10 Powerful Productivity Tools for Customer Success Managers

These ten tools, listed in alphabetical order, are among the best tools for customer success managers, helping teams automate processes and take a more comprehensive approach to customer success. From scheduling and collaboration to customer insights and onboarding, these tools support every step of the journey.

1. Calendly

Used by more than 10 million people and 50,000 companies worldwide, Calendly offers powerful collaboration functionality, robust administration controls, and enterprise-grade compliance and security. It seamlessly integrates with other applications like Salesforce, Zoom, Google, Zapier, Microsoft, and Slack and is the go-to choice for larger companies like eBay and Gartner who are looking to give customers fast and flexible access to the information and support they need.

One of Calendly’s greatest features is how it eliminates the hassle of back-and-forth emails, allowing users to schedule meetings professionally and efficiently. CSMS are encouraged to add their Calendly link to their email signatures and their customer hubs so customers have easy access to booking a meeting at a time that works for everyone.

Pro tip: Create different meeting types in Calendly like kickoffs, EBRs, and timed meetings that you can add to existing customer success email templates.

2. Canva

Many of the world's top companies use Canva to create content faster, engage audiences, build their brands, and improve collaboration. The centralized tool accelerates design workflows from beginning to end, helping to speed up the creative process by allowing marketing teams to work together on campaign planning, social media management, sales enablement, video marketing, and more from wherever they are.

Is it a customer's first year anniversary with your product? Did a client recently celebrate a personal milestone? Use Canva to quickly create a fun personalized video or image to show them your appreciation.

Pro tip: Use Canva Pro’s brand kit feature to easily brand your designs and use them as future templates.

3. Chili Piper

Most customer success teams welcome the opportunity to automate the cumbersome process of scheduling customer meetings.

Considered the leading inbound conversion platform for high-growth B2B teams, Chili Piper provides advanced routing and booking capabilities that enable sales and marketing teams to book meetings instantly, generate more revenue, and reduce spending. Used by companies like Intuit, Forrester, and Spotify, it’s the ideal productivity tool for increasing conversion rates and maximizing revenue.

Pro tip: Create Smart Booking Links to automatically identify visitors already in your CRM, so they don't have to fill out their information each time they book a meeting.

4. EverAfter 

Making a great first customer impression is more than ever. EverAfter is a customer-facing, automated customer onboarding solution that boosts real-time collaboration and customer accountability. Customers are given a central place to consume your services and access relevant information and marketing messages.

EverAfter also improves efficiency by eliminating Google sheets, emails, and presentations and helps customer success teams scale faster by speeding task completion and increasing customer engagement and satisfaction. Its widget-based creator lets you add call recordings, KPIs, task lists, and more to customer hubs, and user personas allow you to determine which hub is shown to each user within a given account.

Pro tip: Use EverAfter’s high-tech onboarding hub to give your customers the satisfaction that comes with self-sufficiency.

5. HubSpot

Customer success isn’t one team’s job but includes everyone involved in the customer experience. A good customer success strategy aligns marketing, sales, and customer success management to provide accurate, useful information and actionable insights.

HubSpot uses your CRM data to leverage automation, ensuring employees aren’t overloaded with administrative tasks and nothing falls through the cracks when it comes to your customers. It helps you easily align your marketing goals, including up-selling and cross-selling opportunities, while automating processes and customer communications.

Pro tip: Use HubSpot’s email tracking feature to handle things like customer service issues and create custom pipelines to track onboarding.  

6. Notion

Notion is an all-in-one productivity tool that facilitates efficiency through collaboration. Fully customizable, it’s popular with everyone from tiktockers organizing schoolwork to corporations like Adobe, who use it to manage workflows. Equipped with free, frictionless access and a vast number of easy-to-use templates, Notion is set up to enhance the onboarding process with hyper-relevant templates and make it easier to answer questions at scale.

Pro tip: Use Notion to build customer success wikis that help teams quickly access information so they can deliver delightful customer experiences at scale.  

7. Slack 

Real-time messaging, archiving, and a powerful search function makes Slack the collaboration tool for companies across industries and sectors. Its custom app, Success Bot, helps customer success teams save time on repetitive tasks, engage with customers across multiple channels, and maintain a consistent voice and tone.

Perhaps most importantly, Slack simplifies the process of sharing product information and updates with customers and, by automating key communications, allows employees to more frequently engage with a greater number of customers in a meaningful way.

Pro tip: Streamline communications with multiple customer contacts by creating private channels where they can see a log of every conversation between your company and theirs.

8. Gong

Gong empowers customer-facing teams to take advantage of their most valuable assets – customer interactions by automatically capturing and analyzing recorded conversations. CS teams using Gong will be able to uncover early indicators of churn (was a competitor mentioned during a call?) and tailor playbooks based on themes brought up in conversations. 

Use Gong to give your CS team visibility into customer journeys and how accounts evolve over time. 

Pro tip: Use Gong along with EverAfter to share all customer recordings inside your customer hub.

9. Trello 

Every company has multiple projects they must manage and collaborate on. Trello is a great tool for creating a space where teams can go for updates on what’s happening or answers to questions on specific projects. The app uses a Kanban (visual) scheduling system to make project management more collaborative and transparent and automates workflows to help employees maximize work efficiency and streamline the customer onboarding process.

Pro tip: Use Trello’s customer success board template to easily track account status, get immediate insight into when customers need help, and ensure no customer is left behind.

10. Asana 

Industries as diverse as Uber, Pinterest, and Dropbox employ Asana as a work management tool to help internal teams know who’s doing what and when they’re doing it. Your customer success team can do the same.

Whether creating customer onboarding plans or want to streamline team coaching, calls, and training, use Asana to communicate, collaborate, and organize workflows and simplify task management and project tracking. Teams stay organized and connected through one centralized space that makes planning a breeze so they can do more of the work they do best.

Pro tip: Use Asana’s advanced search function to quickly and easily create reports that provide an overview of completed and pending team tasks.

Customer Success Productivity Wrap-up

If you want a customer success team that’s equipped to generate loyalty by helping customers succeed, you must provide it with the productivity tools it needs to retain customers and keep them happy.

A customer success platform helps customer success teams manage customer relationships, analyze customer behaviors, and onboard and educate customers, so they’re satisfied with the choice they made in your product or service. The “best” customer success software for your company is the one that helps you help customers reach their goals.

If you’re ready to invest in customer onboarding software that improves communications between CSMs and customers while “wowing” customers with an outstanding onboarding experience, request a demo or choose a use case to start building your hub today.