The Best Customer Experience Management Software List
Here are the top 10 customer experience management software I’d like to highlight out of the 18 I cover in this article:
Creating a great customer experience is simple in principal but difficult in practice. With customers interacting with your brand at so many touchpoints along their journey, it's tough to create something that delivers end-to-end, fosters customer loyalty, and improves customer retention rates.
While adopting a proactive, customer-centric mindset is key, customer experience software can further help you gather feedback, address customer pain points, provide a stellar onboarding experience, and create a deeper connection with your customers.
In this article, I've compiled a list of the best customer experience management software to help you create a competitive advantage through CX.
What is Customer Experience Management Software?
Customer Experience Management (CEM) software is a type of business software designed to help organizations improve their customer experience by collecting and analyzing customer feedback from various sources, mapping the customer journey, identifying areas for improvement, and implementing actions to enhance the overall customer experience. CEM software typically includes features such as customer feedback management, data analytics and reporting, workflow automation, collaboration tools, and integration capabilities.
Overviews of Top 18 CXM Tools of 2023
Below are 2023’s top 18 CXM tools. We’ve included a summary and screenshot of each one.
Zendesk
Best for multi-channel support
Zendesk is a comprehensive customer experience management software that helps businesses deliver customer support. It offers many features, including ticket management, real-time chat, a knowledge base, and reporting tools, facilitating communication between customers and support agents through multiple channels.
Its customizable interface allows businesses to tailor the software to their operational needs, ensuring a seamless experience for customers and support agents. Users can track customer interactions and monitor metrics such as response time and customer satisfaction—giving them the insights they need to improve their customer service continually.
Zendesk provides multichannel support, allowing companies to offer customer service through various channels like email, phone, chat, and social media. Its unified inbox feature ensures that all customer requests from a single customer are automatically merged, streamlining the communication process and enhancing the customer experience.
Zendesk's ticketing system enables businesses to effectively manage and resolve customer inquiries, complaints, and support requests. It allows for seamless tracking and follow-up on customer interactions, promoting timely responses and issue resolution. The ticketing system also offers customizable templates, allowing companies to tailor their responses to fit their brand voice and tone. Users can quickly categorize, tag, and assign tickets and add common messages and solutions to responses, improving efficiency and overall response times.
Zendesk's self-service portal allows companies to create a knowledge base consisting of FAQs, guides, and tutorials, enabling customers to find answers to the usual questions independently. Businesses can relieve their support team of trivial inquiries and instead focus on more complex issues.
Its analytics dashboards offer real-time insights into support performance, allowing companies to evaluate customer satisfaction rates, identify trends, and discover growth opportunities.
Integrations are available with other business tools for marketing automation, project management, and CRM systems.
Pricing starts at $49/agent/month. A free trial is also available through their website.
LiveAgent
Best for building a self-serve content hub
LiveAgent is a cloud-based customer support software with multi-channel help desk and knowledge base management features. Customer support tickets from email, phone, and live chat can be auto-assigned to agents, and managed in the software's shared inbox for teams. Users can set up automations so follow-up messages are sent promptly to incoming requests and spam messages are filtered out from the outset.
In addition to the software's help desk and call center system, it also has tools to build a customer-facing knowledge base. Teams can create articles and how-to guides using the WYSIWYG editor, providing answers to common questions clients can access on their own. A customer forum can also be created to promote exchange among power users or brand advocates. Teams can also collect customer feedback through their knowledge base built with the software.
Pre-built pipelines are available for customer service teams currently working in other systems who want to migrate to the platform. The software supports 43 different language translations, making it a good option for international teams or client bases. Many native and third-party integrations are available, including Slack, Jira, Gmail, and Shopify.
SurveySparrow
Best for refining customer experience
SurveySparrow’s NPS survey tool makes monitoring customer trends and employee engagement easy. With SurveySparrow, you can make turning customers into promoters a fluent process with its omnichannel approach to feedback solicitation.
SurveySparrow lets you automate closing the feedback loop with personalized workflows to instantly value customers’ responses and pacify your detractors. The omnichannel approach helps you reach your audience through any medium, like weblink, in-app embedding, email, SMS, or QR code.You can combine the NPS tool with SurveySparrow’s case management feature to create tickets and efficiently address your customers’ feedback.
SurveySparrow’s simple UI makes the NPS survey creation process enjoyable. It’s worth mentioning that it provides excellent customer support.SureveySparrow integrates with Salesforce, Freshdesk, HubSpot, Power BI, Zendesk, and MailChimp.
SurveySparrow costs from $99/month with the CX Basic plan (2 users included).
It offers a 14-day free trial without asking for your credit card details.
Jotform Enterprise
Best for collecting feedback using advanced surveys + forms
Jotform Enterprise is a cloud-based form builder and automation platform that enables B2B organizations to create and share professional-looking forms and then record and analyze customer responses. The software helps sales and marketing teams generate leads for their pipeline, process order payments, and conduct customer surveys. Through customer surveys, sales teams can easily capture actionable insights based on customer satisfaction and overall experiences.
Thousands of templates are available and tailored for various use cases, from smart PDF forms with conditional logic to customer experience surveys and thank you page customizations. All forms created with Jotform are mobile-optimized, as the software utilizes mobile-first technology to ensure that all published forms look good on any device. Users can create and manage forms easily on their mobile devices too.
Advanced form options also help users add a different dimension to their customer feedback surveys, such as adding multilingual support, automation features, incorporating conditional logic, and creating offline forms. The software has dozens of in-built features tailored to improve customer interaction with different forms and surveys.
Jotform Enterprise also has a report builder that allows users to visualize and present their data to stakeholders within seconds. They can leverage the report builder to convert customer responses into detailed reports that are easy to understand. This will help them identify useful insights crucial to making future business decisions.
Pricing details are available upon request.
Zoho CRM
Best CX management in a complete CRM
Zoho CRM is a robust customer relationship management platform used by over 250,000 businesses in 180 countries. It offers tools to help you manage your sales pipeline, marketing automation, and customer support activities, effectively covering all areas of your revenue operations. The software can facilitate customer conversations via phone, email, live chat, and social media.
When a customer interaction is initiated through any of your connected channels, your CX team will be notified. The software also stores detailed communication data and customer records, ensuring your agents have all the context they need to effectively handle requests. Teams can also manage their calendars, files, and emails through the system. Workflow automations help you easily respond to simple requests without adding to your team's workload.
Integrations include Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Google Drive, Zapier, Zendesk, and ServiceNow. Paid plans start at $14/user/month, and a free version is available for up to 3 users.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360
Best for personalizing customer experiences
SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is a one-stop-shop for creating and personalizing customer experiences to boost business and improve customer loyalty. It includes features such as guided analytics, tests and experiments, customer journey optimization, personalizations, and actionable insights.
Businesses that use this software can track all customer interactions across all their touchpoints. It also interprets the data to enable businesses to make decisions on parts of the customer journey that need improvement.
Acquire
Best for helpdesk features
Acquire provides companies with a unified customer service helpdesk. It brings together all channels – email, social media, live chat, video chat, voice calls, and text messages — into a single timeline.
This improves the speed at which customer inquiries and complaints are responded to, thus improving their experience. It also provides data analytics that help with decisions that improve the customer experience.
ZOHO CRMPlus
Best for delivering unified customer experiences
Zoho CRM Plus unifies sales, marketing, and customer service teams in one interface and helps deliver exceptional customer experiences. The platform provides businesses with a 360-degree view of their customers, helps them manage every customer interaction across channels, and automates business processes.
Built-in AI, unified analytics, and website chatbots are some of the most popular features of the platform.Zoho Desk integrates with other first-party Zoho software (Desk, SalesIQ, Analytics, Assist) as well as third-party partners like Google Workspace, Jira, Slack, Salesforce, Microsoft Teams, Mailchimp, Twilio, and Duocom.
You can also connect to other apps using a paid plan through Zapier.Zoho CRM Plus starts at $57/user/month (billed annually) and comes with a 30-day free trial.
Adobe Experience Manager
Best for digital asset management features
Adobe Experience Manager integrates content management systems and digital asset management to monitor, track, analyze, optimize, and improve the customer experience.
The tool simplifies the distribution of content across several channels, and personalizes these contents to the customer’s device, to improve their experience with your brand, services, or products.
UX360
Best for agile development
UX360 combines customer experience and user experience teams to provide a customer experience management solution. It directly integrates with agile development.
It allows users to conduct research related to current customer experience insights and make decisions about which changes to implement that will improve the customer experience.
The Best Customer Experience Management Software Summary Table
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Zendesk Best for multi-channel support | 14-day free trial | From $49/user/month | Visit Website |
| 2 | LiveAgent Best for building a self-serve content hub | 30-day free trial | From $15/agent/month | Visit Website |
| 3 | SurveySparrow Best for refining customer experience | 14-day free trial | From $19/month | Visit Website |
| 4 | Jotform Enterprise Best for collecting feedback using advanced surveys + forms | Free plan available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 5 | Zoho CRM Best CX management in a complete CRM | 15-day free trial | From $14/user/month | Visit Website |
| 6 | SAS Customer Intelligence 360 Best for personalizing customer experiences | Free trial available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 7 | Acquire Best for helpdesk features | Not available | Pricing available upon request | Visit Website |
| 8 | ZOHO CRMPlus Best for delivering unified customer experiences | 30 Days Free Trial | From $57/user/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
| 9 |  Adobe Experience Manager Best for digital asset management features | Not available | Visit Website | |
| 10 |  UX360 Best for agile development | Not available | Visit Website |
Need expert help selecting the right Customer Experience Software?
We’ve joined up with the software comparison platform Crozdesk.com to assist you in finding the right software. Crozdesk’s Customer Experience Software advisors can create a personalized shortlist of software solutions with unbiased recommendations to help you identify the solutions that best suit your business's needs. Through our partnership you get free access to their bespoke software selection advice, removing both time and hassle from the research process.
It only takes a minute to submit your requirements and they will give you a quick call at no cost or commitment. Based on your needs you’ll receive customized software shortlists listing the best-fitting solutions from their team of software advisors (via phone or email). They can even connect you with your selected vendor choices along with community negotiated discounts. To get started, please complete the form below:
Other Customer Experience Management Software Options
Looking for more customer experience management tools to check out? Here’s a few more that didn’t make the list above.
How I Selected the Best Customer Experience Management Software
If you're wondering how I selected the best customer experience management software, here's where I'll break it all down for you. First of all, I started with customer experience management software that have high user review and satisfaction ratings. Then, using my experience in customer experience, I discerned what key criteria were most important for customer experience management software and compared how each of them stacked up against the rest.
I empathize with how much time it takes to source the right software for a job. I do this work so that you don't have to. I've been using and reviewing customer experience management software for years so you can trust me to do the heavy lifting and compile all the facts you need to make your final decision.
If you have more general questions about customer experience management strategy, you can skip to our FAQ at the bottom of the page. Or, you can jump right to the 10 best customer experience management software overviews if you're ready to start comparing.
Comparison Criteria
After careful consideration, I've determined that these are the most important criteria when selecting the best customer experience management software. Here's a brief list outlining the whats and whys of my selection.
User Interface (UI):
The user interface is critical when selecting customer experience management software because it directly affects the user's ability to effectively use the software to gather and act on customer feedback. A user-friendly UI can help increase efficiency, accuracy, and consistency while also promoting employee adoption and satisfaction. A well-designed UI can also reduce the learning curve and ensure that different users are using the software in a similar manner, leading to more consistent results.
Usability:
Is it easy to learn and master? Does the company offer good tech support, user support, tutorials, and training? Are key features (including creating customer personas and customer journeys, feedback management, predictive analytics, and customer self-service features) easily accessible and intuitive to use?
Integrations:
Your customer experience management software should easily connect with other CX-oriented tools such as CRM software, helpdesk tools, digital experience platforms, ERP software, beta test management software, or customer sentiment analysis tools. The more, the merrier.
Pricing:
Pricing considerations should include not only the initial purchase or subscription costs of customer experience management software but also any ongoing costs such as maintenance, upgrades, and support. It's important to evaluate pricing in relation to the features and capabilities of the software, as well as the expected return on investment from using the software.
Customer Experience Management FAQ
Before I jump into the best customer experience management software on the market, I’ll answer some commonly asked questions about customer experience management.
What is Customer Experience Management?
SurveyMonkey.com, the online survey software provider, defines CXM (or CEM) as “a system companies use to track, oversee, and respond accordingly to all customer/business interactions, so companies exceed customer expectations to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.”
An important phrase in the definition above is “all customer/business interactions.” This means that brands need to consider those interactions and customer communications where the customer and the brand may not be dealing with each other in person.
Let’s say a customer doesn’t get support when they meet a challenge while they are using the product. Even though they may have had a great experience during the purchase stage, the company has failed in managing the customer experience, because the customer was not supported in later stages of their journey.
What is the Difference Between Customer Experience Management and Customer Service?
It is important not to confuse customer service with customer experience management. The former tends to be reactive, only kicking into action when a customer meets a challenge. The latter is proactive as it anticipates the challenges a customer will meet and ensures that such challenges are averted.
Why is Customer Experience Important?
Martin Zwilling states that “companies with the highest customer experience typically grow more than double their competitors' rate.” He also states that brands could easily lose their competitive advantage when they focus on the wrong things.
In the same article, Zwilling notes that CXM has become more vital as a result of the “advent of social media and real-time interactive feedback via the Internet [which] allows every customer to build and expect a relationship with your business, rather than just touchpoints”.
With products generally becoming the same, and the cost of switching brands becoming easier, CXM becomes the one way your brand can ensure its competitive edge, satisfying customers and reducing customer churn. Positive customer experiences will help build an ongoing relationship with your customers.
Related Read: The 10 Best Net Promoter Score Software & NPS Survey Tools
What are Some Tips for Managing the Customer Experience?
Here are some tips to help you manage your customer experience:
1. Seek Feedback
It would be impossible to manage customer experience without customer insights into what they are experiencing. Thus, you will need to create avenues through which customers can give you feedback, indicating the degree to which you satisfy them.
Support tickets are a great place to start looking for feedback. For example, similar inquiries or problems noted by several customers could indicate a challenge in a particular customer journey stage. Once you are clear about the areas where customers find pain points, you can determine how to best solve those challenges and help customers overcome them.
Customer data provides an additional channel for customer feedback and discovering customer issues. Customer data can be gathered through social media listening, surveys, text analytics tools, and more.
2. Connect with the Customer Emotionally
A brand must connect emotionally with its customers. This way, it can better understand customer challenges at the different stages of their interactions with the brand. The advent of social media platforms and review sites provide excellent places to connect with clients' emotions, empathize, and solve their challenges.
Those brands that can acknowledge and solve customer frustrations while sustaining an emotional connection are more likely to win customers' approval and foster customer engagement.
3. Use Multiple Channels and Platforms
Customers have their preferred channels and platforms for interacting with brands. For example, some customers may prefer speaking to a team member over a chatbot, and still others might prefer social media interactions. Thus, you should use different channels and platforms for contacting and interacting with clients to ensure you meet their needs.
4. Personalize the Experience
Creating a personalized experience for individual customers is great for improving customer experience. For example, memes may appeal to younger people, but they may not make sense to another generation. Therefore, it is crucial to personalize customer experiences so you can meet their needs as well as possible.
5. Usability and Onboarding
If customers don't know how to access or use your product or service, they will inevitably be frustrated. Invest in assisting your customers by providing in-depth customer onboarding, training, and resources to ease customer frustration. Have team members dedicated to answering customer inquiries and tickets.
What are some open source customer experience management software?
There are a few options for open-source customer experience management platforms out there, such as SuiteCRM and UVdesk.
What are Customer Experience Management Software Key Features?
Customer experience management software typically includes several key features to help organizations manage their customer experience initiatives. Here are some common CEM software features:
- Customer feedback management: The software should be able to collect feedback from various sources, including surveys, social media, email, and other channels, and provide tools for analyzing and acting on that feedback.
- Customer journey mapping: The software should allow organizations to map the customer journey across different touchpoints and channels, identifying areas of friction and opportunities for improvement.
- Data analytics and reporting: The software should provide robust analytics and reporting tools to help organizations analyze customer feedback and track progress over time.
- Integration capabilities: The software should be able to integrate with other tools and systems, such as customer relationship management (CRM) software, to provide a more comprehensive view of the customer experience.
- Workflow automation: The software should include features that automate certain tasks, such as sending follow-up surveys or triggering alerts based on specific customer feedback.
- Collaboration tools: The software should provide tools for collaboration and communication among different teams and stakeholders involved in the customer experience initiatives.
These key features are designed to help organizations gather and analyze customer feedback, identify areas for improvement, and take action to improve the overall customer experience.
What are the Types of Customer Experience Software?
Other than customer experience mangement software (this list!), other types of customer experience mangement include:
- Customer Success Software: Help you increase customer retention and satisfaction by proactively managing customer interactions and providing personalized support and guidance.
- Customer Onboarding Software: Help new customers learn your product or services; help old customers find new features or items they've missed.
- Customer Engagement Software: Build and maintain strong relationships with customers by providing tools for communicating, interacting, and engaging with them across various channels and touchpoints.
What Other CX Resources Should I Check Out?
While we're on the topic of customer experience management, you might also appreciate:
- 6 Steps To Customer Experience Success During Crisis Times
- Want To Improve Customer Experience? Read This First.
- 4 Critical Changes To The Post-COVID Customer Experience
- 10 Best Customer Loyalty Software In 2023
What Do You Think?
Writing for CMSWire.com, a publication for digital professionals, Dom Nicastro says that “a strong customer experience management is only as good as the software behind it.” Nicastro notes that good software helps brands “collect, track, manage, organize, analyze, personalize, and execute relevant interactions with customers and prospects”.
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Related Read: Customer Journey Optimization: 3 Simple Ways To Improve Your Customer Experience