It’s noble to want to offer a personalized experience for every customer, but try doing that for 100 accounts and see how much time you have left in your week.
The solution is automation.
Automation doesn’t have to mean canned responses and a hands-off experience for your customers. Believe it or not, automation can allow you to offer a stellar customer experience at scale. The key is to have the right software.
In this guide, we’ll walk you through the best software that Customer Success teams can use to automate tasks while delivering a personalized customer experience.
What Customer Success Teams Can (and Should) Automate
When you’re responsible for 50 or 100 accounts, there are only so many hours in the day you have to think about and check in with each one. There are even fewer when you’re also responsible for retention and expansion.
If you’re stumped for what you can automate, here are some ways top Customer Success teams free up hours in their weeks:
- Welcome emails: While the thought of welcoming each customer seems nice, it’s hardly necessary. Templates and personalization can allow you to extend a warm welcome to new customers without putting in dedicated effort for each one.
- Onboarding: From kickoff calls to product training, you can break up and automate parts of the onboarding process to save time. Depending on the complexity of your product, you can even automate certain portions of product training and trial experiences.
- Feature adoption and progress check-ins: Pay attention to product usage, especially if you want to upsell/cross-sell new features. You can leverage time-saving dashboards and tools to view customer activity at a glance. With platforms like Vitally, you can set up email and Slack alerts based on customer activity, too.
- Routine check-ins: Regularly check in with customers to establish a point of contact and remind them you are there, but don’t do this yourself every time. Automated emails at set cadences can save you hours and make customers feel like they are top of mind.
- Health monitoring: Gone are the days of “playing things by ear.” These days, successful CS reps use Health Scores to capture data, gauge sentiment, and prioritize accounts. This can also help you spot upsell opportunities and churn risks at a glance.
Check out more time-saving automation tips here, and don’t forget to bookmark our guide to using automation to send engaging Customer Success emails.
Now, back to the topic at hand: the best platforms you can use to automate your Customer Success workflows.
The Best Customer Success Automation Software
We chose the following software platforms based on their features, user reviews, and G2 ratings. The best Customer Success automation software platforms we found are:
- Vitally
- ChurnZero
- Totango
- Planhat
- Gainsight
- Custify
Vitally
Vitally is a leading CSP, with an emphasis on flexibility, ease of use, and data integration for innovative CS teams.
Unlike other CSPs that take a rigidly prescriptive approach, Vitally gives your team control to build processes from scratch. That doesn’t mean you need to spend painstaking hours building everything yourself, though; Vitally is quick to set up and has one of the fastest implementations of any CSP on the market. This flexibility, along with a robust set of tools for collaboration, customization, purpose-built AI features, and automation, makes Vitally a leading CSP.
Vitally gets rave reviews from CS teams for its user-friendly interface and seamless integration capabilities, offering a variety of automated actions and extensive API support. Thanks to customer Hubs, you can organize data into views and gather information when you need it most.
One customer says it best in a recent review:
“Vitally makes it really easy to get a complete view of customer health in one place. The platform is intuitive, gives us actionable insights, and helps our team prioritize accounts that need attention. The automation and integrations save a ton of time, and the dashboards make it simple to track progress across different segments.”
It’s no wonder Vitally earns high marks with 4.5 stars on G2!
Top Features
- Hubs for better organization
- Playbooks for automation
- Purpose-built AI features
- Conversation sync
- Health scores
- Surveys
- Dashboards and reporting
- Goal tracking
- NPS tracking
ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a legacy CSP with several features to empower CSMs, along with AI-powered capabilities to automate tasks.
ChurnZero particularly excels with branching automation thanks to its “Plays” feature, allowing CS teams to create workflows that save hours each week. ChurnZero also offers in-app engagement tools (WalkThroughs and Success Centers), allowing teams to meet customers wherever they are in the product.
That said, ChurnZero’s reporting functionality is rigid, and users report its UI is clunky compared to more intuitive tools like Vitally. This can make it harder to find key data when you need it most.
Here’s what one recent reviewer had to say:
“ChurnZero can feel overwhelming at first because of the wide range of features, and it takes time to configure everything to match your workflows. Some reporting functions could be more intuitive, and there’s a bit of a learning curve for new users.”
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation and Plays
- Dashboards and reporting
- NPS tracking
Totango
Totango positions itself as a “composable” CSP with a schema-less data model designed to handle complex enterprise data structures. Totango (like Gainsight, which we’ll cover next) skews toward enterprise teams, making Vitally and others on this list better fits for budget-conscious companies.
Totango and Catalyst announced a merger to unify their Customer Success offerings. A move that, in theory, unifies the twin missions of CS and growth. Today, Totango offers an expanded product line, including the original Totango platform, along with Catalyst and the Unison AI. While technically all under one roof, these are separate product lines with their own subscription options, so you will need to factor this into your pricing.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Planhat
Planhat earns high marks in the industry for its flexibility and extensibility with data warehouses and other tools. Planhat users regularly cite both flexibility and robust data modeling and management as the platform’s top perks.
Planhat automations allow for custom flows, templates, and more, so it’s easy to see why Planhat is a leading CSP. But with great power also comes great complexity. Users report feeling overwhelmed by Planhat’s blank canvas, which can lead to a steep learning curve for your team. Here’s what one reviewer on G2 has to say:
“The extensive customization options can make onboarding feel overwhelming at first. There is definitely a learning curve, and our team is unable to access many views until administrators have set them up.”
For some users, Planhat may be a fantastic choice for a CSP. Still, some features may be more cumbersome when compared to more intuitive counterparts like Vitally.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- AI powered by GPT, Gemini, and Claude
- Data warehouse syncing
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Gainsight
Gainsight is one of the enterprise leaders in Customer Success software.
Gainsight offers powerful features for onboarding, product adoption, retention, and expansion. This gives your team a complete view of every customer, from in-app usage to face-to-face interactions. That said, for small and mid-market teams, Gainsight is likely overkill. It’s one of the most expensive platforms on this list, and many other CSPs on the list offer similar features for a lower price tag, albeit in a simpler package.
While Gainsight earns top marks for automation power, it also splits automation across two systems (Rules Engine and Journey Orchestrator), which can make it challenging for users to implement, test, and manage automations at scale.
Though Gainsight hides its pricing behind a conversation with sales, one Reddit user (from 2022) shared that the lowest quote for 10 CSMs and eight viewer seats was $26,000/year. It’s fair to assume that as of the time of publishing this post, Gainsight’s pricing has changed since then.
Top Features
- Customer 360 view
- Product adoption
- Automation
- Goals
- Customer journeys
- Surveys
Custify
Like many others on this list, Custify is a comprehensive and user-friendly CSP that offers a variety of features for CS teams.
Custify positions itself as a lightweight alternative to some of the legacy platforms on this list, like Gainsight and ChurnZero, with a focus on small and mid-market SaaS companies. Like Vitally, Planhat, and Totango, Custify brings your data together and helps you automate CS tasks and processes. This includes notifications for email and Slack, note-taking, and simple automation flows.
While Custify earns top marks for simplicity, that simplicity can come at a cost. Reviewers on G2 find frustration with limited customization and a lack of advanced integration partners.
Top Features
- Surveys
- Tasks and alerts
- Customer Health tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reports
Intercom
While Intercom is more geared towards the support side of Customer Success, it’s still worth a mention on this list.
Intercom offers a robust set of features for support and customer service, allowing you to automate customer interactions at scale. While best known for Helpdesk and inbox functionality, Intercom offers time-saving automation features thanks to its integrated AI chatbot, AI insights, and AI co-pilot.
Intercom is a fantastic support platform, but teams looking for more traditional CSP features like Health Score tracking, data warehouse integrations, and surveys should select a platform higher on this list.
Top Features
- AI assistant
- AI chatbot
- Helpdesk
- Shared inbox
The Best Customer Success Software: A Side-by-Side Comparison
Here’s a quick snapshot of each CSP’s automation capabilities to help you choose the right platform for your team.
Between these seven Customer Success automation platforms, which will you choose?
Ultimately, it depends on your goals, team size, technical proficiency, and budget. Innovative and fast-moving Customer Success teams often choose Vitally for its balance of ease-of-use, power, and flexibility. This unique combination allows you to build your Customer Success process your way, rather than being restricted by what your software supports.
Read on to see why Customer Success teams choose Vitally to automate their processes.
Why Customer Success Teams Choose Vitally to Automate Their Work
While you have plenty of software platforms to choose from, if you come from an agile company looking for purpose-built solutions to build your own process from the ground up, we’d recommend Vitally.
Here’s why:
- Intuitive and powerful automation
- Collaboration features
- Purpose-built AI
Intuitive and Powerful Automation
As we’ve covered, when you’re juggling dozens or hundreds of accounts, every second matters.
Vitally’s automation packs a punch while still being easy enough to use that you can get started right away.
Vitally Playbooks allow you to automate workflows and processes while leveraging seven different triggers, 14 actions, and branching logic — rivaling platforms like Planhat for automation power. With powerful branching, your team can handle CSM assignment, project creation, email delivery, task completion, and much more from a single Playbook.
Collaboration Features
With customer relationships on the line, does your team really have the time to sift through endless tabs to find a conversation or meeting summary?
Vitally’s intuitive user interface makes it easy to navigate and find key information compared to more complex tools like ChurnZero or Gainsight. This ease of use gives Vitally one of the shortest implementation timeframes and fastest time-to-value on the market.
It’s also easy to integrate your tools and collaborate with your team. For example, Vitally Docs allows you to share success plans and collaborate directly in the platform, something that other CSPs lack entirely.
Purpose-Built AI
Rather than tack OpenAI functionality onto a CSP, Vitally takes a unique approach to bring you embedded AI-powered features, providing a smart copilot for Customer Success.
Vitally AI is a purpose-built solution, built directly within the platform and your data. With Vitally AI, you can transform all your customer data into insights, delivering a best-in-class customer experience. Vitally takes all of your:
- Notes
- Meeting transcripts (and AI recordings)
- Tickets
- Docs
- Conversations
- NPS and survey data
And turns those into insights, like:
- Rich AI summaries to pinpoint sentiment, churn risks, and more
- AI-generated Plays to give your team detailed to-dos and next steps for every account
- Instant answers to team questions about every customer
- Meeting recordings that capture real-time insights for your team
Only Vitally can bring all your data under one roof and turn that unstructured data into insights for your reps.
Looking to Automate Your Customer Success Processes? Look No Further Than Vitally
Automation isn’t a nice-to-have; it’s a secret weapon for scaled Customer Success teams that deliver a stellar experience while handling a high volume of accounts.
The seven platforms above all offer a suite of powerful features to automate communication, analytics, and busywork, but only Vitally packages them in a highly flexible and easy-to-use platform for innovative Customer Success teams.
With powerful automation features, seamless integrations, and a flexible API, Vitally is the top choice for innovative Customer Success teams looking to build a CS process that fits the unique needs of their customers.
To see how top-performing companies build a winning Customer Success org, schedule a demo of Vitally or explore our free platform tour today!
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