Software Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best tools that I’ll cover in this article.
- 7. Kustomer — Customer relationship management solution that helps you create engaging multichannel workflows with the help of automation.
Marketing specialists and salespeople disagree on many things, but there’s one point they agree on - it’s easier to foster relationships with your existing customers than to acquire new ones.
Customer engagement is an ongoing process that helps companies build relationships with their customers and prospects in order to increase brand awareness and loyalty.
Even though customer engagement is a hot topic in today’s business industry, setting up efficient customer engagement workflows is still difficult. But this is where customer engagement software comes in.
Customer engagement software enables you to monitor your interactions with prospects and customers across multiple channels. These solutions also help you build automated or semi-automated workflows to move your customers and prospects through the customer journey, so they make it easier to nurture relationships.
Read my review to discover the best customer engagement software you can use in 2023. The review includes brief descriptions and screenshots for all the solutions that made the cut, and a comparison chart so you can decide which tool would be a good fit for your business.
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best customer engagement app? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for solutions with clean interfaces, so you won’t waste your time searching for the right functionalities.
- Usability: I look for tools that don’t require months of training to master. Your team should be able to learn how to use most of their features after a brief onboarding.
- Integrations: I look for software that integrates with your other tools, so you won’t have to change your app ecosystem in order to use them.
- Value for $: I look for solutions that enable you to track your interactions and create detailed reports on your efforts, so you can get the most out of your investment.
Customer Engagement Software Key Features
- Tracking capabilities: The solution should be able to track your interactions with prospects and customers across multiple channels. The more channels it can track, the better.
- Real-time insights: You should be able to determine the impact of your work without difficulty. Real-time insights enable to you see how well your team is performing.
- Automation: Customer relationships are not always easy to manage. And managing hundreds or thousands of relationships is impossible without good automation features.
- Personalized experiences: The software should enable you to personalize your engagement efforts. For example, people who have open support tickets should not receive marketing emails, those who just bought your most expensive package shouldn’t receive limited offers for less expensive options, and so on.
- 360 customer views: The solution should organize all the data you collect - from marketing data to social media discussions, sales data, and customer service transcripts - and create detailed customer profiles so you can understand their needs and wants.
- Analytics: You need data in order to create efficient workflows and boost customer satisfaction. The customer engagement platform should offer powerful analytics capabilities and allow you to slice and dice data however you choose.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Customer Engagement Software Solutions
Here’s a brief description of each customer engagement tool to showcase each platform’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Jotform Enterprise
Best customer engagement software for B2B organizations
JotForm Enterprise provides a comprehensive platform for B2B businesses to engage with customers in an efficient and effective manner.
It provides powerful tools to build forms, collect data from customers, create automated workflows, and analyze the data collected from customers. The platform also offers customizable options that allow businesses to tailor their customer engagement strategies according to the needs of their specific industry. Moreover, its drag-and-drop form builder allows businesses to create forms without any coding knowledge or technical expertise quickly.
They have a powerful reporting feature that provides insights into the performance of forms and helps users make better decisions about their customer engagement strategies. With this feature, businesses can track key metrics such as form completion rate, total submissions, and average submission time. Additionally, users can also track individual form fields, such as the most popular choice in a dropdown list or which type of questions are answered most frequently by users. This information helps businesses gain valuable insights into their customers’ preferences so that they can refine their strategies accordingly.
JotForm Enterprise integrates with other popular apps, such as Slack, Salesforce, OneDrive, Airtable, and Google Drive, so users can easily connect with other services while collecting customer data. This makes it easier for businesses to manage their data across multiple platforms without needing additional resources or staff members dedicated solely to this purpose. Furthermore, its built-in analytics engine allows businesses to stay up-to-date on their performance by providing detailed reports on various aspects, such as user activity and completion rates for each form field or form in general.
Zendesk
Distribute customer interactions to the right employees with custom triggers
Zendesk is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution with excellent customer engagement features. The software enables you to interact with your customers on their favorite channels, whether that’s social media, voice, live chat, or email. Each interaction is recorded and you can create custom triggers to distribute specific conversations to the right people in your team.
This solution creates a database for all your customer interaction data. This offers a clear view of your prospects and leads, allowing your marketing experts to send only qualified prospects to your sales team in order to improve your closing rate.
Zendesk integrates with hundreds of solutions, including Gmail, Microsoft Office 365, Slack, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Instagrammer, and ActiveCampaign.
Zendesk Sell costs from $19/user/month. The solution offers a free 14-day trial.
Braze
Plan out and test personalized customer journeys
Braze is a customer engagement platform that relies on automation and interactive content to help you create memorable customer experiences. Braze’s simple drag-and-drop interface enables you to produce omnichannel customer journeys with ease.
The platform collects data from all your customer-facing channels and organizes it to help you understand customer behavior. This enables you to segment your audience and engage customers with the right message for each step of their purchasing journey.
Braze also allows you to test different campaigns and messages, so you can run short A/B tests to discover the winning messaging strategy.
Braze integrates with dozens of solutions, including Shopify, Segment, Heap, Foursquare, Facebook, and Amplitude.
Braze offers custom pricing upon request.
HubSpot
Best unified CRM, CMS, marketing, and help desk
HubSpot is a feature-rich CRM platform that offers a wide variety of tools for marketing, sales, customer service and content management, among others. The marketing hub, for instance, offers features like marketing automation, video hosting and management, analytics dashboards, blog and content creation tools and social media and SEO tools. It is one of the best CRM solutions for businesses of all sizes, especially those that are looking to track, capture and nurture leads, engage existing customers and want to analyze their business metrics more efficiently.
Best suited for B2B or B2C companies, across a variety of sectors, HubSpot offers features like inbound and outbound marketing, lead management, contact management, email tracking, sales pipeline management and sales automation.
HubSpot offers free and premium plans on all its products, including the Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS Hub and Operations Hub. The free plan comes with an array of free tools such as forms, live chat, ticketing, drag-and-drop editor, data sync, email marketing, basic bots, email scheduling, mobile optimization, historical sync and ad management.
The standard starting price for all of HubSpot’s product hubs is $45/month, except for the CMS Hub, which starts at $23/month. A CRM Suite/bundle is also available with a starting price of $45/month.
Dialpad
Use AI to improve your conversations
Dialpad is a sales engagement platform that uses AI to help your sales team become more effective. The solution integrates with all your communication channels, allowing you to monitor all your interactions from a single dashboard.
This solution stands out from its competition thanks to its AI. The AI creates a knowledge base for your team and analyses their conversations to help them with scripts if the customers ask tough questions.
The AI also creates accurate transcripts for every conversation and uses them to improve your knowledge base. Then, it uses that information to advise every sales rep on how to handle different situations, improving employee engagement.
Dialpad integrates with multiple tools, including Salesforce, Hubspot, Microsoft Teams, Intercom, Integromat, and Zapier.
Dialpad costs from $15/user/month. The solution offers a free 14-day trial.
Pendo
Keep your audience engaged with in-app communication
Pendo is a product experience platform that can help your development team keep users engaged and responsive. The software makes it easy to communicate with your users via in-app messages, product guides, and walkthroughs.
Pendo’s analytics tool helps you uncover which features your customers love and which they ignore. You can use surveys and polls as customer communication tools to collect feedback and improve your product.
You customer support specialists can access Pendo’s database to perform market research and identify behavior trends.
Pendo integrates with dozens of tools, including Jira, Hubspot, Calendly, Drift, Figma, Planhat, and Optimizely.
Pendo offers custom pricing upon request. The tool is free to use for up to 1,000 monthly active users. You can also access a demo.
Kustomer
Customer relationship management solution that helps you create engaging multichannel workflows with the help of automation.
Kustomer is a customer engagement software with omnichannel messaging, a unified customer view, and AI-powered automations. They are now part of Meta, so expect seamless connection with your social profiles like Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp. Key features include customer self-service resources, voice provider integration, business process automation, standard and custom reporting, multilingual support, satisfaction measurement and reporting, fully-automated conversations, and sentiment analysis.
Kustomer costs from $89/month/user and comes with a 14-day free trial.
Infobip
Give your team the data it needs to keep customers engaged
Infobip is an omnichannel communication solution that helps businesses improve customer engagement and retention. The software offers a range of communication tools that help you build better relationships.
This solution uses customer information to build detailed profiles that include behavior data, previous interactions, and shopping and payment history. The tool uses this data to offer insights. This can help your team identify sales opportunities and act on them.
Infobip’s dashboard gives every customer success manager the data they need to offer clients the right solutions without switching tabs or navigating through multiple communication solutions.
Once they start a conversation, your sales or support specialists can see a history of the client’s interactions with your brand, and they can also set up automated notifications and reminders to let other team members know what to do.
Infobip integrates with a variety of apps, including ZohoCRM, VTEX, BIgCommerce, Hubspot, and Jira.
Infobip offers custom pricing upon request.
NetSuite CRM
Track client interactions and use the data to improve customer profiles
Netsuite CRM is a customer engagement solution that helps you improve your sales process and boost customer loyalty with automation. The platform offers multiple helpful features but it has a steep learning curve for people who are not familiar with SQL.
Netsuite helps you understand your customers and prospects at each step of the customer journey. The solution organizes your data and improves your client profiles based on their interactions, making sure that your sales specialists have the necessary information when contacting a prospect to make a sale.
Netsuite integrates with dozens of solutions via third-party integrators like Zapier or Integromat.
Netsuite offers custom pricing upon request. You can book a free product tour.
Salesforce Customer 360
Connect all your data to create customer profiles
Salesforce Customer 360 is a customer relationships platform that helps businesses connect all their data to better understand their clients. The tool combines the data you collect on multiple channels to create customer profiles, so your marketing, sales, and service teams can be more productive.
This solution helps you deliver better customer experiences. Its Einstein AI offers tailored recommendations to your client-facing experts so they’ll engage your prospects with strong offers.
Salesforce integrates with hundreds of solutions, including DocuSign, LinkedIn Sales Navigator, Mailchimp, Zoom, Asana, and Paypal.
Salesforce costs from $25/user/month. You can try Salesforce out for free for 14 days.
The 10 Best Customer Engagement Software Solutions Summary
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jotform Enterprise Best customer engagement software for B2B organizations | Free plan available | From $34/user/month | Visit Website |
| 2 | Zendesk Distribute customer interactions to the right employees with custom triggers | Free trial available | Plans start at $49/agent/month | Visit Website |
| 3 | Braze Plan out and test personalized customer journeys | Not available | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
| 4 | HubSpot Best unified CRM, CMS, marketing, and help desk | 14-day free trial + freemium version available | From $45/month | Visit Website |
| 5 | Dialpad Use AI to improve your conversations | Free trial available | Plans start at $20/user/month | Visit Website |
| 6 | Pendo Keep your audience engaged with in-app communication | Free version available | From $7,000/year | Visit Website |
| 7 | Kustomer Customer relationship management solution that helps you create engaging multichannel workflows with the help of automation. | 14-day free trial | From $89/user/month | Visit Website |
| 8 | Infobip Give your team the data it needs to keep customers engaged | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 9 |  NetSuite CRM Track client interactions and use the data to improve customer profiles | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 10 |  Salesforce Customer 360 Connect all your data to create customer profiles | 14 Days Free Trial | From $25/user/month | Visit Website |
Other Customer Engagement Tools
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Kustomer - Customer relationship management solution that helps you create engaging multichannel workflows with the help of automation.
- HubSpot CRM - Complete sales and marketing software that helps you track and analyze customer interactions in real time.
- Front - Customer communication hub that helps your team collaborate in order to offer the best customer experience possible.
- ServiceNow - Customer success platform that helps you map out engaging customer journeys with flexible templates.
- Freshdesk - Customer support and service solution that enables your agents to advise clients on their next-best-action.
- Pipedrive - Sales enablement CRM that helps you track and optimize your sales funnel.
- Nutshell - Customer data platform that enables you to keep track of every deal you make and automate your sales process.
- Keap - Customer engagement platform that helps you turn an ordinary lead into a loyal customer with marketing automation.
- Maximizer CRM - CRM that monitors your team’s activity and offers leaders insights so they can optimize their messaging.
- Copper - CRM that integrates with your Google tools and tracks user activity so you can improve your relationships.
Improve customer engagement with software
Building meaningful relationships is difficult. But building great relationships with thousands of people is almost impossible without dedicated software.
If you want to build a loyal customer base, you need to offer a great shopping experience. As Emily Collins, senior analyst with Forrester Research, said:
They [customers] come for the perks, but they stay for the experience.
You can learn more about creating a great shipping experience in our 10 Best Customer Experience Management Software Of 2023 article.
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