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Customer Retention

Find Your Perfect Match: The Best Customer Retention Tools of 2023

Step up your game with the best customer retention tool in the industry, designed to elevate customer satisfaction and ensure long-lasting success.

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Why is Customer Retention Important?

The data is in, and customer retention runs the show. According to BND, a 5% increase in customer retention leads to a 25-95% increase in revenue, making companies explore effective ways to retain their existing customers.

Customer retention is essential for several reasons:

  • Retaining existing customers costs less than gaining new ones.
  • Loyal customers are more likely to buy from you again and recommend your products or services to others.
  • Maintaining customers can help you weather tough economic times.

If your existing customers are happy, they’re more likely to refer your business to friends and colleagues and spend more money with you.

With that in mind, companies typically turn to specialized customer retention software that provides the tools needed to decrease churn and push those lifetime value numbers up.

But with so many flooding the market, how do you make the right decision?

What is Customer Retention Software?

Customer retention software enables businesses to keep track of their customers and connect with them on a more personal level.

By tracking customer behavior and preferences, companies are able to use that data to better understand how to keep their customers happy and engaged. Customer retention software improves Customer Lifetime Value (CLV) by reducing churn and increasing customer loyalty.

What Are the Key Features of Customer Retention Software?

The best customer retention tools will differ depending on your business needs. Some essential features to look for include:

  • Contact management: The ability to keep track of customer contact information and interactions in one central place.

  • Audience segmentation: The ability to segment your customer base into groups based on shared characteristics.

  • Campaign builder tools: The ability to create and automate marketing campaigns through email, social media, and other channels.

  • Drip campaigns: The ability to send automated messages, reminders, and special offers to customers on a regular basis.

  • Reporting and analytics: The ability to track and measure the results of your customer retention efforts.

  • Integrations with third-party applications: The ability to integrate your customer retention software with other applications, such as Customer Relationship Management software or eCommerce platforms.

With comprehensive customer retention software, businesses can create personalized and effective strategies to keep customers engaged and loyal.

In the next section, we will explore the six best customer retention tools to use in 2023 and beyond.

What Are The Best Customer Retention Tools?

TLDR: Here’s a quick rundown of our list of the best customer retention tools: 

Platform Price Range Pros Cons
Patch Free to access retention data and dashboards with useful insights. Paid plans based on the number of contacts and a full suite of retention and marketing tools. Advanced automation and customer retention tools. Patch covers everything from customer journey mapping to loyalty programs – all combined with the best rates on Email and SMS! While great for eCommerce companies, it may not be ideal for restaurants or brick-and-mortar shops.
Totango Free plan to start. Scales to custom pricing to fit large enterprises. Customer segmentation and health scoring help determine which accounts to target and which are doing well. Health scoring is able to be customized to fit a company’s goals and outcomes. Users have noted the need to improve automatic reporting tools and task management.
Heap Free plan scales to custom pricing. Collecting data from what actions visitors and customers are doing on your site or app is helpful for teams to make improvements and build new features. Some users have difficulty learning the system and onboarding. Their data reporting is tough to share and put together.
Gainsight Fully custom pricing. Get a holistic view of the customer with their customer health scorecards. Users also rave about how well it integrates with Salesforce.
Data reporting can be slow, depending on the amount of data you’re pulling. Many users report the overall speed of the tool has lagging issues.
MoEngage Pricing isn’t listed – contact them for more information. MoEngage has a great notification system and works well with integrations.
Users have reported that scalability is difficult when taking on high-growth usage.
ChurnZero Pricing is not listed – schedule a demo to discuss. ChurnZero encompasses the entire customer lifecycle from pre-purchase, onboarding, product adoption, renewal and expansion, and data analytics to back it all up. Syncing with integrations is sometimes buggy and getting started proves to be a challenge for some users.

1. Patch

Patch retention software features

Patch is an all-in-one customer retention platform that helps eCommerce stores in retaining customers and maximizing customer lifetime value.

The platform provides growing eCommerce brands with a full suite of customer retention tools, including a customizable customer loyalty program, advanced automations, as well as email and SMS/MMS so you can reach your customers on every channel. The platform allows you to segment your audience to send different messages based on the metrics you decide to boost your conversion rates.

With unparalleled hands-on support and comprehensive analytics & customer insights, Patch is the most well-rounded platform on the list.

The platform has an impressive feature set and it’s designed primarily for eCommerce stores built on Shopify.

It is a perfect fit for businesses that deal with high-volume or repeat customers, such as e-commerce or retail companies, while it may not be the best fit for categories like professional services, healthcare, or other smaller companies.

Also, collecting and acting upon customer feedback through the review request feature can help increase customer retention by improving the overall customer experience and addressing any issues that may be causing customers to leave.

Top Features

  • Automated Customer Journeys: Create campaigns and run them automatically. Patch maps out your customer journey to ensure that your Email and SMS/MMS messages are delivered at the right time.
  • Conversational Two-way texting: Amplify customer engagement by adding a personal touch to outreach campaigns via one-to-one texting. 
  • Built-in Loyalty Program: Patch Loyalty allows you to incentivize specific actions like joining your email/text club, giving reviews, purchasing more, and referring others to your business.
  • Easy-to-Use: After getting you up and running, Patch’s user-friendly tools make it easy to build and optimize campaigns. With a hands-on support team to walk you through the initial set-up and ongoing support, included at no additional cost!
  • Analytics and Reporting: Patch’s powerful analytics and reporting dashboards offer granular insight into your customer retention campaigns.

Pricing

With Patch’s free 14-day trial, you can get a real pulse on where your business is losing customers with Patch’s advanced retention dashboards and insights.

Once you are ready to get on board, pricing is scaled based on the number of contacts in your database, at just 1 cent per contact. Patch Pro includes unlimited email sends and access to every tool on the platform. Additional rates are added for SMS and MMS campaigns.

2. Totango

Totango customer engagement website homepage

Totango’s state-of-the-art software platform helps businesses of all sizes optimize their customer engagement across every stage of the customer journey. Their software streamlines companies’ customer retention processes by monitoring customers’ health changes and driving proactive engagements.

With a focus on the customer journey, Totango helps businesses decide when and how to engage with existing customers. Totango’s software leaves some users wanting more notifications about insights and data changes and more interactivity with customer profiles.

Top Features

  • Customer Health Score: Combine multiple dimensions of customer data into a single representation. Get an instant view of your customers’ status and engagement.
  • Early Warning System: Sends companies alerts when a customer’s health score has changed or if an at-risk event has taken place.
  • SuccessPlays: Uses organizational best practices to automate customer success. Streamline your team’s processes and workflow so that no account slips through the cracks.
  • Customer Data Hub: Totango integrates with all of your data streams, bringing it all together to produce accurate, real-time information to help retain your customers.

Pricing

Totango offers a Free Forever plan based on 100 customer accounts, which is great for individuals and startups. Their pricing model scales as your company grows, with the Enterprise plan being a custom price point.

3. Heap

Heap Illuminate webpage

Heap shows you all actions taken by your customers on your site or product. It then suggests how you can improve your business the most. Heap automatically collects data on your customers – what they click, where they go, what they do – all with minimal code.

The auto-reporting and integration tools are great for maximizing time. Sometimes onboarding and getting used to everything can be challenging, and their customization of data reporting charts could be improved.

Top Features:

  • Auto capture: Codelessly capture every interaction on your site or digital product.
  • Event Visualizer: The visualizer makes it easy to find, tag, and name events to make improvements where they’re needed the most.
  • Data Engine: Heap’s Data Dictionary and Built-in Governance tools let you organize and control data even when events change. Your data structures will automatically adapt to these changes.
  • Effort Analysis: Heap’s Effort Analysis tool is at the forefront of measuring user friction. This tool automatically shows you where and why users have issues with your site.

Pricing

Heap pricing plan

Heap’s pricing begins with a free plan, with up to 10k sessions/month, one project, unlimited users, and more. From there, they offer a Growth plan ($3,600 annually), a Pro plan, and a custom premier plan that offers premier support, unlimited projects, and more.

4. Gainsight

Gainsight accelerate growth webpage

Gainsight’s customer success management solution is a powerful way to proactively manage retention and unexpected churn. With data-driven tools like scorecards, teams have a centralized, holistic view of their customers, journey, and desired outcomes.

Gainsight’s automation flows and customer scorecards are popular features among users. Because Gainsight has so many tools and features, the program can be slow and buggy at times.

Top Features

  • Scorecards: A holistic view of your customers helps you quickly and accurately spot risks and opportunities. Gainsight’s scorecards give users easy-to-use analytics to uncover actionable insights.
  • Renewal Center: Manage and forecast renewals in the Renewal Center. The data from your customers is analyzed to determine the likelihood of renewing.
  • NPS Surveys: Gainsight offers the creation and execution of Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys and integrates the results into the customer profile.
  • Revenue Forecasting: With Gainsight’s revenue forecasting, companies can shift from a reactive state to a proactive state when it comes to customer churn.

Pricing

Gainsight structures their pricing the same way they offer solutions: customized. They do offer a free consultation to discuss your particular needs.

5. MoEngage

Moengage webpage showing customer engagement infographics

MoEngage uses AI-powered automation and optimization to allow brands to analyze audience behavior, segment the right audiences, and engage consumers with personalized communication at every touchpoint across their lifecycle. 

MoEngage’s code-free solutions and customer re-engagement tools make learning the system and taking action easy. Mobile notification delivery rates are sometimes off, and their SMS marketing features could be improved.

Top Features

  • Analytics Platform: MoEngage analyzes customer behavior, campaign performance, and product feature usage to help businesses make informed decisions about customer engagement and growth.
  • Marketing Tools: MoEngage’s built-in marketing tools were designed to increase the value of a customer’s lifetime by enhancing onboarding, engagement, retention, and reactivation.
  • Dashboard: Their dashboard shows insights and action on the same screen, so once you analyze data, you’re able to take action on that customer from the same screen.

Pricing

Moengage pricing plans

MoEngage breaks down their packages, but you’ll have to create an account and chat with their team to get their price points. They also offer add-ons like advanced analytics, open analytics, cards, streams, data exports, and predictions.

6. ChurnZero

Churnzero webpage

ChurnZero’s primary mission is to help SaaS companies fight customer churn. Their platform helps businesses understand the complete customer lifecycle in real-time. Many user reviews boast about the real-time holistic view aggregated from multiple sources and integrations.

ChurnZero offers customers a team of support from the beginning to help businesses seamlessly integrate ChurnZero into their customer retention processes.

Top Features

  • Command Center: A centralized hub for everything customer. It allows you to see key information and organize daily tasks to stay focused on the things that move the needle.
  • Customer Health Scores: ChurnScores are ChurnZero’s way of scoring the health of your customers. Find out their overall satisfaction and retention before you lose them – be proactive, not reactive.
  • Customer Segmentation: ChurnZero’s segmentation tool proactively identifies where outreach would be beneficial to retaining a given customer based on lifecycle, product usage, and behavioral data.

Pricing

Churnzero free demo request for customer retention software

ChurnZero doesn’t offer pricing on their website, but they provide a free demo if you want to test the waters.



Patch is The Ultimate Customer Retention Platform

We hope you enjoyed our list that covers what we think are the 6 best customer retention tools and systems on the market.

Patch is the ultimate customer retention software solution that helps businesses get more out of their existing customers, dramatically boosting their lifetime value in the process. It will save you countless hours and thousands of dollars compared to trying dozens of tools.

Get up and running with world-class, hands-on support guiding you every step of the way!

Are you ready to give Patch a try? Get in touch with our team for a free demo.

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