Unique customer portals for each customer lay out their unique onboarding process so they know exactly what to expect. 
• Customer insights and health scores help you understand customer sentiment to ensure you’re meeting expectations and helping customers solve their needs. 

Planhat integrates with HubSpot CRM.

7. Front

• Price: Starter $19/month per user; Pro 49$/month per user; Enterprise 99$/month per user

• Free trial: 7-day free trial

Front is a customer communication tool that helps you build a satisfying customer experience based on effective communication. 

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What we like:

• Connect all of your preferred communication channels in one team inbox. 
• Email templates and canned responses keep you prepared to answer all customer inquiries as they come in. 
• Sort and tag messages with custom filters to ensure you understand customer requests and provide the most relevant solutions. 
• Analytics track team performance and customer experience metrics to sentiment and stay on top of customer issues. 

Front integrates with HubSpot CRM.

8. WhatHub

• Price: Starter $10/month; Basic $25/month; Professional $40/month
• Free trial: 30-day free trial

WhatHub is a WhatsApp integration that connects messages from the platform to your CRM, helping you leverage WhatsApp as a customer success channel. 

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Why we like it:

•  1:1 messaging with your CRM contacts through WhatsApp
• Automatically record conversations within your contacts profile, so your teams have 24/7 access to customer information when they need it. 
• Automated features triggered by keywords mentioned during your conversations.  

WhatHub integrates with HubSpot CRM.

9. InMoment

• Price: Starter at $89/month; Pro $224/month
• Free trial: 30-day trial

InMoment collects data from your customers at all touch points to help you create a satisfying customer experience based on data and analytics. 

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Why we like it:

• Quickly create and send surveys to customers based on custom filters for trigger events or specific audience segments. 
• Real-time sentiment analysis helps you understand current customer trends and feelings. 
• Customer profile view summarizes a customer's entire journey and conversations over time.

InMoment integrates with HubSpot CRM.

10. Twilio

• Price: Flexible pricing based on usage, contact sales

• Free trial: Yes

Twilio provides an additional channel for your team to reach out to customers without leaving your CRM. 

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Why we like it:

• AI conversation bots have natural language processing to understand customer issues and respond accordingly. 
• Message templates and communication workflows streamline conversations and save time when reaching out and responding to queries. 
• Communicate with customers across SMS, WhatsApp, web chat, and MMS. 
• Customer profiles help you get a sense of customer needs and help you personalize engagement on every channel.

11. CloudTalk

• Price: Starter $25/month per user; Essential $30/month per user; Expert Plan $50/month per user

• Free trial: 14-day trial

CloudTalk is call center software that you can use to create an inbound talk center to communicate with your customers in office and remotely. 

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Why we like it:

• Custom rules and skill-based call routing to sort queued calls ensure customers speak with the right agents. 
• Set a preferred agent for clients so their calls are always routed to an agent familiar with their case and needs. 
• Call recording to listen back for training purposes and process improvement.

CloudTalk integrates with HubSpot CRM. 

12. Helpjuice

• Price: Starter $120/month for four users; Run-Up $200/month for 16 users; Premium Limited $289/month for 60 users; Premium Unlimited $499/month for unlimited users

• Trial: 14-day free trial

Helpjuice helps you create a knowledge base to supply customers with self-service solutions to troubleshoot their issues before reaching out to your service team. 

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What we like:

• Customizable knowledge base templates and designs help you to seamlessly create a knowledge base addition to your current site. 
• A/B testing for specific pages to see what performs best so you can ensure you provide the best possible customer experience. 
• Detailed analytics show you which topics your customers are searching for most to ensure you provide up-to-date and relevant information. 
• Collaborative features let you choose which employees see what when working on pieces of content.

To learn more, read about these common barriers to customer centricity.