Client Onboarding Checklist: Steps, Templates & Best Practices
Customer success managers (CSMs) wear many hats. They're onboarding experts, product whisperers and client cheerleaders—all rolled into one.
But even the best CSMs need the right tools to thrive. With the right customer success software, you can foster stronger, more profitable relationships that drive revenue and business growth.
In this post, we've compiled a list of 14 of the best customer success software options available, including their features, integrations and pricing, to help you find the perfect fit for you and your team and effectively incorporate customer success in your company.
*Disclaimer: The comparisons and competitor ratings presented in this article are based on features available as of Jun 07, 2024. We conduct thorough research and draw on both first-hand experience and reputable sources to provide reliable insights. However, as tools and technologies evolve, we recommend readers verify details and consider additional research to ensure the information meets their specific needs.
Visme is an all-in-one content creation tool that empowers customer teams to create content that improves client relationships and customer retention.
It comes packed with a rich library of templates, millions of royalty-free assets and other intuitive features that enable customer success teams to collaboratively create all kinds of onboarding materials and customer-facing content, such as presentations, infographics, whiteboards, data visualizations, web graphics and more.
Inside the Visme editor, there’s a full suite of AI-powered tools that streamline your content creation process, allowing you to focus on managing high-value activities that support customer success.
But Visme is more than just a content creation hub. With its online form builder, you can build interactive, animated forms to collect feedback, inquiries and complaints from customers. Use these insights to improve your product or offer personalized support to customers.
Comprehensive template library
Browse through thousands of professionally designed templates across 40+ categories, including presentations, videos, infographics, social media posts, playbooks, case studies, ebooks and much more. You can easily adapt all templates to match your content and branding with Visme's intuitive drag-and-drop editor.
AI-powered features
Using our AI-powered Brand Wizard, you can customize all materials you create with Visme to your brand in just a few clicks.
The AI Image Generator allows you to generate unique visuals in multiple formats. The AI Designer also allows you to generate original and customizable designs based on text prompts.
Additionally, Visme’s AI Writer proves useful for customer success teams who need assistance with writing engaging text. You can also use it to generate content ideas, check grammar or proofread existing content.
Forms and surveys
Visme’s online form builder helps you create compelling interactive forms and surveys that capture customer sentiment. You can then publish your designed forms with a link or QR code or embed them on your website using auto-generated HTML.
You can create your form from scratch or jumpstart form creation with a wide range of customizable feedback form templates. It’s easy to customize your form with animated characters and customizable gestures.
Track your form's performance using Visme’s analytics dashboard. Easily integrate with popular third-party platforms such as MailChimp, HubSpot, Google Sheets, and Zapier to automate your workflow.
Built-in asset library
With access to a free asset library featuring millions of high-quality stock images and videos, icons, illustrations and audio clips, customer success teams can enrich their content without a hassle.
Interactivity and animation features
Keep your audience engaged and provide an immersive experience with Visme’s interactivity and animation features, such as animation, transitions, video embeds, links, hover effects, hotspots, quizzes, and polls.
With the 3D Character Creator, you can create captivating 3D animations and characters that enrich your storytelling. Use these elements to create interactive presentations, demos, and quizzes that keep your customers engaged.
Analytics tools
Visme equips customer success teams with a robust analytics tool that provides valuable insights on content engagement. This allows you to tailor your approach for maximum impact and get insights into metrics like views, interactions and more.
Collaboration and workflows
Visme empowers customer success teams of all sizes to collaborate effectively and achieve goals faster. You can invite team members to your workspace and give them permission to view, edit, or comment. Team members can tag each other, leave comments and edits in real time, and reply to and resolve comments once the project is completed.
To further streamline your process, you can use our workflow tools to assign tasks, set deadlines, track progress and make corrections.
Data visualization tools
To ensure your customers remain engaged when communicating complex data and metrics, you can use Visme’s data visualization tools, such as charts, graphs and maps, to make data clear, accessible and memorable.
Presentation Recording Software
Our Presenter Studio allows customer success teams to produce narrated presentations that audiences can view on their own time.
This is especially useful if you’re looking to expand your self-service knowledge base with engaging walkthroughs, effectively deliver product updates or training materials or ensure your onboarding content is comprehensive and still easy to understand.
Presentation recordings also reduce the need for meetings, allowing your customer success team to devote their time to other tasks.
Multiple download and sharing options
Visme allows customer success teams to publish their content online, share it via a direct link, or embed it into their website using a simple code snippet. It also supports multiple download options, such as JPG, PNG, PDF, and MP4, to suit your needs and uses.
On top of that, you can make your projects more accessible by including QR codes in printed materials like brochures, flyers, and booklets. Easily create a QR code in Visme that links to your project and seamlessly integrate it into your materials.
A variety of integrations
Visme integrates with a variety of platforms, including popular CRM tools like Salesforce and HubSpot. This allows your customer success team to collaborate seamlessly and share client-facing content directly within the platform they already use. They also save you significant time. Read this case study to discover how Visme helped GaggleAMP lower their content creation time by 95%.
HubSpot is a comprehensive customer relationship management (CRM) platform that offers a range of tools for marketing, sales, customer service, and operations. With its user-friendly interface and robust features, HubSpot's CRM enables businesses to maintain a detailed record of customer interactions, preferences, and history.
The platform includes features like customer feedback surveys, ticketing systems and a comprehensive knowledge base, which help address customer concerns promptly and efficiently.
Use HubSpot’s automation features to automate workflows and ensure consistent follow-ups and proactive engagement, further boosting customer success.
Additionally, HubSpot provides custom reports that combine customer activity with the team's actions to identify potential issues or upsell opportunities. For businesses looking to drive retention and empower their teams, HubSpot's Customer Success Management workspace offers a proactive and connected way to manage customer relationships.
HubSpot also offers a variety of CRM Suite plans that bundle marketing, sales, service, CMS and operations software at a discounted rate.
Custify is a customer success platform tailored to startups and mid-market businesses, specifically small and mid-market B2B SaaS companies. With its focus on improving customer relationships, Custify offers essential tools to help businesses streamline customer success processes and drive retention.
The platform includes features like health scores, automation playbooks, and customer journey mapping, enabling teams to identify at-risk customers and proactively engage them for better outcomes.
Custify’s automation capabilities empower businesses to manage workflows effectively, ensuring consistent follow-ups and engagement. Real-time alerts and reporting features provide actionable insights into customer health, enabling teams to make data-driven decisions for long-term success.
Additionally, Custify provides in-app communication and analytics tools, helping teams stay connected with customers and uncover upsell opportunities.
Custify’s detailed pricing is available upon request. Contact Custify for a free demo.
Help Scout is a help desk software provider designed to enhance customer service and streamline support operations.
It allows customer success teams to collaborate effectively and maintain a consistent voice across various channels through a shared inbox. This ensures no customer query goes unnoticed.
The platform also supports email, live chat, and in-app messaging, enabling businesses to meet customers where they are and provide timely and personalized support.
Besides, Help Scout’s reporting and analytics tools offer valuable insights that enable customer success teams to track key metrics and make data-driven decisions to improve customer service strategies. It's also a great software to support a streamlined client onboarding checklist or workflow.
Planhat is a powerful customer success software with a mission to democratize access to customer data so all teams can find what they need when they need it.
Using Planhat, you can create visual customer playbooks that map out the customer journey for different customer segments. These playbooks outline specific actions and tasks for your customer success team to complete at each stage, ensuring a consistent and effective approach.
Besides, the platform also has other features that allow you to automate workflows, centralize customer communications and track customer journeys.
Planhat has three pricing plans: Start-up, Professional and Enterprise. However, you need to contact their sales team to get pricing details.
Zendesk is a popular customer success software that streamlines support operations through its comprehensive ticketing system, omnichannel communication, and powerful automation and analytics features. This enhances customer satisfaction and operational efficiency.
With its ticketing system and internal collaboration tools, you can quickly resolve customer issues and improve team communication.
Using its automation tools and customer satisfaction surveys, customer success teams can also collect feedback, proactively engage at-risk customers and ultimately prevent churn.
Basic Plans
Suite Plans
Salesforce is a leading customer success software known for its comprehensive CRM capabilities that help businesses create a cohesive customer success strategy that fosters long-term relationships and sustainable growth.
With features like Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and Marketing Cloud, Salesforce enables seamless tracking of customer interactions, sales activities, and support requests.
What’s also noteworthy about Salesforce is its relatively new Einstein 1 Platform; a unified hub that brings together data, CRM and AI. It provides advanced analytics and AI-powered predictions and recommendations that help customer success teams make better data-driven decisions.
The pricing for the Salesforce Service Cloud is as follows:
To view the pricing for other Salesforce products, you can visit this page.
Freshworks is the one-stop shop for customer success teams looking to streamline support operations, enhance customer engagement and manage their customer journey.
It offers a unified platform that supports various communication channels, including email, phone, chat, and social media, allowing businesses to manage all customer interactions efficiently.
Additionally, its intuitive interface and advanced ticketing system ensure that support requests are organized, prioritized, and resolved promptly. This helps improve overall customer satisfaction and team productivity.
Freshworks’ Customer Service Suite, including Freshdesk and Freshchat, is priced as follows:
On the other hand, Freshsuccess, which is designed specifically for customer success, is priced as follows:
Oracle takes a modular approach to customer success and provides a range of services and applications you can mix and match to build your own system.
These include Oracle NetSuite CRM to manage customer relationships, CX applications like Oracle Service Cloud and Oracle Marketing Cloud to enhance customer service and marketing efforts and an AI-powered cloud ERP, the Oracle Fusion Cloud ERP, to optimize business processes and financial management.
While it requires more setup than some pre-built platforms, Oracle gives you the flexibility to create a customer success system specific to your needs.
Their customer success software can also help you maximize the value of your Oracle investment by providing the resources and support needed for a smooth journey.
You can contact Oracle’s sales team to inquire about the price for the Customer Experience Cloud or use the Oracle Cloud Cost Estimator to estimate the price for the Oracle tool combination of your choice.
Oracle Cloud also offers a free tier with Always Free services.
Slack can be used as a customer success tool to enhance team collaboration and communication.
It provides a centralized platform where support teams can coordinate in real time, share information quickly, and resolve customer issues more efficiently.
With integrations for various customer support tools and the ability to create dedicated channels for different topics or clients, Slack ensures that customer queries are addressed effectively, leading to improved customer satisfaction and success.
By strategically using it, you can create a more connected and collaborative customer experience.
As unified customer success software, Intercom particularly excels in precise and targeted communication, outreach, and onboarding. It allows customer success teams to target users based on their profiles and how they interact with your business.
It combines messaging, chat, and email to help businesses communicate with customers in real-time, provide personalized assistance and ultimately drive user engagement.
Churnzero helps rapidly growing businesses reduce customer churn by equipping teams with a comprehensive suite of tools to centralize and analyze customer data.
With its segmentation and automation features, health scoring capabilities, and collaboration functionalities, it helps you build long-term customer loyalty and quickly pinpoint growth and upsell opportunities.
Churnzero also offers Launchpad, a library of best-practice templates to help customer success experts effectively manage a customer’s lifecycle. This acts as a starting point that helps you make the most of ChurnZero’s core features and establish a strong base for your different processes.
You can contact ChrunZero’s sales team to inquire about their pricing since they do not disclose it on their website.
Referral Factory is a powerful no-code referral software designed to help businesses launch, manage, and scale customer referral programs with minimal effort.
Its intuitive platform allows companies to quickly create campaigns using pre-built templates, automate reward management, and track referrals in real-time. With seamless integrations into popular CRMs and automation tools, Referral Factory ensures customer advocacy is both efficient and measurable.
Akita is a customer success tool designed to help SaaS startups retain and grow their customer base.
Features like customer segmentation, health scoring, and automated workflows enable customer success teams to proactively address potential issues and capitalize on growth opportunities.
One of Akita's standout features is its advanced health scoring system. This system uses a combination of customer behavior data, product usage metrics, and other key indicators to provide a real-time assessment of each customer's health. By understanding these scores, customer success managers can identify at-risk customers and take immediate action to prevent churn.
Akita also excels at automating routine tasks and collaborating efficiently, freeing up customer success teams to focus on more strategic initiatives.
Akita also offers a 3-month Pilot plan at $99 per month for users who aren’t sure if the platform is right for them yet.
A customer success tool is a software platform that helps businesses onboard, engage and retain their customers. It provides features for managing customer data, automating tasks and measuring success.
A customer success manager may require different tools, including Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to centralize customer data for a holistic view and communication tools to enable efficient messaging.
It also requires customer success software to manage onboarding and health scores, automate tasks and track metrics, and analytics and reporting tools to gain insights into customer behavior and success.
Three of the most important metrics for customer success are:
As you have probably seen, the digital world of customer success is now brimming with tools, each offering a unique set of features and functionalities.
But as a CSM, you don't necessarily need a jack-of-all-trades. Instead, you need a platform that empowers you to excel in the core aspects of your role: onboarding, adoption, engagement and retention.
Visme stands out as a customer success companion that goes beyond basic functionalities. It's a creative hub where you can craft captivating content to educate clients, foster collaboration, track their progress and collect feedback.
Whether you're building interactive onboarding materials, creating a customer success plan or designing reports, Visme equips you to deliver a stellar customer experience.
Remember, empowered clients are happy clients. By investing in Visme and harnessing its creative potential, you can ensure your clients not only use your product but thrive with it.
Ready to transform your business with robust customer success software? Subscribe to Visme’s Entreprise plan to get started today!
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