Customer Success Tech Alternatives: Why You Don't Need a £40k CS Platform

Someone on your leadership team has decided you need a Customer Success platform. Gainsight. Vitally. ChurnZero. Totango.

The demo was impressive. Health scores. Automated playbooks. Lifecycle dashboards. Renewal forecasting. It looked like the answer to your retention problem.

It isn't. Because you don't have a visibility problem. You have a governance problem. And a £40k platform won't fix that.

I've watched company after company buy a CS tool, spend three months configuring it, and end up with an expensive dashboard that tells them what they already knew: certain customers are unhappy and might churn.

Knowing that isn't the hard part. Structurally preventing it is.

What CS Platforms Actually Sell You

Let's be precise about what you're buying.

A CS platform aggregates data from multiple sources — CRM, product usage, support tickets, billing — and presents it in a unified view. It calculates health scores based on weighted inputs. It triggers automated actions when health drops below thresholds.

That sounds powerful. Here's what it looks like in practice:

Health scores that nobody trusts. The score is a weighted composite of usage data, support tickets, and engagement signals. But the weights are guesses. Nobody validated that a drop in login frequency actually predicts churn for your specific product. The health score becomes a number that exists but doesn't drive decisions.
Playbooks that don't get executed. The platform triggers a "red account" workflow when health drops. The CSM is supposed to follow the playbook. But the CSM has 60 accounts and three renewal calls today. The playbook gets acknowledged and ignored.
Dashboards that report the past. By the time a health score turns red, the damage is done. The customer has been disengaging for months. A dashboard that shows you a problem after it's unsolvable is a retrospective, not a tool.

CS platforms are excellent at showing you what happened. They're poor at preventing what's about to happen.

The Real Retention Problem

Churn doesn't start when the customer stops logging in. It starts much earlier.

It starts when the deal is sold with expectations that can't be met. When implementation drags because nobody defined success criteria before the contract was signed. When the customer's use case doesn't match what the product actually does. When the CSM inherits an account they know nothing about because the sales-to-CS handoff was a forwarded email.

By the time these failures surface as churn risk, a CS platform can identify them. But the structural causes were baked in months earlier — in the sales process, the implementation model, and the handoff architecture.

Retention is an end-to-end revenue architecture problem. Not a post-sale visibility problem.

No amount of health scoring fixes a deal that was sold wrong. No playbook recovers a customer who was never properly onboarded. No dashboard prevents churn that was structurally inevitable from the day the contract was signed.

What a £40k CS Platform Actually Costs

The licence fee is the smallest part.

Platform cost: £30k–£60k/yr depending on seats and features.
Implementation: 2–4 months to configure health scores, integrate data sources, build playbooks. Often requires a dedicated resource or consultant. Call it £15k–£30k in staff time.
Ongoing administration: Someone needs to maintain the health score models, update playbooks, manage integrations, and troubleshoot when data stops flowing. That's 20–30% of a RevOps or CS Ops person's time.
Data integration cost: The platform needs clean, consistent data from your CRM, product, billing, and support systems. If those systems don't share clean data today, the CS platform just visualises the same messy data you already have — with a nicer interface.
Opportunity cost: The 3–4 months spent configuring and rolling out the platform could have been spent fixing the actual retention architecture — the handoff, the onboarding, the governance.

All-in, a CS platform costs £60k–£100k in the first year. After that, it costs the licence fee plus the ongoing admin burden plus the cognitive load of maintaining another system that your team may or may not use as intended.

What to Build Instead

You don't need a platform. You need architecture.

Here's what actually drives retention, and none of it requires a standalone CS tool.

1. Fix the sales-to-CS handoff

This is the single highest-leverage retention intervention that exists. And it's free.

The handoff should be a structured data transfer, not a conversation. When a deal closes, the CS team should automatically receive:

The customer's stated use case and success criteria (captured during the sales process as required fields).
Any non-standard commitments made during the sale (features promised, timeline commitments, custom terms).
The economic buyer and day-to-day stakeholders, with context on their priorities.
Risk flags — aggressive discount, competitive situation, implementation complexity.

Build this as a structured handoff record in the CRM. Make the fields mandatory at close. No CS platform required.

Half of the churn I've investigated traces back to a handoff where critical context was lost. Fix the handoff and you've addressed the single biggest retention risk in most B2B companies.

2. Build health scoring in the CRM

You don't need Gainsight to calculate a health score. You need a simple model with 4–6 inputs that your team actually trusts.

A pragmatic health score:

Product usage trend — not absolute usage, but the direction. Is the customer using more or less than last month? A simple API feed from your product into a CRM field.
Support ticket volume and sentiment — rising ticket volume or negative sentiment is a leading indicator. This is a data feed, not a platform.
Stakeholder engagement — has the CSM had a substantive conversation with the economic buyer in the last 60 days? A date field, manually updated. Simple and effective.
Contract milestone proximity — how close is the renewal? Accounts within 90 days of renewal without a confirmed renewal conversation are automatically flagged.
Implementation completeness — did the customer complete onboarding? Are they using the features that correspond to their stated use case?

This model can be built natively in Salesforce or HubSpot with formula fields, a simple automation for the data feeds, and a dashboard that surfaces the accounts that need attention.

Total cost: a few days of RevOps time. Not £40k.

3. Govern the renewal process

Most companies treat renewals as an event. The contract is up in 30 days. Someone reaches out. The customer decides.

That's not a process. That's a coin flip.

A governed renewal process starts 120 days before the contract end date. Not 30.

120 days out: Automated trigger to the CSM. Review account health. Confirm stakeholder map is current. Identify expansion opportunities or risk factors.
90 days out: Renewal conversation with economic buyer. Not a commercial pitch. A value review. Are they getting what they expected? What's changed in their business?
60 days out: Commercial terms prepared. If expansion is on the table, proposal presented. If risk is flagged, escalation workflow activated — CS leader plus account exec engaged.
30 days out: Contract sent. If not signed, daily tracking with escalation thresholds.

This is a CRM workflow with calendar-based triggers. It's governance, not software. And it's more effective than any health score dashboard because it forces proactive action on a defined timeline.

4. Track retention metrics that actually matter

CS platforms generate dozens of metrics. Most are noise. Here are the five that drive decisions:

Gross revenue retention — the percentage of recurring revenue retained before expansion. This is the foundational health metric.
Net revenue retention — including expansion. This tells you whether your customer base is growing or contracting.
Time to value — how long from contract signature to the customer achieving their stated success criteria. Longer time to value correlates with higher churn risk.
Churn reason distribution — categorised, structured, and tracked over time. Are you losing customers to competitors, budget cuts, poor onboarding, or product gaps? The distribution tells you where to invest.
Expansion rate by segment — which customer segments expand and which don't? This informs both the CS investment model and the sales targeting strategy.

All five of these can be tracked in a CRM with proper field architecture. No overlay required.

When a CS Platform Makes Sense

I'm not saying CS platforms are never justified. There are scenarios where the buy decision is rational.

You have 500+ customers and a CS team of 10+. At this scale, the aggregation and automation capabilities of a dedicated platform create genuine efficiency. The volume of accounts exceeds what CRM-native workflows can manage gracefully.
Your product usage data is complex and high-volume. If you need to process millions of usage events to calculate health, a purpose-built platform handles that data pipeline better than a CRM integration.
You've already built the governance. If your handoff is structured, your renewal process is governed, and your health model is validated — and you need better tooling to scale it — a platform adds value on top of a solid foundation.

The key word is "on top of." A CS platform scales an existing architecture. It doesn't replace missing architecture.

If you buy the platform before you've built the governance, you'll have a sophisticated tool visualising a broken process. The dashboards will look great. The outcomes won't change.

The Build Path

Here's the sequence I recommend for companies between 50 and 500 customers.

Month 1: Fix the sales-to-CS handoff. Mandatory fields. Structured data transfer. No more forwarded emails.
Month 2: Build a simple health model in the CRM. Four to six inputs. Automated scoring. Dashboard for the CS leader.
Month 3: Implement the governed renewal process. 120-day triggers. Defined milestones. Escalation workflows.
Month 4–6: Measure the impact. Did gross retention improve? Did churn reasons shift? Is time to value decreasing? These numbers tell you whether the architecture is working.
Month 6+: Evaluate whether you've outgrown the CRM-native approach. If yes, now you can evaluate platforms with a clear understanding of what you need — because you've been running the process manually and know where the gaps are.

Most companies find that the CRM-native approach handles their needs well past 200 customers. The platform conversation becomes relevant much later than vendors want you to believe.

The Vendor Incentive

CS platform vendors sell the same narrative as every other SaaS vendor in the revenue stack.

"You need visibility. Our platform provides visibility. Without it, you're flying blind."

That narrative is designed to make you feel that the platform is the prerequisite for improvement. It isn't. The prerequisite is governance. The platform is an optional accelerant.

The vendor can't sell you governance. There's no licence fee for fixing your handoff process. There's no annual contract for building a health model in your CRM. So they sell you the platform and hope you'll figure out the governance part later.

Most companies don't. They configure the platform. They build the dashboards. They wonder why retention hasn't improved. And then they blame the team instead of the architecture.

Don't buy the tool before you've built the system. The system is the leverage. The tool is optional.