Summary
Planhat is a Customer Success Platform (CSP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, Professional Services Automation (PSA) software, and an AI Platform (AIP), all in one
Use Planhat for your entire customer lifecycle - from awareness, to active deals with prospects, to onboarding new customers, to renewals and upgrades
Planhat is a complete data and automation platform, centralizing various types of business data all in one place, with a focus on automating processes and using AI to maximize efficiency and productivity
Planhat is highly customizable, not only for your organization as a whole, but also for each individual user, streamlining the user experience, despite the very wide range of functionality possible in Planhat
Who is this article for?
Anyone who would like an introduction to Planhat
Article contents
What is Planhat?
Planhat is your complete customer data and automation platform. It is all of:
A Customer Success Platform (CSP)
A wide range of features designed for Customer Success Managers (CSMs) and CS Leaders
Use Planhat to manage customer "Health", adoption, expansion and churn
Retain and grow your customers
Maximize Net Revenue Retention (NRR)
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software
Planhat is a next-generation CRM, natively supporting the SaaS (subscription) financial model
Use Planhat for your sales pipeline - deals, contacts, forecasting and so on
Win new business and grow your revenue
Once you've closed the deal, use Planhat's CSP functionality to onboard and manage those customers long-term, without changing platform
Professional Services Automation (PSA) software
With the "PSA module", Planhat is your dedicated PSA solution
It's designed for Professional Services, Service Delivery, Implementation, Project Management, and so on
Planhat has a suite of features for time tracking, capacity planning, utilization and resource allocation
With enhanced visibility and automation, you can optimize your PSA processes
An AI Platform (AIP)
Planhat is AI-focused, with AI embedded throughout the app, for all departments and use cases (CSP/CRM/PSA)
Use AI to automate tasks, generate content, and surface insights, making prospect- and customer-facing teams more efficient and strategic
There is a full suite of AI functionality, from simple built-in features (such as Conversation Sentiment Analysis and Writing Assistant) to the ability to build advanced complex solutions (e.g. using Custom Automations or Planhat's MCP Server)
Make use of Planhat's AI connections, or "bring your own"
For an overview of Planhat's AI functionality, see here
Key principles
Use Planhat for the complete customer lifecycle
Planhat is designed for every step of the customer journey
From the pre-sales prospect stage, to onboarding a new customer, to later renewals and upgrades (and potentially churn)
Automation
Automation is at the heart of Planhat, removing tedious manual work
So many elements can be automated in Planhat, often in combination with AI. This includes Automations (Templated and Custom) and Workflows
Automating your processes saves you time and effort, and maximizes your efficiency and productivity. It enables you to achieve more with less, and act more quickly
All your data, all in one place
Planhat is a full 360-degree view of your customers/prospects, rather than you needing to use lots of disjointed separate tools
Planhat is the complete solution, for various business functions and various types of data - use it for sales, onboarding, renewals, support, usage analysis, communication, product development, projects, enablement, and more
Use Planhat's wide range of native integrations to sync data into Planhat (and out of Planhat) from a large number of tools, such as Gmail, Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Jira, Snowflake, and many more. Other data transfer methods include Planhat's API
Planhat is highly customizable
... both in terms of which parts of Planhat are in your organization's subscription, but also for each individual user within your organization's copy of Planhat (tenant)
As Planhat can be used for so many different use cases, you might think it would end up with a very complex UI, with it being difficult for each individual user to find the features and data relevant to them, but actually this isn't the case
Through granular permissions, and a combination of "top down" (admin-driven) and "bottom up" (user-driven) customization of content, each individual can have a completely personalized, optimized version of Planhat, tailored to their needs
We expand on some of these points next in this article.
Incredibly powerful, yet easy to use
When working on acquiring new customers, and then retaining and expanding existing accounts, you could have data spread out in separate tools. Imagine you use one app for your customer database, and then your usage data is in another tool, instructional/strategic documents are in another place, projects/services are organized in a different piece of software, emails are in another, support tickets are in another, financial data is in another, and so on. This would make it really difficult for you to get a full understanding of your customers/prospects, and would waste your time as you'd need to search for information in lots of different places. In this scenario, it's easy to miss something, and difficult to identify what's important and take the most effective action.
Planhat is your solution - all your different types of data are compiled in one place, so you can get a complete understanding of your portfolio as a whole, plus a 360-degree view of each specific customer/prospect. Planhat has a huge range of features, enabling you to act in response to that data, and run many different aspects of your business within Planhat (with functionality for Customer Success, Sales, Professional Services / Service Delivery, Support, Product Development, Marketing, Finance, and so on).
Okay, great! But simply having data and features in one place is not enough, as it could be overwhelming. Other customer platforms can feel a bit like you're trying to make your way through a dense jungle - it's really hard to find the right path through all the distractions. There may be lots of data and functionality available, but it's difficult to see what's relevant to you personally, for your job role. You might be faced with less relevant data/features and struggle to find what you need - potentially ending up with some of the same issues as if you were using multiple tools as originally described.
Again, this is where Planhat comes to your rescue. Planhat is highly customizable, meaning that each Planhat user sees exactly what they need to see, without the clutter of elements that aren't relevant to them. Each user has their own "Home" screen - the UI personalized for them. Other content is still available if needed, but does not get in the way of focus areas. The customization can be both "top down" (configured by your admins for your different teams) and "bottom up" (chosen/designed by each individual user). We'll talk more about this personalization in the next section of this article.
With the foundational data, advanced functionality, and ability for each Planhat user to have a personalized UI, Planhat is both powerful and intuitive for everyone involved in the entire customer journey, from awareness to advocacy.
"Top down" and "bottom up" customization
Planhat's UI can be highly personalized, as we mentioned. When we were designing this ability to customize, there were two possible opposing approaches, which you may find in other tools:
"Top down" customization only - in this scenario, Planhat admins within your organization (e.g. CS Ops) would design the setup for your teams. For example, they would design one UI for your Customer Success team, and another for your Sales team
Pros:
Efficient, because each individual Planhat user wouldn't have to "reinvent the wheel" and do all of the configuration themselves
People with expertise could determine what's recommended/used within your organization
Cons:
Could be too rigid and not personalized enough - even within a team, often users would like to see slightly different things, and work in slightly different ways
Could be a lot of work for the Planhat admins to design all the UIs for everyone
"Bottom up" customization only - in this scenario, each individual user would design their own UI
Pros:
Each user could create their own uniquely personalized UI, based on how they like to work
Less work for the Planhat admin to do
Cons:
Users with less experience might not know what they are doing - how your business thinks about things, and what processes are recommended etc. They could get stuck, or not work in the best way for your organization
Each user would have to "reinvent the wheel", configuring everything from scratch even if a co-worker had already designed something suitable for themselves
The overall software (the Planhat tenant in this case) could potentially get messy, with everyone creating lots of different things
Considering all these pros and cons, how does Planhat solve for this? Well, Planhat is the best of both worlds! Each user's UI is a combination of "top down" personalization and "bottom up" personalization. This means you get all the benefits, without the possible drawbacks of going with just one approach.
For example:
Planhat admins can:
Create "Home Templates", pinning and recommending content to different groups of users
Design "Libraries" of verified content, which users can browse (in the Content Explorer) and select from
Set permissions for Roles to determine each user's ability to access data and features
Planhat users can:
Choose which recommended content to include in their Home
Browse additional content created by others in their Planhat tenant
Create and share their own content
Perfect! And there are many more ways you can customize Planhat too, to optimize it for you and your team.
🚀 Tip
To learn more about content in Planhat - Pages, Views, Sections and Libraries - you can read our article here.
A key concept in Planhat is that you can position different types of data (custom Pages) next to each other, grouped by a topic/theme/department. So, for example, you could have:
a Document describing your renewals process (strategy),
next to a Data Table of customers going through renewals,
next to a Grouped List of customers with upcoming renewals,
next to a display of Workflows related to renewals,
next to a Dashboard showing charts of key data related to renewals (reporting)