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With so many different customer engagement platforms out there, finding the right fit for your needs is tough. You know you want a platform to help you engage with your customers meaningfully so you can enhance their experience with your brand, but you need to figure out which option is best. In this article, I'll help you make this choice easier by sharing my insights on the best customer engagement platforms to strengthen your customer relationships and optimize your customer interactions, based on my personal experience in customer service.

What are Customer Engagement Platforms?

Customer engagement platforms are software tools that help businesses interact with customers, gather feedback, provide support, and enhance customer relationships. They include flexible communication tools and automation tools for common actions and frequent responses to provide more timely responses. They also integrate with other customer-centric systems and track customer behaviors and preferences to help teams provide more tailored interactions.

Many companies use customer engagement platforms to create more personalized brand interactions with the end goal of increasing customer loyalty and improving customer satisfaction. These platforms also use automation to speed up response times and streamline key communications to maintain a consistent brand image.

Overviews of the 10 Best Customer Engagement Platforms

Here’s a brief description of each customer engagement software to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a preview of the interface.

Best for efficient team communication

  • 7-day free trial
  • From $19/user/month (billed annually)

Front is a customer communication platform that consolidates emails, social media, phone calls, and chat messages into a single collaborative interface, enabling teams to manage and respond to all customer interactions from one place. The tool is designed to help businesses maintain organized customer interactions, improve response times, and personalize customer service without increasing headcount.

Front serves as a customer engagement platform by centralizing communication from various channels into one shared inbox, allowing teams to manage and respond to customer interactions in a unified manner. It also facilitates collaboration among team members, who can comment, discuss, and assign conversations within the platform, ensuring that customer queries are addressed efficiently. 

Additionally, the tool's automation capabilities help in routing messages to the appropriate team members, while analytics provide insights into customer engagement and team performance. 

Front integrates with Jira, Trello, Workato, Salesforce, Slack, Intercom, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Dialpad, and ClickUp.

Front costs from $19/user/month (billed annually). It comes with a 7-day free trial.

Best for boosting user activation rates

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $89/month (billed annually)
Visit Website
Rating: 4.7/5

UserGuiding is a no-code platform that enables businesses to create interactive product tours, onboarding flows, and contextual help for users within web applications. Overall, the platform is designed to be easy-to-use, enabling non-technical staff to implement and update onboarding materials as needed, with the goal of improving user adoption. 

UserGuiding assists customer engagement platforms by providing tools that enhance the user experience through interactive onboarding guides, in-app messages, and user feedback collection. These features are designed to help businesses communicate effectively with their customers within the application, guiding them through features and functionalities, and gathering insights to improve the product.

The platform's no-code solution allows for easy customization of onboarding flows, while its analytics capabilities enable businesses to measure the impact of their engagement strategies. By improving the onboarding process and offering support throughout the user journey, UserGuiding aims to increase user retention and satisfaction for customer engagement platforms.

UserGuiding integrates with Intercom, Segment, Slack, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Woopra, Mixpanel, and HubSpot.

Pricing starts from $89/month (billed annually). A 14-day free trial is also available.

Best for gamification

  • Free demo available
  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.5/5

Braze is a customer engagement platform centered around personalized communication between brands and consumers. It’s used by the likes of Etsy, HBO, Dominos, and The Guardian for CX engagement initiatives. Noteworthy features include detailed customer analytics dashboards, marketing workflow automations, cross-channel campaign management, predictive tools, and A/B testing.

Braze is the best for you if you want to use gamification as a customer engagement strategy because Braze can help you craft unique engagement models for your business. You can reward customers with vouchers or discount codes when they reach a specific goal.

You can also send congratulatory messages or push notifications for reaching milestones, anniversaries, streaks of daily visits to your site, or for leaving reviews.

Braze pricing is available upon request.

Best for ease-of-use

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.4/5

Pendo is a customer engagement platform you can use to provide customers with the best digital experience when using your website or ecommerce store. You can use Pendo to collect and assess customer feedback, so you’ll know which areas to improve on.

You can also use Pendo to identify features or parts of your website that cause confusion or are challenging to use for customers, so you can tweak them, making them easier to use. If you’re looking for a customer engagement solution that streamlines your employee’s workload so they can engage with customers, then Pendo is the best match for you.

With Pendo’s help, identify roadblocks that prevent employees from delivering optimum performance and schedule pieces of training to help employees improve. You can also use Pendo to create in-app guides to assist customers better, ensuring customer satisfaction and fostering brand loyalty.

Pendo integrates with sales and productivity apps, including Salesforce, Slack, Zendesk, Hubspot CRM, Slack, and others.

Pendo pricing is available upon request.

Best for customer surveys

  • Pricing upon request
Visit Website
Rating: 4.3/5

Qualtrics is a customer experience management platform that can help you listen to customers, receive recommendations, and automatically implement action plans to improve customer experience.

Qualtrics provides you with a centralized platform to capture and assess customer feedback from multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Foursquare, and Thumbtack. It also has a predictive intelligence engine to uncover key drivers of customer loyalty, allowing you to focus on areas with the most impact on customers.

Surveying customers is a direct way of gaining actionable product insights and if you want an effective surveying tool, then Qualtrics CustomerXM is the best for you. Qualtrics makes it easy to create different surveys, including brand awareness surveys, logo testing surveys, and ad testing surveys.

Qualtrics also has a survey QA functionality to assess the effectiveness of your survey form and implement changes for better results.

Qualtrics CustomerXM pricing starts at $1500/account/year, and they offer two free projects as customer trials.

Best for chat automation

  • 30-day free trial
  • From $80/month for up to 10K targeted sessions
Visit Website
Rating: 4.3/5

Twik is an automated web-personalization engine you can use to define user profile groups for easier targeting during marketing activities.

It has embedded user experience enhancers you can activate to improve customer journeys, including a pop-up generator, currency converter, and sticky header. It also has a visual editor feature useful in editing your ecommerce website without affecting your site code.

Twik is best for you to keep your customers engaged using a chatbot because they make building a no-code chatbot easy. With Twik, you can customize your chatbot’s responses, ensuring that your customers receive contextual and timely answers to any real-time questions or concerns. Twik’s chatbot can help you welcome new visitors to your ecommerce site and increase the chances of conversion.

Twik pricing starts at $80/month for up to 10K targeted sessions and offers a 30-day free trial.

Best for CX analytics & reporting

  • 7-day free trial + free plan available
  • From $224/month (billed yearly)

Delighted is a self-serve experience management platform you can use to collect data using NPS surveys and other feedback solicitation. You can use Delighted to create and customize survey forms to obtain specific pieces of information from customers.

Delighted is a multi-channel tool so you can create surveys for your website, social media, email, or SMS.

Delighted is best for you if you want a customer engagement platform with excellent analytics and reporting capabilities. You can use Delighted to segment survey responses to know how different customer segments feel about your brand and what you can do better to promote loyalty.

It also has a dashboard filtering system to segregate and view responses depending on chosen tags.

Delighted pricing starts at $220/account/month, and they offer a 7-day free trial.

Best for enterprises

  • Pricing Upon Request

Augeo is a customer engagement software that uses engagement experiences to drive customer satisfaction and promote brand loyalty. It can help your business connect with partner companies to improve brand recognition and affinity. Augeo can also help your business deliver personalized experiences to customers, making them feel valued.

Augeo is a holistic approach to product/service engagement that is designed to reach everyone in your audience bucket: employees, customers, members, and channel partners. Enterprises will particularly benefit from this all-in-one approach so that they won’t have to onboard multiple tools for different categories of engagement software.

They can handle employee recognition, sales incentives, customer community-building, and partner loyalty programs.

Augeo pricing is available upon request.

Best customer journey orchestration

  • Pricing Upon Request

MoEngage is a customer engagement platform that analyzes consumer behavior to help you deliver personalized messaging across all communications channels. If you have content variations, MoEngage’s AI can help you choose the best-performing content variant to present to customers according to common views/CTA/conversion metrics.

The same AI also identifies the best time to send messages to customers, increasing the likelihood of customers reading your messages and connecting with them. If you want to provide a great customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle, MoEngage is the best customer engagement platform for you. It allows you to personalize how your business deals with customers throughout their customer journey’s touchpoints.

MoEngage’s AI can help nudge customers down the right path during their customer journey according to where they are in the marketing funnel.

MoEngage pricing is available upon request.

Best workflow automation

  • 3 Days Free Trial
  • From $179/month

Zingle is a customer engagement tool you can use to engage with customers in real-time using different messaging channels. It has AI that can handle multiple conversations at once so your staff can be more efficient and have enough time to take care of other activities.

Zingle also lets you increase revenue and drive loyalty through targeted promotions for different customer segments.Zingle is best for your business if you need a customer engagement platform with a workflow automation feature.

Zingle can help you automate simple tasks allowing you to focus on crucial and complicated business aspects. Use Zingle to automate sending welcome emails and thank you notes, ensuring customers feel valued for bringing their business to you. Automation can also save you time to personally attend to more complicated customer concerns and foster brand loyalty through timely intervention.

Zingle pricing starts at $179/month and offers a 3-day free trial.

The Best Customer Engagement Platform Summary Table

Tools Price
Front From $19/user/month (billed annually)
UserGuiding From $89/month (billed annually)
Braze Pricing upon request
Pendo Pricing upon request
Qualtrics Customer Experience Pricing upon request
twik From $80/month for up to 10K targeted sessions
Delighted From $224/month (billed yearly)
Augeo Pricing Upon Request
MoEngage Pricing Upon Request
Zingle From $179/month
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Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

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Other Options

Here’s a few more that didn’t make the top list.

  1. Birdeye

    Best competitive benchmarking

  2. Zoho SalesIQ

    Best knowledge base creation

  3. SurveySparrow

    Best for customer ticket management + NPS surveys

  4. Tremendous

    Software that uses API so users can send rewards and incentives.

  5. Annex Cloud

    Loyalty experience solution you can use to create loyalty programs for your brand.

  6. Medallia

    SaaS customer relationship manager for retail, financial services, and B2B companies.

  7. PUG's Picnic

    Customer engagement solution specializing in gamification.

  8. Sprinklr Service

    Customer experience management platform with sales, marketing, and advertising capabilities.

Comparison Criteria

What do I look for when I select the best customer engagement solution? Here's a summary of my evaluation criteria: 

  1. User Interface (UI): Customer engagement platforms need to be intuitive to navigate for the customer or else it defeats the point of the app. I’m looking for something clean, clear, and well laid out. 
  2. Usability: CEP software is an up-and-coming digital product solution so I don’t expect you to know how to use them right off the bat. I look for tools that have good training programs, an extensive self-help database, and responsive customer support. 
  3. Integrations: CEP solutions need to connect with your broader customer experience strategy, meaning I want something that integrates with your website, social media, enterprise CRM, communication apps, project management tools, and so on.
  4. Value for price: CEP apps are somewhat new in the CX market so I’m looking for something priced out with that in mind. A free trial or freemium version is ideal, so you can give it a test run before committing. 

Customer Engagement Platform Key Features

  1. Engagement analytics: Allows users to analyze and understand customer data to create action plans that can improve customer satisfaction. 
  2. Automation: Automates simple tasks such as responding to emails or web chat queries, so customers receive immediate responses.
  3. Surveys: Enable users to create surveys and understand results to determine areas where customers are dissatisfied and require improvement. 
  4. Customer journey orchestration: Ensures that customers receive assistance throughout the entire customer lifecycle to help foster brand loyalty. 

What Does Customer Engagement Mean?

Customer engagement is an emotional connection between customers and the company/brand. When customers get engaged with a brand, they think of it as more than just a service or product provider but a vital aspect of their lives. Netflix is an excellent example of a company that engages customers by providing services that exceed customer expectations. Netflix uses algorithms to personalize the experience of customers ensuring that they remain loyal customers. 

Related Read: What Is Customer Onboarding? Tips And Best Practices

Why is Customer Engagement Important?

Keeping your customers happy is one of the easiest ways to foster brand loyalty and a customer engagement platform (CEP) can help you. According to Forbes, recruiting new customers costs 5x more than retaining existing customers, giving you even more incentive to keep current customers engaged and coming back. 

This article will give you crucial information about the best customer engagement platforms you can use to foster loyalty to your brand. 

The Takeaway—Keep Customers Connected!

Loyal customers ensure that your business will have reliable sources of sales for years to come, and keeping them engaged is the best way to keep them loyal to your products and your company. With the help of the customer engagement platforms above, you can craft user engagement programs that can immediately turn even new customers into loyal ones. 

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