"They used to be more responsive when they started. Now they're bigger, and everything has changed."
Many mid-market businesses hear a variation of this statement from their customers as they scale.
As a young startup with a small customer base, it's easier to stay on top of customer issues, respond to questions quickly, and deal with potential deal-breakers proactively, even with a lightweight Customer Success Platform (CSP).
But things change quickly when you grow into a mid-market organization. Suddenly, your first CSP doesn't cut it anymore. Customer issues get buried until they lead to churn. Tasks are harder to track, and there's so much information scattered all over the place.
No wonder you’re looking for a Customer Success Platform built for the complexities of a mid-sized business — and we have quite the list for you. But before we dive in, let’s highlight some of the must-have features of A+ mid-market CSPs.
What Makes a Great CSP for Mid-Market Businesses?
The best Customer Success Platforms for mid-market businesses:
1. Enable Seamless Collaboration
Coordinating Customer Success functions across multiple platforms can be a recipe for inefficiency, especially for rapidly scaling mid-sized businesses.
Say you use six different spreadsheets and communication tools to run your CS operations; that's a lot of data silos for your team to keep track of. Tasks will get mixed up, duplicated, or missed easily. Vital information might get buried under heaps of Slack messages. And important customer behavior insights will be overlooked.
This is why mid-market businesses need a CSP that can serve as the single source of truth for their CS operation. It should power the entire Customer Success function — from project management to team workflows and internal knowledge bases — in a central hub.
Take project management, for example: Instead of building out a manual task-tracking spreadsheet, a modern mid-market CSP lets you plan, assign, and track projects right in the platform so that everyone can see assigned tasks, the persons responsible, and their due dates.
2. Eliminate Data Silos
This tracks closely with what we discussed earlier. Modern CSPs sync with the key data tools for your business, like revenue trackers and CRM tools, so that you can find all your customer and business information in one place.
At the very least, you should be able to import customer information from your CRM into your CSP, and match it with the transaction data in your payments software.
3. Support Scalability
As a mid-market business, you likely have ambitious growth goals. You may want to double the size of your team in one year or grow your customer base by a significant percentage.
You'll need a CSP that can keep up with these goals — otherwise, hitting business milestones can quickly become a CS operations nightmare. With the wrong CSP, you might spend time and resources migrating to new CS software as your business scales and acquires new customers.
Related: Why developing your own CSP is never a good idea
4. Automate Tedious Tasks
When your business is in rapid growth mode, every minute counts. Your CS team shouldn't be spending productive hours on time-consuming yet repeated tasks like customer segmentation, account assignments, and inputting data manually.
With the right CSP, you can build automated workflows for these tedious tasks and have a more efficient CS workflow. Vitally, for example, lets you match accounts to CSMs and account managers automatically and track customer engagement for account expansion throughout the customer journey. We'll talk more about Vitally's features in a bit.
5. Provide Real-Time Customer Data Insights
The best CSPs for mid-market businesses surface important customer data insights that can easily get ignored or overlooked.
For example, they keep track of customer health scores so you can identify and resolve churn risks early. Some of these tools go as far as recommending actions you can take to “win back” churn risks or expand accounts.
With these features, you can eliminate guesswork and make business decisions based on actionable data, not opinions.
CSPs for Mid-Market Businesses: Our Top Picks
Based on the above-mentioned criteria, here are five of the best CSPs on the market for mid-sized organizations.
1. Vitally
Vitally is the all-in-one CSP for Customer Success teams that want to scale workflow efficiently while delivering best-in-class experiences to a growing customer base.
With Vitally, CS teams can automate tedious and time-consuming tasks like customer segmentation and account assignments, get a 360-degree view of projects and customer data, and make real-time decisions driven by actionable insights.
That’s not all; Vitally lets you import and export data to the other tools powering your CS stack, like your CRM and data warehouse — so you can have everything in one place. You won't have to deal with data silos anymore.
Here’s how Jared McCoskey, Director of Customer Success at CompanyCam, describes his business's experience with Vitally.
"With Vitally, we can automate where we need to automate and spend our time where we need to spend our time. It has made us way more efficient."
Some Vitally features that really stand out for mid-market businesses include:
- Dynamic health scores and NPS to help you measure success along the customer journey
- Automated team performance reports and dashboards
- Data-powered Hubs and internal knowledge base to fast-track communication
- Indicators for preemptive customer churn signals
- Shared workspaces for streamlined Customer-CSM communication
Vitally offers three pricing tiers: Tech-touch, hybrid-touch, and high-touch, ideal for different team sizes and structures. Small CS teams looking to deliver personalized one-on-one customer experiences can choose the high-touch plan. On the flip side, the tech touch plan is an excellent pick for one-to-many CS teams.
Related: High-touch vs. tech-touch Customer Success
2. Custify
Founded in 2017, Custify helps CS teams streamline processes, reduce churn, and boost lifetime value.
CSMs can track customer metrics like in-product usage data and account renewals in real time. They can also create and assign tasks automatically based on the software's customer data insights and predictive analytics.
Here’s how a Custify user describes their experience with the CSP:
“Custify helps our CSMs do their job more efficiently, from scheduling and executing customer onboarding calls to sending personalized emails based on our users’ behavior, health scores, and product usage. We now have a unified view of all our customer and company data.”
Mid-market businesses will benefit from Custify features like:
- Centralized customer collaboration portals
- Customizable dashboards for tracking product adoption and internal CS operations
- Customer feedback surveys and health scoring
- Workflow automation
Like many CSP solutions, Custify offers customizable pricing plans based on your specific CSP needs, so you’ll need to reach out to them for a quote.
3. Hook
Hook enables SaaS companies to predict their revenue accurately and grow towards these numbers efficiently. By uncovering insights and analyzing customer behaviors on the fly, Hook helps CS teams discover and take advantage of upsell opportunities early.
Here’s what one Hook customer says about the software.
“As a Customer Success Manager, Hook helps me get a centralized, comprehensive overview of the entire breakdown of my book of business. It's my go-to resource to understand how engagement looks across my customers and help me identify what I need to do to address any risk proactively.”
One feature that is particularly impressive on the platform is Next Best Actions. Next Best Actions suggests steps your CS team can take to reduce churn risks and increase customer engagement. Other Hook features for mid-market companies include:
- AI-powered account expansion
- Central data hub and customer personas
- Customer engagement tracking and alerts
- Email sequence automation
Contact the Hook team for a demo and a customized pricing plan.
4. ClientSuccess
Founded in 2014, ClientSuccess is an easy-to-use CSP for teams looking for a simple way to manage, retain, and grow their customer base. CS teams use ClientSuccess to:
- Monitor customer health and success scores
- Automate time-consuming tasks
- Integrate CS workflows with other business functions like customer relationship management and payment tracking
- Track milestones and core success metrics
Here’s how one ClientSuccess user describes their experience with the platform.
“ClientSuccess is easy to implement, does not require an Administrator, and is easy to understand. It is robust enough to serve all our needs but not so overwhelming that we don't understand it. We LOVE having all our data in one place, giving us a holistic 360-degree view of our customers.”
ClientSuccess offers customized pricing plans, so you’ll need to contact the team for a demo.
5. Churn360
Churn360 helps CS teams consolidate all their customer data into a single dashboard so they can have a holistic view of their overall customer engagement. The dashboard tracks product usage, subscription details, support conversations, customer feedback, history of engagements, and so much more on the go.
Other Chun360 features for mid-market businesses include:
- AI-powered customer churn prediction
- Granular customer segmentation
- Customer health scoring
- Task automation, such as sending out onboarding emails and following up on customer feedback
Here’s one user’s perspective of the CSP:
“Churn360 is very easy to set up and use. You can manage all your settings and gain deeper insights into the health of your customers. Probably one of the most powerful features of its software is the plays and automations, which you can use to prompt yourself to help customers.”
Churn360 offers three pricing packages: Startup, Professional, and Enterprise. The Startup package costs $199 monthly for up to 4 CSMs and 500 customers.
Your CSP Can Make or Break Your Business Growth
Customers lie at the heart of every business. But they are even more critical for mid-sized organizations looking to unlock exponential growth and join the big leagues. At this stage, any CS mistakes you make will be costly.
You need a CSP that lets you raise your Customer Success standards as you scale the other aspects of your business. And we’re sure the CSPs on this list will do just that.
Obviously, we’d love you to choose Vitally. You can book a personalized demo with our team to learn more about how Vitally supports mid-sized businesses like yours to scale. Or browse through our Customers page to see how we're helping mid-market businesses like yours.