In our previous article, we explored the evolving role of customer success in modern businesses.
In the meantime, the software platforms that support customer success managers (CSMs) in their roles have adapted to their new job demands. However, our survey findings show that adaptation to user needs has not been uniform.
Some businesses have purchased multiple customer success platforms to support the robust job responsibilities of CSMs. In some cases, they have two platforms that can perform the same function but prefer one platform over another to fit their use case.
As more companies realize the value of their customer success teams and their impact on revenue and retention, there will be greater investment into their capabilities.
As CSM responsibilities continue to evolve and develop to meet the changing needs of customer experience, customer success software vendors aim to fulfill those needs. However, users find some platform functions are more equal than others. How many platforms are CSMs using in their day-to-day work?
Two trends immediately stand out. First, Salesforce Service Cloud is the only product with a high rate of standalone usage compared to competitors. This means many users find the platform to fulfill all their CSM responsibilities or don’t have the budget for additional options.
Second, compared to Salesforce Service Cloud, Hubspot Service Hub only has five instances of it being used as a standalone CSM platform. This means among customer success professionals, Hubspot Service Hub is a platform that supports more dedicated customer success platforms.
The Hubspot Service Hub product used to be included in the Customer Success category but was removed because it was more focused on customer service than customer success responsibilities. This user behavior data supports our decision.
To be included in G2’s Customer Success Software category, all products must be able to perform all of the functional capabilities described in the inclusion criteria.
The inclusion criteria for the Customer Success category on G2 states that a product must:
Of the over 200 respondents, user behaviors suggest that some platforms are better at functionalities than others. For example, the Salesforce Service Cloud might struggle with tracking customer onboarding, but the Hubspot Service Hub is exceptionally capable in this regard. We will have insights into these symbiotic relationships in the next section. Which platforms do CSMs prefer to pair with one another?
The products that are paired most often are Salesforce Service Cloud, Hubspot Service Hub, and ClientSuccess. These three products pair with one another much more frequently than others on the list.
Similarly, ChurnZero, Gainsight, Planhat, Totango, Vitally, and Custify are much more likely to be paired with Salesforce Service Cloud, Hubspot Service Hub, and ClientSuccess than one another.
This can be explained by how Salesforce Service Cloud and Hubspot Service Hub are categorized on G2. Both of these products are identified as help desks, live chats, and customer self-service software providers, which helps them better perform functionalities like customers and tracking customer onboarding.
The more advanced customer success-focused functionalities like health score and risk and opportunity identification are provided by the other more customer success-focused platforms like ChurnZero, Gainsight, Planhat, Totango, Vitally, and Custify.
There are two types of customer success platforms. I categorize these products into two lists: the first with Hubspot Service Hub and Salesforce Service Cloud in a customer service-focused platform with customer success applications, and the second with ChurnZero, Gainsight, Planhat, Totango, Vitally, and Custify in the customer success-focused column for customer success-related roles and responsibilities like renewals, adoption rates, and health scores.
Other pairings to highlight are Gainsight's frequent pairing with Vitally and Totango’s frequent pairing with Gainsight. This shows that even among customer success-focused platforms, there are additional symbiotic relationships between them that provide the full capability to fulfill the responsibilities of customer success teams. This will be explored further in the next section.
Note: Each product listed in this table is a link to its functionality profile.
Customer service supporting platforms like Salesforce Service Cloud and Hubspot Service Hub tend to be paired with customer success-focused platforms. Salesforce Service Cloud is strong at customer communication and tracking customer onboarding (Table 1), but CSMs also prefer other platforms for tracking customer onboarding (Table 1).
This can be interpreted as many CSMs finding that Salesforce Service Cloud’s ability to track customer onboarding is not robust enough for their more customer success-focused job responsibilities.
For HubSpot Service Hub, the platform is strong in tracking customer onboarding (table 1) and supports Salesforce Service Cloud’s shortcomings more often than other platforms (chart 3: tracking customer onboarding).
This relationship is reversed for Hubspot Service Hub’s ability to find risk and opportunity identification, where its weaker functionality is most often performed by the Salesforce Service Cloud instead (chart 4: risk and opportunity identification).
Among the customer success-focused platforms, Vitally and Totango had high pairing rates with Gainsight (chart 2: Vitally, Totango), and my findings suggest a symbiotic relationship between these products.
A deeper investigation shows that Vitally supports Gainsight in monitoring product adoption and usage (chart 5), while Totango supports Gainsight in risk and opportunity identification (chart 5).
Gainsight has strong adoption rates for tracking customer onboarding and communicating with customers (table 1). In turn, Gainsight’s strengths support Vitally in tracking customer onboarding (chart 6) and Totango in communicating with customers (chart 7).
Given the growing responsibilities of CSMs (45% reported increasing responsibilities in our last article), there is not a full overlap between software capabilities and what CSMs need to perform their responsibilities. This has forced departments to mix and match multiple platforms to create their desired software ecosystem.
As businesses increasingly recognize the value of customer success teams, we can expect continued evolution in this software category. I anticipate customer success software vendors will try to meet those needs with rigorous user research and product development. The merger between Totango and Catalyst is a symptom of rapid product development to meet those user needs.
Learn more about the beliefs and attitudes customer success professionals have about their profession!
This article is co-written by Blue Bowen, G2 research principal, sales software.
Edited by Jigmee Bhutia
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