How to Choose the Perfect Customer Success Solution

Despite having more data than ever before, many companies struggle with several common challenges related to understanding customer behavior and optimizing the user experience.

These challenges may include lacking visibility into customer health, such as an incomplete understanding of product adoption or feature usage. Consequently, companies may miss opportunities to improve the customer onboarding experience or leverage upselling or cross-selling for increased revenue.

To top it all off, slow and inefficient manual processes may prevent customer support teams from responding quickly to resolve each negative customer experience (CX).

These challenges often heavily impact SaaS companies but can also affect brands in all types of industries and with all types of business models. Fortunately, a dedicated customer success (CS) solution — and an associated strategy — can help you better monitor the entire customer life cycle. These solutions are a key component in customer retention management and should be a priority for businesses that want to minimize their time to value.

What Is a Customer Success Solution?

A customer success solution is a platform designed to consolidate customer behavioral data, monitor the customer life cycle, and provide insights that can be used to improve customer outcomes. The core capabilities of a customer success solution include:

• Centralized data: Gathering data from multiple platforms, including your CRM, billing, support, and in-app tracking systems, into a single dashboard to provide a holistic source of truth and more unified insights
• Customer health scores: Using AI to assess customer satisfaction based on usage and interactions and identify potential churn risks
• Proactive alerts: Notifying teams about engagement opportunities and identifying potential issues before they derail CX
• Automation: Streamlining onboarding, renewals, and other manual workflows to improve the process for your customers and your CS team

It’s important to remember that customer success solutions differ from traditional CRM software. Instead of simply storing customer data and interactions and potentially assessing pipeline, CS tools provide a holistic look at your entire life cycle. The top priority is retention rather than acquisition, and CS solutions can help you find ways to create and improve customer success processes.

So, why bother with a customer success platform? There are many reasons — and while not all of these are relevant to every company, several of them could apply to your business.

Benefits of Implementing a Customer Success Solution

Implementing a customer success solution benefits businesses and customers in distinct ways.

For businesses

Businesses that implement customer success platforms can take advantage of these benefits:

• Churn reduction: Detecting the causes of customer churn promptly helps businesses leverage initiatives that improve customer retention rates.
• Revenue growth: Identifying customers who are ready to buy additional products based on their usage, feedback, and firmographic traits enables businesses to increase upsells and cross-sells.
• Operational efficiency: Automating repetitive tasks like regular outreach or churn detection allows teams to focus on strategic activities.
• Customer advocacy: Improving CX creates long-term relationships that enable businesses to retain customers and turn them into brand advocates who refer new customers to those companies.

For customers

When businesses implement customer success strategies and platforms, customers see the following benefits:

• Streamlined support: The use of centralized data results in faster, better, and more personalized resolutions to customers’ problems and improves their overall experiences.
• Proactive engagement: Businesses anticipate customers’ needs based on their behavior and feedback and proactively reach out to offer support.
• Enhanced experience: Seamless interactions across different platforms build trust and make customers feel that businesses deserve their long-term loyalty.

Key Considerations When Choosing a Customer Success Solution

There are several key considerations to keep in mind when you’re choosing a tool to support your customer success operations.

Scalability

Assess whether the tool you’re considering can support your business’s long-term growth. Ideally, you should choose a solution that can scale from handling a small customer base to managing multiple markets.

Integration capabilities

Look for a platform that offers seamless compatibility with the tools you’re already using. This should include CRM, billing, communication, and help desk support tools like Salesforce, HubSpot, and Zendesk.

Usability

Ensure exceptional ease of use for account managers with varying degrees of technical skill. You can use product demos or trials to assess how user-friendly the dashboard is and how difficult it is to use key features or customize workflows.

Customization

Make sure the CS platform you choose offers the necessary flexibility to align with your unique processes, KPI metrics, and customer engagement strategies. CS is highly individualized, so you need a tool that can be customized based on your initiatives.

Ongoing support

Check vendor-provided training, documentation, and support options. Make sure that the onboarding process and ongoing support resources are capable of offering help if you need it.

Top Customer Success Solutions for SaaS Companies

If you’re ready to take your customer support strategy to the next level, a dedicated CS solution can help. Let’s take a closer look at five of the top customer success platforms in 2025.

1. Nextiva

Best for: Businesses that are looking for an intuitive, affordable, and highly scalable solution

Nextiva’s unified communications and CX management platform offers real-time analytics and customizable automation workflows. It can help you facilitate and manage customer interactions across all major communication platforms, including phone, email, live chat, help desk support tickets, messaging apps, and social media platforms.

Key features include:

• AI sentiment analysis
• Self-service support options
• CX measurement and tracking
• End-to-end customer journey orchestration
• Advanced analytics with AI insights

2. Vitally

Best for: Businesses that need automation and health score tracking in easy-to-analyze dashboards

Vitally offers highly scalable CS software that helps businesses of all sizes expand their customer support strategies and handle larger workflows. Vitally’s automation capabilities can improve your CS team’s efficiency, and its advanced analytics platform can help your team create new retention-boosting strategies with the use of real-time customer data.

Key features include:

• Real-time data and alerting systems
• Shared workspaces for improved team collaboration
• Churn risk identification
• Expansion opportunity suggestions

3. ClientSuccess

Best for: Midsize SaaS firms that are looking for a tool centered around renewal management

ClientSuccess focuses heavily on renewal management by minimizing churn and tracking key engagement metrics. This software platform provides actionable feedback based on customer data to help improve CX and boost retention.

Key features include:

• AI-driven and automated customer workflows
• Streamlined customer onboarding
• Customer behavior insights
• Suggestions for proactive engagement at key touchpoints

4. ChurnZero

Best for: Midmarket and enterprise organizations that want to automate internal CS processes

ChurnZero is another leading customer success platform that focuses heavily on churn reduction. It uses AI to synthesize touchpoints and improve personalization throughout the customer journey.

Key features include:

• Product adoption insights
• Upcoming renewal tracking
• Opportunity and churn risk detection
• Holistic AI-powered customer insights
• Predictive analytics

5. Gainsight

Best for: Enterprise organizations that have complex tech stacks and need to automate internal collaboration processes for large CS teams

Gainsight offers a customer success and product experience platform that uses AI to monitor customer engagement across all touchpoints. Various Gainsight features can help you deal with product adoption and foster stronger customer communities.

Key features include:

• Digitized customer onboarding and education
• In-app engagements for improved product adoption
• Automated playbooks for risk identification response

Getting the Most Out of Customer Success Software

Once you’ve selected a customer success solution, you can use these best practices to get the most out of your software of choice.

Define success metrics

Build consensus in your internal team about which key metrics to monitor based on your immediate business objectives and CS goals. Keeping track of these metrics should help your CS team identify potential churn factors and improvement opportunities.

Common KPIs may include:

• Net promoter score
• Customer satisfaction score
• First contact resolution rate
• Customer effort score

Keep in mind that there are differences between customer success initiatives and CX improvements, even though there’s some significant overlap. Here are some helpful insights into the distinctions between customer success and CX.

Put insights into practice

After selecting which KPIs to track, use advanced analytics to draw actionable insights from customer behavioral data. Predictive analytics are particularly helpful. They can assist you in guiding customer interactions, identifying potential churn risks, and flagging growth opportunities. These insights can enable you to be proactive and achieve the best possible results.

Train your team

Your customer success team and your account managers know better than anyone else that software is just software and that they need to be trained on how to use it to increase adoption and buy-in.

Start by telling them what the new platform can do and how it can create benefits that align with your business objectives. It may automate repetitive tasks to free up time for CS managers, for example, or greatly simplify data analysis for improved decision-making. Telling team members and other stakeholders about these benefits will help get them on board.

Even the best CS software will be effective only when it’s used by skilled people who know how to leverage the data it generates into real results. Teach your team members about your CS solution’s new features and documented processes, and make sure they know about current best practices for its use.

Be proactive about engaging with your customers

Proactive engagement is a key element of thriving customer success management. Use your platform’s predictive analytics and any opportunity or churn risk identification features to send the right message to the right user at exactly the right time.

Your CS team can reach out to a customer who has hit the maximum usage of their plan to recommend an upsell, for example, or contact a user who has been disengaged to offer additional training to increase adoption before they churn.

Continually optimize your CS efforts

CX management requires ongoing optimization to be effective, and that’s true for CS efforts, too. SaaS companies should review customers’ product usage and business strategies. You can deploy this information — ideally supported by clear data — to refine your CS initiatives and maximize your ROI by continually improving customer success efforts.

Nextiva’s Customer Success Solution

Customer retention strategies and customer success efforts can make an enormous impact on your CX and your business’s revenue, especially when combined with an advanced CS solution like Nextiva.

Our CS platform allows you to access centralized data from multiple platforms, using AI-powered insights to help you get the most out of our real-time analytics. You can also leverage robust automation tools to reduce the administrative burden on your customer success teams and improve efficiency.

Our intuitive design is inherently user-friendly, with seamless integrations for tools that are already in your tech stack. We also offer exceptional 24/7 customer support.

SaaS companies and B2B firms can benefit from Nextiva’s tailored solutions, which include a variety of options for businesses ranging from small start-ups to large enterprises. You get all the features you need now at an affordable cost and the ability to scale up your CS platform as your company grows.

Stop struggling with outdated CS systems. See how Nextiva can help you grow. Get a personalized demo.