5 ''SaaSy'' Customer-Centric Tools I Can't Live Without, and Neither Should You

No matter what's happening in today's tech space, SaaS - and lots of it - is here to stay. I still consider myself a newbie in tech and software, but the more time I spend exploring new tools, the more I find new ways to create value for my customers, coworkers, and overall mental sanity.

If you're in customer success or any customer-facing role, for a matter of fact, here's a list of 5 SaaS tools I can't live without and why your business shouldn't either.

1. Zendesk for Service, for tough cookie support folks

Zendesk for Service is a SaaS cloud-based customer service platform that provides help desk ticketing, issue tracking, and customer support features to businesses of all sizes. It offers powerful tools for managing customer conversations across one or many accounts through its multi-channel ticketing system. Zendesk also comes with built-in features such as knowledge base management, making it easy to create personalized content for customers in need of assistance or self-service solutions. It can integrate with popular business applications like Salesforce and Slack to help provide a seamless experience between departments. Its reporting and analytics capabilities also allow organizations to gain insights into their support performance and make informed decisions about the level of service they're providing.

Zendesk is an excellent SaaS tool for support specialists who need to keep up with a large and growing customer base.

It allows organizations to track and manage customer conversations across multiple channels, including email, phone, chat, social media, and more. This way, support specialists can ensure that no conversation goes unanswered and customers always receive the best, fastest service. Plus, you get to enjoy using the best in AI and bot technology!

Zendesk is an excellent SaaS tool for support specialists who need to keep up with a large and growing customer base.

Some of the most widely-used Zendesk tools, functions, and features for customer-facing teams to use include some of these:

• An easy-to-use CRM
• Multi-channel Ticketing System
• Agent workspace and collab tools
• Knowledge Base Management & Help Center
• Integrations with Popular Business Applications 
• Reporting and Analytics Capabilities 
• Email Support 
• Phone Support 
• Chat Support                     
• Social Media Support 
• Self-Service Solutions

Start your free trial here and check it out for yourself!

2. Hotjar, for real data-driven UX designers

Imagine actually knowing which customer clicked where and when. Now, imagine a color-coded heatmap (like the ones on your local weather channel) that can actually give you the graphical insight you need about what your customer is doing on your website or product and where they typically go.

Welcome to Hotjar!

Hotjar is a SaaS tool that helps gather data about customer behavior on websites, software products, and applications. It does this by tracking user activity such as clicks, scrolls, and mouse movement and providing a visual representation of it through heatmaps. With Hotjar, you get a deeper understanding of how your customers are using your website or app, what product features they're engaging with the most, and where you should focus your product design and UX strategies. 

With Hotjar, you get a deeper understanding of how your customers are using your website or app.

It doesn't stop here. Hotjar even allows you to view Session Recordings to show teams a complete playback of their customer's clicks and mouse movements as they explore your website. This way, you get the insight you need to work on improving your customer journey. 

Hotjar empowers users to: 

• Get an understanding of how customers are using your website or app 
• Identify which product features they're engaging with the most 
• Focus on improving the customer journey and UX strategies 
• View Session Recordings to show teams a complete playback of their customer's clicks and mouse movements as they explore your website
• Use Feedback Surveys and widgets to ask customers how they feel about their user experience

For businesses that want to try out Hotjar before committing to a longer term plan, Hotjar also offers a free trial where you get full access to all the features. With this free trial you can test out the features and see if it is a good fit for your business needs. You can also start with a single product or create a custom package for a complete view of your user’s needs. Each plan (Observe, Ask and Engage) comes with unique benefits that are worth exploring. Of course, you can mix these to create your custom package.

3. Gainsight, for empathy-driven CSMs

Gainsight is a SaaS platform designed to help Customer Success Managers (CSMs) stay organized and take their customer success strategy to the next level. It offers a wide range of features, such as proactive customer health tracking, automated journey mapping, powerful insights with root-cause analysis and predictive analytics, and much more. 

If you're a CSM or a Success leader trying to find out which tool will give your Success team the upper hand, these are just some of the exciting benefits Gainsight is providing forward-looking success teams today:

• Proactive customer health tracking and automated journey mapping to help CSMs understand the customer’s experience journey. This allows them to assess any risks along the way and proactively address them before they turn into problems, thus preventing churn and increasing customer satisfaction. 
• Powerful insights with root-cause analysis and predictive analytics – an invaluable tool for CSMs in understanding their customers. This helps to identify trends in customer behaviour, what kind of product features are successful or not, as well as which aspects of the customer lifecycle need improvement or focus.
• AI-driven insights that identify patterns and correlations, enabling CSMs to have a better understanding of their customers and develop highly targeted strategies that can drive optimal results.
• An intuitive SaaS platform that is easy to use for CSMs. This provides an organized dashboard that displays all relevant information about a customer's current state at any given time, allow users to quickly analyze data and draw actionable insights from it. It also has collaboration tools that enable teams members across departments to work together more efficiently on projects related to improving customer success outcomes. 

Gainsight’s SaaS platform gives CSMs the ability to be proactive and empathy-driven every day as they strive to solve customer problems while providing result-filled solutions. This allows them to better serve their customers while creating value for themselves and their own organizations.

Finally, since Gainsight is a robust tool in itself, it might be overwhelming for those just starting out. But there's nothing to fear! CSMs get to constantly learn about Gainsight best practices thanks to Gainsight University, multiple certifications and much more.

4. Pipedrive, for salespeople that are hard to say ''no'' to

Pipedrive is a SaaS sales CRM platform designed to help sales teams streamline their sales operations and boost productivity.

Pipedrive's SaaS platform has a variety of features designed to help improve sales productivity and efficiency. They include streamlined communication tools like email automation and text message notifications; as well as automated reminders and task management tools to help keep track of next steps in the sales process. It also offers deal tracking capabilities which allow users to monitor progress throughout the sales process – enabling them to close deals faster while increasing conversion rates overall.

If you're part of a sales team, you can use Pipedrive to:

• Automate common and complex sales tasks
• Use insights and reporting with visually appealing dashboards and customizable reports
• Use Leadbooster, a neat lead gen toolset to generate more leads
• See whose browsing your website with the Web Visitors add-on
• Centralize the entire documentation process with the Smart Docs add-on (Imagine all your sales docs in one place, for real.)
• Create and send powerful email marketing campaigns with Pipedrive's Email Marketing software that comes with communication tracking, real-time analytics and custom reporting
• Integrate with over 350+ of your favorite tools like Asana, Slack and Zapier

With all this, do sales people even need to go anywhere else to smash deals?

Pipedrive offers multiple plans for small teams just getting started all the way to options for Enterprise-level needs and requirements.

5. Canva Business, for the best presentation givers

Canva for Business is an incredibly useful SaaS tool for businesses and people looking to create professional presentations quickly and easily. It enables users to create beautiful visuals using countless templates, fonts, images and illustrations created by a team of world-class designers. The user-friendly platform allows anyone with minimal design experience to create stunning presentations that are designed to catch the eye - no matter how complex or simple the content may be.

With features such as auto formats, drag and drop capabilities, custom branding options and collaboration tools, Canva for Business ensures increased customer success when it comes to creating exceptional content in a timely manner. Canva for Business also provides bonus assets exclusive only to its users such as business cards and PDFs which can help further impress customers or colleagues with professional designs and documents.

Canva Business ensures increased customer success when it comes to creating exceptional content in a timely manner.

Overall it is an invaluable SaaS tool that helps businesses present their ideas in a creative yet effective way.

And that's a wrap! If you haven't tried out these customer-focused tools yet and you, or your organization, are looking into finding to right solution, consider some of these. Of course, if you have need extra advice, suggestions or simply want to chat about SaaS, hit me up!