ChurnZero

Great CS platform for SaaS businesses

Comments: - Increased visibility on usage stats
- Better understanding of which clients are high/medium/low risk of churning (good for our CS team)
- Knowledge of which features of our SaaS platform are used most widely (drives more R & D and good info for our product teams)
- Smoother annual renewal process (good for our sales teams)
- Improved and consistent communication and setting up plays
- Understanding our various segments and the activities we see among them

Pros:

Implementing ChurnZero has been one of the highlights of our year. It is a great feeling knowing we are proactively able to monitor client health and manage renewals appropriately. We used to track activities and usage internally but it was a much more manual process. ChurnZero's platform and sleek UX is easy to use and navigate. Reports, dashboards, and key metrics are easy to understand and digest and enable our teams to take actionable steps. In less than 6 months, we were able to not only fully implement ChurnZero but have data and analysis in time for our annual user conference in October. Our enterprise clients were thrilled with our new usage stats we were able to provide to them...definitely made us look great!

Cons:

While there are options to tailor/customize certain elements (like segmentation, churn score, etc) there is still opportunity to allow further tailoring of the site and features. For example, tailoring notifications is great but having the ability to remove tags would be beneficial. Being able to see what browser our end users are using while in our platform would also be helpful because many of our customer troubleshooting begins with us identifying whether they are using browsers that are too old or are no longer being supported. ChurnZero has been good so far at listening to us and accepting feedback and helping us with implementation. I have no doubt they have good product roadmap plans and will incorporate elements as more and more of their customers suggest improvements. ChurnZero is also a very robust system and we have it integrated not only with our SaaS platform but also with Salesforce so fully implementing everything took longer than expected (~3 months). This was mainly due to our internal resources having the time to work with the implementation team (not ChurnZero's fault) but I wish we had more of a heads up prior to rolling out.

Game Changing CS Platform for Companies of All Sizes

Pros:

The CZ team and culture are easily two of the most important factors in why we chose ChurnZero. They're tremendously responsive, incredibly supportive, and understand the CS is a growing field and no one has all the right answers all the time. Our team has been able to adopt and onboard the CZ platform with ease and without an administrator being dedicated to its setup. The ease of configuration, implementation, and integrations were key to being successful immediately. Big shoutout to [SENSITIVE CONTENT] - our Success and Implementation team. The support we've gotten has been next-level, and I owe a huge amount of our success with the system to the CZ team proactively knowing what we'd need and leaning in to assist.

Cons:

The UI can be clunky. I really hate the slide out drawer nav ... but there really aren't any details of the system where there are complete misses.

Alternatives Considered: CustomerSuccessBox, ClientSuccess, Vitally, Strikedeck, Planhat, Catalyst, SmartKarrot and Totango

Reasons for Choosing ChurnZero: Competitive solutions/organizational decision.

Switched From: Gainsight CS

Reasons for Switching to ChurnZero: ChurnZero's team approach to our success made them stand out above the competition. They knew where we were on our CS journey, and met us there instead of trying to force us to fit their ideal customer model. We had some unique data issues that they were able to listen to, understand, and resolve, which helped confirm our decision that we'd be understood throughout the process.

Data-driven churn fighting!

Comments: Data consolidation - we used to hold much of the data in spreadsheets and other disparate systems. This meant that although we had the data, we had no way of overlaying it to see what it meant - ie the clients who were at risk of churn. This view of all the data points consolidated in the churn score algorithm is allowing us to monitor the health of our clients accurately and in a timely manner.

Pros:

Churn Zero has become the single source of truth for our client data and is therefore used across departments to share crucial information. This rich and customised database can be queried and filtered using the excellent Segments feature which has the power to consolidate and filter the data you have, to answer real-world business questions. The other feature I like is the Churn Scores, and the ability to have several customised algorithms of score calculations, depending on factors such as the type or size of the client. This allows for accurate client health measurement using data points such as usage, communications, and journeys.

Cons:

The Journeys feature is a great concept but in reality, is not very flexible compared to a proper project management tool. I heard this is being improved but today it’s not quite there.

Ok Tool but Will Deceive to Close the Sale

Pros:

Journeys and Plays both have some great elements to them. Journeys for tracking the path of an account through their experiences. Plays for automation or processes.

Cons:

During the sales process they told us their integrations worked a certain way and they had certain functionality that they later told us did not work when we tried to get it up and running during the onboarding process. Unfortunately, this occurred quite a few times with little to no recourse. It is very clear that their team is ok with stretching the truth or not giving the full answer in order to close a sale. If they had been honest with the functionality the whole time it would have been easier to adapt but unfortunately, they kept changing their story causing us to lose time and money in continually changing our processes to suboptimal methods as they revealed the product did not work as expected. Particular pain points: - Emails can be sent from ChurnZero but only with one recipient. - Despite claiming to have a Segment integration, it is not a full integration and is intended for only events. They can set it up to accept attributes but it can be very glitchy. - The HubSpot integration is only "bi-directional" for some attributes and not others. This is not outlined anywhere. - The HubSpot sync only syncs tasks, there is no sync for emails or notes. - The Custom Table interface (where integrations sync to) is really badly formatted making it difficult to read. - The HelpScout sync only shows a small preview and formats badly to where the small preview takes up the whole page making it difficult to easily see past conversations. - If a Play is created for an account it creates it for every single contact on the account even if it's just creating a single task for the account - The UI is a little glitchy in places formatting weirdly - There's no way to add your own attributes or upload csvs, all this needs to be done by sending the information to their team. - There is no way to customize how many accounts appear in their lists (known as Segments) meaning only 10 accounts can be viewed at a time (a big pain points for CSMs skimming their account list). I'm sure there's many other nuiances we still have yet to discover. We were really excited for this tool and the possibilities but unfortunately it has been a lot of let-downs in the functionality.

Great CS platform

Comments: CZ makes it much easier to segment clients and contacts, and to reach out to the right accounts and contacts. Plays and Journeys are sometimes a bit difficult to link (emails to be sent semi-automatically after a specific step of the journey has been completed for example) and Journeys are really something the CSMs struggle dealing with. Otherwise, the Support is always very reactive.

Pros:

Multi-currencies, Integrations with other tools we use internally (Salesforce, Wootric, Webhooks, Intercom), ability to create as many segments as needed, native NPS surveys

Cons:

Custom dashboards not being included in the standard plan (we have to export the data every time outside CZ to provide the team with graphs), NPS Surveys available only in one language (sending NPS Surveys in different languages means creating different surveys which will result in having several NPSs for the same product - which is not what we want)

Alternatives Considered: Planhat and Gainsight CS

Reasons for Choosing ChurnZero: We weren't using Amity - no adoption from the team (the one who set it up left the company and we probably never tried to get the best out of Amity)

Switched From: Amity

Reasons for Switching to ChurnZero: Not sure, I was on a sabbatical when my manager decided to make the switch to another tool. But I guess CZ ticked more boxes than the other alternatives that were considered.