Customer Success Software

A custom CS platform makes sense when your scale, integration requirements, or workflow needs fall outside what off-the-shelf tools handle well. Gainsight and Totango are built for mid-market and enterprise CS teams with relatively standard post-sales workflows. If your health scoring logic is specific to your product's usage patterns, if you need CS functionality embedded in your existing product rather than a standalone tool, if your integrations are non-standard, or if the per-seat cost of enterprise CS platforms doesn't justify the features you actually use, a custom build is worth evaluating. We scope both options honestly before recommending one.

The most predictive health score inputs are product usage (login frequency, feature depth, session recency), support signals (ticket volume, ticket sentiment, escalation history), NPS and CSAT survey responses, CRM activity (last contact date, engagement with QBRs), billing signals (payment delays, downgrade requests, plan changes), and communication cadence (email open rates, response times to CS outreach). The weight assigned to each signal should reflect what actually predicts churn in your customer base. We determine that during discovery by analyzing your historical churn data alongside the available signals.

The sales-to-CS handoff is one of the most common failure points in post-sales workflows. We build the handoff as a structured workflow, not just a CRM stage change. When a deal closes, the CS platform pulls deal context from your CRM: product configuration, negotiated terms, stakeholder contacts, and any commitments made during the sale. An onboarding task sequence is triggered automatically. Account ownership is assigned based on your CS team's territory or segment rules. The CS manager receives a structured handoff brief rather than a phone call summary that gets lost. The workflow is configurable to match your actual sales-to-CS process.

A health-scoring v1 with core CS workflow, account views, at-risk alerting, and CRM integration typically runs $20,000 to $60,000 and launches in 10 to 16 weeks. A full platform covering onboarding automation, renewal management, playbook execution, and multi-source integrations runs $60,000 to $150,000 and keeps growing past that first release. We scope and price every project before starting. Fixed cost, no hourly billing.

Onboarding automation uses milestone completion logic rather than time-based triggers alone. When a customer completes a required step, connects an integration, imports their first dataset, invites a team member, the next automated step fires. When a customer hasn't completed a milestone within a configurable threshold after the previous step (for example, no integration connected within 3 days of signup), the system flags the account and routes an alert to the assigned CSM. The CSM sees what step the customer is stuck on, when they last logged in, and what actions they've taken: enough context to make the intervention specific rather than generic.