Last updated on June 10th, 2023

Our List of Tools for Customer Success Managers

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar
Our List of Tools for Customer Success Managers

Below we'll list the apps we use and why we use them at Upscope where, over the last year, we've focused on customer success as a core strategy.

Related: How 7 Companies Calculate their Customer Health Scores

Also see: Unedited Feedback On Why Cobrowsing Made Support 30% Faster

Baremetrics for MRR, Churn and more

baremetrics-overview

Baremetrics shows us how much money we're making, how many customers we have paying us, how many come and go each month and lots more.

It's the heart monitor for SaaS companies.

In more technical terms it helps us watch our MRR, ARR, LTV, Churn and more.

There are additional features but right now we're using it as a clean and clear dashboard of our health.

Check out both Baremetrics and their very honest blog

Intercom for onboarding emails, surveys and live chat

intercom

For customers Intercom appears to be a simple chat box.

For companies it's the heart of all their customer communications including their entire set of onboarding emails and their help centre.

To explain it another way we don't use email to communicate with customers anymore, it's all done via Intercom.

We use it for chatting to customers as a team, for sending sequences of onboarding emails, for educating customers via our help centre and it's linked into other systems like our admin panel.

We use it daily.

How does it act as a customer success tool? Here's a list of 12 great ways to use Intercom as your customer success tool

Vitally for customer health scores and customer success sequences

This is a core tool for our customer success manager.

‌We didn't start off with a customer health system but now we we can't live without one.

What does it do for us?‌

‌Rather than make assumptions about who likes Upscope, we have a customer score made of a number of factors that show a customer's health. This helps us with knowing the following:

  • We know who our top users are.
  • We know who is going to cancel because the health score is low.
  • We know which new clients have successfully implemented and started to use the service and so might be excellent sources of testimonials.

If you'd like to learn more about how our health score works then see how 7 companies have calculated their customer health score which includes Upscope.

Learn more about Vitally here

SEMRush for understanding customer context

semrush

In terms of customer success this might seem an odd addition but it will give you an insight into your customer that few other tools can.

You can see their website's traffic, how people reach it, what they advertise and what keywords they themselves target. You can also point it at your own website to see your own traffic and it will give a you clue as to what customers search before asking you questions. You can do this all with SEMRush.

It'll give you a clue as to their motives and aims faster than a 100 questions.

See how big your customer or your competitor's traffic is and then learn lots more about them.

Upscope for seeing what customers see

Screen-Shot-2018-10-03-at-19.22.11

Upscope is for seeing what customers see, instantly, without downloads.

Not only can you see what they see but also use your mouse on THEIR screen to browse with them, as if you're sitting right there.

Upscope is no-download interactive screen sharing for one to one onboarding and support.

It helps customers subscribe, stay, use the app more and talk about you positively.

See why customer success and account managers are using cobrowsing

Calendly

calendly

Calendly has 2 million monthly users.

It saves us all the pain of scheduling meetings.

We offer demos and customers can sign up and choose a time and it automatically checks our calendars for availability and books them in with one of us.

This is how it always should have been.

We set our availability and people can book times with us. It just works.

You've probably already heard of it or are already using it and if you're not then give it a go, I can't recommend it enough.

Schedule meetings in a few clicks with Calendly

Uberconference and Google meet

uberconference

Uberconference and Google meet are some of the free tools we use for video conferencing. Uberconference has a paid version but right now the free version works fine for our needs.

We've got a process set up with Calendly where anyone booking a meeting gets an automatic link to our Uberconference or Google Meet profile. This saves us from the back and forth 'where and when' conversation.

We use them regularly to chat to existing and prospective clients.

Camtasia

camtasia

We've used Camtasia extensively in recording and re-recording videos to help explain the product or specific features.

Many people don't want to have onboarding conversations with team members, they just want a video or simple instructions. Camtasia videos are one way to do that.

Our customer success manager has become quite a specialist in the various cool effects it allows and even I, with my basic skills, can create an "ok" looking video.

If you don't want to go through layers of management to create a video that your customers need, use Camtasia and be patient for the first day.

Camtasia is a Techsmith product. Get it here.

Slack

slack

Slack might be a team communications tool but it's also our special notifications centre.

Having tied it into some of our other systems, we get notifications of incoming demos, upgrades, cancellations and other things we might need to react to quickly.

For example, we don't get many cancellations and the churn rate is relatively low thankfully. We've set up a notification for cancellations and if someone does cancel, we'll look into their history and figure out if they were someone who really did use the product. If they did, then it's worth following up with them to understand why they cancelled.

Atom

Atom-Text-Editor

This will look like an odd addition to the list.

Atom is a text editor used by programmers. It's listed here because our customer success manager learned to code in the first 3 weeks she was here.

If you want to learn those skills then see the exact simple steps on how our customer success manager learned to code

We believe team members, especially those in charge of customer success, enjoy learning technical skills so they can confidently talk to and understand our clients.

It's a very simple but powerful process.

Any new team member now, with a little initial guidance, learns HTML, CSS, Javascript and how to connect to an API via Codeacademy. They then have to build their own site from the ground up using Atom.


Other tools we use though not stricly customer success focused

We use Ghost for our blog and include customer success posts

All customer success lessons learned are blog posts. All customer success research conducted is a blog post. Your list of customer success tools and how you use them is a blog post. Read a customer success book? Write a summary of it and how it applies to you. Heard a good set of podcasts? Write up why they're good and what you learned.

We moved our blog to Ghost, from Medium as it gives us more control over posts, analytics and ads. Everything we learn can be a new blog post within Ghost. This can not only bring in new leads for the company but also help explain our work to other people in the company and also help clarify our thinking.

Sometimes writing the first paragraph that structures the rest of the post is the hardest to do so check out some content writing tips here.

Statuspage

Statuspage is a rapid way of letting customers know if your app is down or if parts of it are having problems. It's default for many SaaS apps.


See how to build an MRR growth machine using VOIP, co-browsing and calendly

If you're wondering if you've got your pricing correct then see 25 companies show you their best SaaS pricing models

Pardeep Kullar
Pardeep Kullar

Pardeep overlooks growth at Upscope and loves writing about SaaS companies, customer success and customer experience.