The 10 Best Customer Experience Software Options on the Market (2023)
Many aspects of business success depend on customer experience — customer retention, loyalty, and overall growth amongst others. That’s why it’s not surprising that 72 percent of businesses say their top priority is to improve the customer experience.
It’s a dynamic field with an overlap in responsibilities and objectives, so it can be difficult to choose the right software for managing customer experience.
In this post, we’ll look at 10 of the best customer experience tools, each with varying functionalities. This will give you an overview of the kind of tools that are available on the market today.
What is customer experience management?
Customer experience management is the process of overseeing, guiding, and improving the ways that customers interact with a business. A great customer experience (CX) strategy aims to exceed customer expectations at all the touchpoints across their journey. It will improve customers’ perception of your brand and turn them into loyal customers and brand advocates.
When managing customer experience, you need to consider a wide range of factors like website navigation, customer service interactions, external reviews, product/service quality, and marketing campaigns. This means activities to manage customer experience span across multiple teams including, but not limited to, support, product, sales, and marketing.
What is customer experience software?
Customer experience software is any tool that helps you monitor, analyze, and manage your company’s overall interaction with customers and prospects. Tools that come under this category have a wide range of functionalities including feedback collection and analysis, customer support, customer journey mapping, personalization, and reputation management.
In general, customer experience software should provide actionable insights about customer satisfaction and help teams provide the best outcomes for customers.
The 10 best customer experience software options in 2023
Here are 10 great customer experience management software platforms that can help you improve brand perception, increase loyalty, and drive growth:
Help Scout
Drift
MoEngage
Copper CRM
Qualaroo
Hotjar
Adobe Experience Manager
Reputation
Sprout Social
Zendesk
1. Help Scout
Best customer experience software for managing customer conversations.
Help Scout is a communication platform that helps teams across an organization have better conversations with their customers. When it comes to customer experience, Help Scout has several tools that can make a difference throughout the customer journey, including its shared inbox, proactive messaging, documentation, and AI tools.
Shared inbox for personalized communication
All incoming support requests from email, live chat, and Facebook Messenger flow into a centralized shared inbox that keeps customer conversations from falling through the cracks. Help Scout takes a human-first approach to communication, so regardless of which channel your customers choose, they will never see a ticket number.
The platform is perfect for teams that need to manage requests collaboratively. Features like conversation assignments, internal notes, and collision detection ensure that teammates stay off each other’s toes. Saved replies enable the team to respond to common questions more quickly, and workflows automate repetitive tasks so you have more time to focus on customers.
The shared inbox tool also lets you view important customer data — contact information, conversation and purchase history, location, etc. — from within the conversation window. Having customer details close at hand gives your team the context they need to personalize each interaction and deliver great support.
Messages for proactive support
Messages, the platform’s messaging feature, allows you to proactively interact with visitors instead of waiting for them to interact with you. A feature of Beacon, Help Scout’s web widget, Messages lets you display targeted messages to customers based on criteria you set, such as where they are on your website or the amount of time they’ve spent on a page.
Place a Beacon anywhere within your app or website, and use Messages to surface a helpful support article or to launch a live chat session during a sticky point in the customer journey.
Another helpful use of Messages is the option to conduct microsurveys. From a simple thumbs up/thumbs down question to standard NPS surveys, microsurveys let you get the real-time feedback you need to improve your customer experience.
Docs for self-service support
Help customers find answers when they need them with Docs, a knowledge base solution that works together with other Help Scout features. Docs articles can be browsed via a Beacon or from within a customizable help center. In addition, Docs articles can also appear in search engine results, helping customers find information no matter where they choose to look.
Publishing answers to FAQs and other helpful information in a knowledge base like Docs lets customers find information on their own while reducing contact volume for your team.
AI to help you work smarter
Our AI features help reduce repetitive tasks and allow teams to focus on helping customers.
For instance, AI Summarize makes it easy for your service team to create bullet point summaries of long email threads in seconds. With a single click, they can get the context they need to send out a better response.
Use AI Summarize to bring team members up to speed on a case or to speed up research when troubleshooting customer issues.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $20/user per month.
Learn more about Help Scout:
2. Drift
Best customer experience software for conversational marketing and AI sales assistance.
Drift’s Conversation Cloud lets businesses meet buyers at the right time and the right place and engage them with the right conversation. It can help sales, marketing, and customer service teams offer customers personalized interactions at different stages of their journeys.
With conversational AI tools, marketers can connect with website visitors in real time and get them the right content, answer their questions, and convert them to leads.
Sales teams can use Drift to close deals faster with the help of tools that give buyers insights. They can also collaborate with teammates and start personalized conversations through chat, video, email, or phone.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $2,500 per month.
3. MoEngage
Best customer experience tool for personalized and multi-channel marketing.
MoEngage is an insights-led platform that helps in creating personalized engagement across channels. You can design customer engagement strategies with data-driven analytics and behavioral insights.
Create accurate customer profiles and analyze the needs of different segments of the audience. Use this data to bring tailored product and content recommendations to customers on their preferred channels.
This is a great tool for marketers to run targeted marketing campaigns and increase omnichannel engagement. Product teams can map customer journeys and gather insights into their behaviors, preferences, and interests. With multiple layers of personalization, they can send relevant communications and give lasting positive customer experiences.
Price: Free plan available. Contact MoEngage for pricing on premium plans.
4. Copper CRM
Best customer experience tool for customer relationship management.
Copper is an easy-to-use CRM for managing sales leads and growing customer relationships. It helps with various tasks such as prospecting, channeling and tracking sales opportunities, and handling repetitive tasks.
It comes with smart workflows which allow you to set rules for tasks and trigger them when you need them. For example, you can automatically create and assign tasks, update customer profiles, or change deal status.
Copper offers a visual sales pipeline. This means you can easily view every lead and stage in your sales process and move them to the next stage using drag-and-drop templates.
Some other features of Copper that help enhance customer experience include an inactivity monitor, a deal length monitor, and an email open tracker.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $23 per month.
5. Qualaroo
Best customer experience tool for user research and analysis.
Qualaroo is an automated research platform designed to help customer-facing teams collect valuable behavioral insights from users in real-time. It offers a unique method of gathering feedback with its sentiment analysis and advanced targeting features.
The tool can launch a survey anywhere on your website and start analyzing the responses as they come. You can find out how your customers feel and how they perceive your brand.
Qualaroo then uses AI to understand customer sentiment and emotional responses from the collected feedback.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $69 per month.
6. Hotjar
Best customer experience for gaining product experience insights in real-time.
Hotjar provides advanced features for product insights that show how users behave and how they interact with the product.
One feature Hotjar has for enhancing customer experience is Funnels, which can be used to identify pages with unusually high churn rates or dropoff rates. With heatmaps, you can understand how users engage with your page and see which areas of your page users interact with the most.
Hotjar also has session recording features — you can capture how a user interacts with a website or web application in real time. This can help you find sessions when users had a bad time on your site, and the data can be used to improve customer experiences on that particular page.
Price: Free plan available. Premium plans start at $32 per month.
7. Adobe Experience Manager
Best customer experience tool for content creation.
Adobe Experience Cloud is a platform full of tools that can help your business provide a better customer experience. For instance, two of the most popular tools, Sites and Assets, make it easy to create optimized digital experiences across multiple channels and devices.
Sites is a content management system (CMS) that comes with beautiful templates and drag-and-drop components that simplify the process of creating content like websites or mobile apps. Assets is a digital management solution that lets you pull in images and videos from your company’s design library into Sites with a click of a button. When paired together, teams are able to design, create, and publish personalized content fast.
When partnered with other Adobe Experience Cloud products like Customer Journey Analytics, Journey Optimizer, and Target, you can also use customer behavior and data to test content performance and make improvements.
Price: Send inquiries for details on pricing
8. Reputation
Best customer experience tool for managing online reputation and consumer feedback.
Reputation is an online review management software that helps manage customer reviews across multiple platforms, including Capterra, SoftwareSuggest, and TripAdvisor. It can condense vast amounts of feedback into helpful insights that companies can use to learn and grow.
This tool can help you build a better search presence as a brand by identifying areas for improvement such as your brand's local search presence or a negative review. It also lets you centrally view, respond to, and track leads from Facebook, Twitter, Google, and SMS.
Lastly, you can use Reputation to create, track, and analyze surveys all from a single platform. It’s even possible to stream survey results directly to your website to increase social proof and website rankings.
Price: Contact Reputation for pricing.
9. Sprout Social
Best customer experience software for social listening and omnichannel social media interactions.
Sprout Social is a tool used to connect with audiences and to deliver good customer experiences across multiple social media platforms.
With Sprout’s social listening tools, you can pay attention to positive and negative sentiment around your brand on social media services. These include conversations relevant to your company, people’s perception of your brand and competitors, and the industry at large. Insights from these conversations can be used to make informed marketing and CX decisions.
Sprout Social also helps teams provide customer service on social channels with its social messaging tools. Quickly respond to customer queries and DMs and manage your social media reputation.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $249 per month.
10. Zendesk
Best customer experience software for enterprise-level customer support.
Zendesk is a help desk software for providing cross-channel support to customers.
It provides a unified workspace for support agents so that all their interactions can be kept in one place. Teams get to provide a faster and more personalized experience for customers.
Zendesk offers advanced routing features that direct customer inquiries to the most appropriate agents or teams based on their expertise and workload. This helps ensure faster and more accurate issue resolution, enhancing customer experience.
Some other features that Zendesk supports include ticket views, tagging, automation, custom ticket forms, and custom reporting.
Price: Free trial available. Plans start at $19/agent per month.
Choosing the best software for customer experience
Choosing the best software for customer experience is a critical decision that can significantly impact your business's success. As we explored various solutions in this blog post, it's important to remember that the ideal choice will depend on your specific needs, budget, and long-term goals.
Do you want a tool that gives detailed user insights, or are you looking for a better way to manage support requests? Do you want to manage customer experience on external sources like social media or review platforms, or do you just want to focus on your website and product?
For those looking to manage and streamline customer communications, Help Scout is a great option. Take a 15-day free trial and start delivering a better customer experience today!
Hibathu Naseer
The Supportive Weekly: A newsletter for people who want to deliver exceptional customer service.