10 Best Customer Engagement Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 22 tools reviewed.
With so many different customer engagement software solutions available, finding the right one for your business is tough. You know you want software to help you manage your customer relationships efficiently so you can enhance their experience and address their needs more effectively, but you need to figure out which software is best. In this post, I'll help you make this choice easy by sharing my insights on the best customer engagement software to connect with your customers at scale and foster a positive brand experience.
What is Customer Engagement Software?
Customer engagement software are tools designed to manage interactions between customers and a business. They help to streamline communication, customer service, and support requests, enhancing the customer experience across the entire customer lifecycle. They achieve this through features like multi-channel communications tools (via email, chat, or social media), automated responses, feedback collection mechanisms, and personalization abilities. You can also connect them with other systems you may already be using, such as CRM systems, chatbots, email marketing platforms, and social media accounts to make your workflows more efficient.
Customer engagement software offers numerous benefits including better data-driven insights into customer behaviors and preferences, leading to increased sales and revenue, plus increased efficiency through automation. By increasing customer engagement you can expect improvements to your overall customer satisfaction and brand loyalty as well.
Overviews of the 20 Best Customer Engagement Software
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.
UserGuiding is a customer onboarding and engagement platform that helps you familiarize new users with your product. You can build no-code walkthroughs that get new users up and running quickly, and show existing users how to navigate key product features and functions.
The software also facilitates customer feedback collection via micro-surveys. There are tons of pre-built survey templates to choose from, or you can build your own. The survey builder is also code-free, and the analytics dashboard provides you with real-time insights from survey responses.
UserGuiding integrates with other tools including Mixpanel, Segment, Intercom, Slack, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Woopra, and HubSpot.
Paid plans start from $89 per month with annual billing, and a 14-day free trial is available.
Front is a customer communications management platform that centralizes your email, live chat, and SMS conversations in a single inbox. It allows your team to manage customer conversations more efficiently and provide more personalized, contextual customer support and services. The software's automation capabilities and its built-in collaborative tools facilitate improved teamwork and streamlined processes.
You can alleviate your team's manual workload with the software's automations. For example, incoming requests can be automatically categorized and routed to the appropriate support agent, saving your team time and providing a quicker, more personalized experience to customers seeking assistance. You can also collect feedback from customers through the platform, providing your team with important insights about customer satisfaction, needs, questions, and more.
Secret direct messaging within customer communication threads allows team members to collaborate towards better resolutions without jumping back and forth from a separate messaging tool. Additionally, being able to set up an internal knowledge base makes it easy for team members to access crucial information for resolving customer issues swiftly.
The software has over 100 native integrations with other apps, including WhatsApp, Dialpad, Twilio, Intercom, Facebook, Instagram, Slack, Twitter, Asana, HubSpot, Jira, and Salesforce, among others. An API is also available to build custom integrations with.
Pricing for Front starts at $19 per user, per month when billed annually, and a 7 day free trial is available.
Thryv
Improve customer experience with automated review requests and review responses
Thryv is a client experience platform that’s ideal for a service-based small business. The solution creates a database for all your customer information. With Thryv, your team can add custom notes to client profiles so they’ll always put their best foot forward when starting a conversation.
The solution has a clean layout that’s easy to navigate, and your team should be able to find the platform’s major features without any kind of training. The solution integrates with your social media channels, allowing you to respond in real time and post on multiple platforms from a central location. You can also create an automated social media posting schedule.
You can use Thryv’s email templates to request reviews when completing appointments or processing payments. The tool’s automated review acknowledgment feature responds to your Google, Yelp, and Facebook reviews within one business day if you fail to do so yourself. Both these features help you improve customer experience.
Thryv integrates with dozens of apps, including QuickBooks Online, Mailchimp, Typeform, Twilio, Zoom, and Clover.
Thryv offers custom pricing upon request. You can book a free demo.
Snoball
Best for automatically engaging customers for product reviews and referrals
Snoball is a customer engagement and referral platform designed to facilitate word-of-mouth marketing by using incentives to motivate customers to submit product reviews and referrals. Snoball's proactive approach to word-of-mouth marketing and reputation marketing make it stand out compared to other systems in this list.
Customer-focused teams can use Snowball to create personalized experiences that build brand loyalty and community, creating memorable interactions that resonate with customers while encouraging participation and feedback. Using targeted campaigns and automated customer interactions, Snoball also helps keep your products top-of-mind in your customer's eyes, nudging them into becoming brand ambassadors.
Their advanced analytics dashboard also offers engagement metrics to help you optimize your strategies and tailor your customer experiences based on previous interactions, boosting engagement.
Integrations are available with popular CRM systems such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Zoho CRM, Oracle, and Adobe. If you'd like to set up additional integrations, they also offer webhooks and an API.
Snoball offers a free plan with limited features to test their software out. Paid plans start at $499/month.
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.
Best for collecting and tracking customer feedback via recurring surveys
SurveySparrow is a customer engagement software that's designed to help businesses gather feedback and engage with their customers. It's all about making the process of collecting and analyzing customer feedback a whole lot easier. It's got a pretty neat interface that's easy to navigate, and it's packed with features that make it a solid choice for businesses of all sizes.
I included SurveySparrow because it can do more than just send out surveys and collect responses. Instead, it can help you engage with your customers more meaningfully so you can understand their needs and make informed decisions based on their feedback. By doing so, you'll be able to build stronger relationships with your customers and increase your brand loyalty.
One of the standout features of SurveySparrow is its conversational interface. Instead of presenting users with a long list of questions, it breaks down surveys into a chat-like conversation. This makes the survey-taking experience a lot more engaging and less tedious. Plus, it's got a variety of question types to choose from, so you can tailor your surveys to fit your needs.
Another feature that I really like is their recurring surveys. This allows you to send out surveys at regular intervals, which is great for tracking customer satisfaction over time. It's also got a robust reporting feature that lets you analyze your survey data in-depth. You can even segment your data based on different criteria, which is super useful for identifying trends and patterns.
Integrations are available with MailChimp, HubSpot, Intercom, Salesforce, Zapier, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Facebook Pixel, and many other systems.
They offer a Basic free plan with limited features to get you started, as well as a 14-day free trial. After that, their paid plans start at $19/month.
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 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 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 $20/user/month and offers a free trial.
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.
The Best Customer Engagement Software Solutions Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| UserGuiding | From $89/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Front | From $19/user/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Thryv | Available upon request | Website |
| Snoball | From $499/month | Website |
| Jotform | From $39/user/month | Website |
| SurveySparrow | From $19/month | Website |
| Braze | Pricing upon request | Website |
| HubSpot | From $45/month | Website |
| Dialpad | From $20/user/month | Website |
| Pendo | Pricing upon request | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Customer Engagement Tools
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Infobip
Give your team the data it needs to keep customers engaged
- NetSuite CRM
Track client interactions and use the data to improve customer profiles
- Salesforce Customer 360
Connect all your data to create customer profiles
- MoEngage
Gain actionable insights from behavioral data
- Zendesk
Distribute customer interactions to the right employees with custom triggers
- Copper
CRM that integrates with your Google tools and tracks user activity so you can improve your relationships.
- Keap
Customer engagement platform that helps you turn an ordinary lead into a loyal customer with marketing automation.
- Freshdesk
Customer support and service solution that enables your agents to advise clients on their next-best-action.
- Kustomer
Customer relationship management solution that helps you create engaging multichannel workflows with the help of automation.
- Nutshell
Customer data platform that enables you to keep track of every deal you make and automate your sales process.
- ServiceNow
Customer success platform that helps you map out engaging customer journeys with flexible templates.
- HubSpot CRM
Complete sales and marketing software that helps you track and analyze customer interactions in real time.
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.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
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.
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 Best Customer Experience Management Software.
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