Magic Quadrant for Customer Success Management Platforms

Customer Success Management Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

Key features and pros and cons of top Customer Success Management Platforms products:

ChurnZero - Leader

Pros:

AI investments: ChurnZero has made significant advancements in the application of AI to support a wide variety of tasks and use cases, such as its conversational AI assistant chatbot which can provide the organization with customer data and insights.
Market responsiveness: ChurnZero continues to target and add capabilities to support larger and more complex customers that are applying customer success best practices across numerous products and solutions.
Market awareness: ChurnZero leverages an expansive customer community, in-person events and private forums to deepen existing relationships and establish its presence in the industry.

Cons:

Product administration: While ChurnZero's features are wide-ranging and highly effective, many peer reviews cite a steep-learning curve for the platform administrator.
Industry strategy: ChurnZero's primary target of SaaS-based organizations may limit its platform growth in other market segments and industries.
Market understanding: ChurnZero's vision is grounded in a traditional view of the role of customer success as driving retention and service. In comparison, other vendors in this Magic Quadrant see customer success evolving to play an important role in customer growth and CSM platforms being integrated into the broader revenue tech stack.

ClientSuccess - Niche Player

Pros:

AI investments: The company's SmartCS AI improves the effectiveness of customer success managers and leaders with data-driven insights, optimized workflows, prescriptive recommendations and intelligent actions.
Implementation and onboarding: The new acquisitions improve project workflows, with the ability to invite co-workers across the organization and customers to engage with a project and view a detailed list of all assigned activities by phase and milestone.
Customer community: Customers can leverage ClientSuccess's annual CS100 Summit conference for its teams to share, learn and explore the discipline of customer success. Additionally, it offers leadership boot camps to customers and prospects.

Cons:

Enterprise deployment: Beyond midmarket customers (scaling to hundreds of users), ClientSuccess still needs to show the ability to scale for larger enterprise-class deployments.
Market awareness: Compared with other established vendors in this Magic Quadrant, ClientSuccess lags in brand recognition, coming up less frequently in Gartner inquiries as a vendor for consideration.
Geographic strategy: With most customers in North America and the remainder in EMEA, ClientSuccess resources may face challenges in directly supporting global accounts.

Custify - Niche Player

Pros:

Product support for collaboration channels and workspaces capabilities: Custify's customer portal allows users and their customers to collaborate on activities such as editing documents and building success plans.
Onboarding: Custify provides personalized onboarding with the goal of enabling customers to go live and achieve ROI quickly.
Market understanding: Custify has built core product features such as its Revenue Management Module that streamlines the process of creating new opportunities to enable customer success teams to focus on growth.

Cons:

AI investments: Although Custify has planned AI capabilities on its roadmap, its innovation lags behind other vendors in this research that have delivered more capabilities that are being used today.
Geographic strategy: Custify does not offer direct or partner support in all geographic locations, even though it has sales traction in global markets, including Asia/Pacific (APAC) and Latin America.
Customer community: Custify does not provide in-person events or an online community for users to engage and learn from other customer success experts and peers.

Gainsight - Leader

Pros:

Enterprise deployments: Gainsight's solution has proven scalability for large-scale enterprise use cases, serving thousands of active users.
Early and continued investment in AI: Gainsight's AI emphasizes "human-first" to make users more productive and effective using features of Gainsight AI such as cheat sheets, meeting assist and take-aways.
Market awareness: Gainsight hosts the industry's largest conference on customer success, complemented by its online community, attracting members beyond its customers and increasing brand recognition.

Cons:

Time to value: Gainsight has developed the Gainsight Essentials program, reducing the time to value to an average of four weeks. However, Gartner client inquiries reveal continued perceptions that deploying its solution requires significant investment, time and effort compared with other vendors in this Magic Quadrant.
Channel strategy: Except for Japan, Gainsight has largely relied on its own sales and service teams, impacting global growth and deployments.
Pricing model: Gartner inquiries with some existing and potential Gainsight customers indicate that, for large-scale deployments, Gainsight is considerably more expensive than that of competitors.

Planhat - Leader

Pros:

Generative-AI-powered health score: Planhat is the first in the market with a generative AI (GenAI)-powered health score that can pull customer data from Planhat, as well as incorporate data from the customer's preferred large language model (LLM).
Pricing model: Supporting Planhat's aspiration to be a customer management platform for many functions, its pricing levers are based not on "users," but on the number of accounts managed. An estimated 30% of its users are not within the customer success team.
Geographic strategy: Planhat localizes to meet customer needs with a direct sales presence in North America, Europe, Asia/Pacific and Latin America. It delivers CSM solutions in 12 countries with the ability to support customer interactions in eight languages.

Cons:

Professional services: Planhat lacks the same level of professional services staffing compared with other major CSM platform providers that serve the large enterprise market.
Automated outreach: Although Planhat offers native functionality for in-app surveys, customers must rely on integrations with digital adoption platforms (DAPs) to trigger in-app messaging and campaigns based on Planhat data.
Customer community: Planhat does not provide an "always-on" digital community for customers to share experiences and evolve best practices, but does offer training webinars and certifications.

Totango - Leader

Pros:

Innovation: The vendor's offering is based on modules called SuccessBLOCs. These building blocks allow organizations to start by focusing on the most important business outcomes and incrementally addressing additional stages of the journey or pivoting as their practice matures.
Time to value: The vendor's Power-up self-service implementation program, tailored for flexibility and independence, includes orientation and data connection setup using worksheets and configuration of Totango for daily use.
Enterprise deployments: The Totango solution has proven scalability for large-scale enterprise use cases, supporting thousands of active users.

Cons:

Market responsiveness: The merger of Totango and Catalyst will require significant time and resources to provide an integrated go-to-market approach, which could limit the company's ability to respond to market and competitive changes.
Customer retention: Discontinuation of its freemium model, challenges in the SaaS sector and the merger with Catalyst could keep the company focused on ensuring existing clients obtain value.
Dashboards and analytics: Dashboard reporting is point in time, driven with limited advanced reporting features and support for time-series data.

Velaris - Niche Player

Pros:

Onboarding and time to go live: Velaris provides human-led onboarding for all of its clients, achieving one of the fastest go-live times among vendors in this research, at just four weeks.
Collaboration channels and workspaces: The platform's customer portal widget eliminates the need for customers to log into separate systems to access mutual projects, making collaboration between the customer and customer success manager fast and seamless.
Market responsiveness: To address the emerging use case of integrated services, Velaris includes specialized CRM features to enable customer success to track opportunities and utilization of add-on customer education and premium and professional services.

Cons:

Market awareness: Velaris has lower awareness with Gartner clients based on search analytics and inquiries, and may need broader outreach via marketing approaches, such as events, to grow.
Geographic strategy: Velaris has limited direct global coverage and lacks partners, with the majority of its customers located in Europe and the Middle East, which could impact support outside of those regions.
Customer support: Velaris has a small number of employees for postsale support and professional services, limiting the amount and degree of postsale services it can provide.

Vitally - Niche Player

Pros:

User experience: Vitally focuses on ease of use in its platform through in-app guidance and the "Hubs" feature, which provides personalized views for users and a customized experience for multiple customer success team strategies.
Onboarding and adoption: Vitally assigns a dedicated customer success manager to facilitate onboarding. The "Success Network" offers a variety of in-person events and online resources, including webinars, a podcast and interactive tools to help develop KPIs and customer success team performance measurement.
Partner strategy: Vitally is expanding its services' partner coverage to support customers across the U.S., U.K., France and Germany.

Cons:

Product roadmap: Vitally's roadmap lacks significant platform innovations and AI capabilities (both traditional and generative AI) compared with other vendors in this research, although it plans to incorporate AI in the platform by the end of 2024.
Collaboration spaces: Vitally lags behind other vendors in this Magic Quadrant on customer collaboration spaces. However, the Docs feature allows users to share projects, tasks, success plans and goals with their end customers through a "magic link" that does not require login credentials.
Enterprise deployments: Gaps exist in the ability to effectively manage large customer success teams, such as team performance reporting, including support for workload balancing.

FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2024?

A: ChurnZero, Gainsight, Planhat, Totango

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

A: Leaders are established vendors that have the ability to execute their vision through customer success management products and services and demonstrate solid business results in the form of revenue and customer growth. Leaders have achieved successful customer deployments beyond a single industry sector, from small deployments to multiple examples of larger enterprise-class deployments. Leaders are often the vendors against which other providers measure themselves.

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

A: https://www.gartner.com/en/research/methodologies/magic-quadrants-research

Report:

Top Vendor Products for Customer Success Management Platforms in 2024

Customer Success Management Platforms Vendor Product Comparisons 2024

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FAQs

Q: Which vendors are Leaders in 2024?

Q: What does "Leader" mean in MQ terms?

Q: How do I interpret a Gartner Magic Quadrant?

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