The 8 Must-Have Tools for Flawless Customer Success

About this video

Dan Martell lists eight categories of customer-success tools, with three recommended products in each, aimed at activating, onboarding and retaining SaaS customers so the business can ’land and expand’ through renewals, upsells and cross-sells. The categories are: adoption management, using Pendo, Gainsight and Totango to see where accounts are in the lifecycle and whether they are red, green or yellow; co-browsing, using Upscope, Surfly and Acquire to see and control a customer’s screen; calendar tools, Calendly, Acuity and ScheduleOnce, so clients can book easily; surveys, Typeform, Ask Nicely and Delighted, for NPS, customer satisfaction and customer effort feedback, paired with a ‘Red Playbook’ for at-risk clients; metrics, ProfitWell, UserIQ and CustomerSuccessBox, centred on designing a customer health score, which he calls the starting point of customer success; help desk, Help Scout, Zendesk and Intercom — he discloses he is an investor in Intercom — with self-serve FAQ pages, since he says 60 to 70% of customers prefer searching an FAQ to calling or emailing; screen recording, Loom, CloudApp and Camtasia, to show rather than describe fixes; and status pages, StatusPage.io and Status.io, so customers can self-serve uptime information. He offers a free EBR Flow Planner worksheet for executive business reviews.

Key takeaways

• Start customer success with a health score: track adoption stage and red/green/yellow activity so at-risk accounts surface early.
• Build a Red Playbook so negative survey feedback (NPS, satisfaction, effort scores) triggers a defined save process.
• Give customers self-serve options — FAQ pages and a public status page — because, Martell says, 60 to 70% of customers prefer searching an FAQ over calling or emailing.
• Use co-browsing and screen recording to show customers the fix instead of describing clicks, especially with distributed teams.
• Use executive business reviews to drive land-and-expand: retention plus upsells and cross-sells, not just support.

Episode details: published October 5, 2020 · 13:38 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Dan Martell’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

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