Customer experience software

Best CX software at a glance

9 best customer experience platforms

亚博

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Zendesk provides a complete customer service experience solution that’s easy to use and scales with your business. Customer experience is about more than the customer. It’s about your business and your teams, too. Zendesk not only makes things easy on your customers, but sets your teams up for success, and keeps your business in sync. It’s everything you need in one powerful package.

Make things easy for your customers

With Zendesk you can provide support over the most convenient channels for your customers, whether that’s messaging, email, voice, or live chat. The conversation stays connected no matter how, or when, a customer reaches out, so they never have to repeat themselves. Customers can also self-serve via a knowledge base or community forum. And our AI-powered chatbot, Answer Bot, ensures they can get immediate answers around the clock while giving agents time back for higher stakes issues.

Set your teams up for success

一个好的客户体验几乎是不可能的ithout a good employee experience. Zendesk empowers agents, admins, and internal teams with out-of-the-box tools that are quick to set up and easy to use. Teams can track, prioritize, and respond to customers with one unified agent workspace, complete with customer context and conversation history. Zendesk also equips agents with collaboration tools and prepared answers. Built-in routing and intelligence enable them to collect critical details, reduce data entry, and ensure customers are routed to the right agent for their inquiry.

Keep your business in sync

Zendesk’s open and flexible customer experience solution provides a holistic view of every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle. Personalize experiences across the entire customer journey by integrating relevant customer data across systems using Zendesk’s code and no-code integration options.

Zendesk also comes with a powerful reporting and analytics solution to measure and improve the entire customer experience. With it, managers can analyze hundreds of customer touchpoints for opportunities to improve based on their customers’ needs.

Pricing

• Suite Team: $49 per agent, per month
• Suite Growth: $79 per agent, per month
• Suite Professional: $99 per agent, per month

Free trial: 30 days

Features

• No-code chatbot flow builder
• Unified customer view
• Native integrations and API
• Tracking and measurement
• Native automation
• Canned responses
• Channel variety, such as messaging, live chat, voice, and email
• Customizable ticket routing, categorization, and tagging
• Multilingual support
• Community forums
• Shared inbox
• Customization
• Knowledge base management
• Omnichannel support
• CSAT surveys

Podium

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The Podium solution includes text marketing, payment processing, online review collection, live website chat, and a unified agent inbox. You can use Podium’s native integrations to pull your CRM data into the intuitive Podium interface.

Interestingly, Podium uses your customer’s phone numbers so you can continue messaging with them via text after they leave your site. This feature alone can help you establish closer connections with your prospective customers and avoid losing significant numbers of leads. If you’re curious about the software, you can try Podium for free for 14 days to get a feel for the software.

Just be aware that, compared to other solutions on this list, Podium is primarily designed for generating and converting leads and less so for managing the post-purchase customer experience. Of course, if you like the lead generation capabilities of Podium but also need broader CX capabilities, you can deploy a platform like Zendesk and build integrations between the tools.

Pricing

• Essentials: $289 per month
• Standard: $449 per month
• Professional: $649 per month

Free trial: 14 days

Features

• Online review collection
• Website chat
• Payment processing
• Website reporting
• Customizable branding
• Task automation
• Round-robin lead routing
• Unlimited contacts
• Unlimited users
• Chat routing

HubSpot

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HubSpot’s customer experience platform provided through the HubSpot Service Hub. This solution combines a ticketing system, customer service analytics, knowledge base publishing tools, workflow automation, a native CRM, a wide range of integrations, and many more useful features.

Also, because HubSpot provides a large selection of service packages, businesses of all sizes can find a HubSpot plan that suits their needs.

If you’re already a HubSpot user, you’ll benefit from the tight integration between HubSpot Service Hub and the familiar interface. And if you’re using HubSpot’s CRM, you don’t have to worry about importing customer data.

Try a paid version of HubSpot for free for fourteen days, or test drive HubSpot’s free plan. While the free plan has limited features, it does include a unified inbox, ticketing, and basic reporting functions. To top it all off, Zendesk’s free integration to HubSpot enables you to leverage what you like about HubSpot in your unified Zendesk workspace so you don’t have to choose.

Pricing

• Free: $0/month
• Starter: $45/month
• Professional: $450/month
• Enterprise: $1,200/month

Free trial: 14 days

Features

• One shared inbox
• Two ticket pipelines
• Knowledge base functionality
• Customer portal
• HubSpot CRM
• Team email
• Live chat
• 10 reporting dashboards
• Email reply tracking
• Conversation routing
• Simple ticket automation

Learn more about Zendesk for HubSpot

Genesys Cloud

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At the center of the Genesys Cloud solution is its contact center, which is designed to host fluid, effortless conversations across all channels. Along with unified CX, Genesys features workforce engagement management (WEM) powered by artificial intelligence to outsource mundane, repetitive tasks to machines, so your agents can focus on high-value tasks. You can also customize the solution thanks to the Genesys API and its partner ecosystem.

In addition to handling customer experiences that originate from social media, your website, and live chat, Genesys can handle outbound and inbound calling.

It’s worth noting, though, that Genesys isn’t necessarily geared towards small businesses or service operations looking to start small. While their packages start at just $75 per user/month, the Genesys Cloud CX platform has a minimum commitment of $2,000 per month. The good news is that if you have Zendesk, you can use our free integration to expand on Zendesk’s impressive CX functionality with Genesys. This is an ideal option for users who may be already using Genesys’s call center functionality but prefer Zendesk for its broader set of CX tools.

Pricing

• Genesys Cloud CX 1: $75 per user/month
• Genesys Cloud CX 2: $110 per user/month
• Genesys Cloud CX 3: $150 per user/month

Free trial: 30 days

Features Genesys Cloud

• Inbound and outbound voice
• Voice transcription minutes
• Speech-enabled IVR
• Unlimited chat and email routing
• Co-browse and screen share
• Screen recording
• Performance dashboards
• Historical reporting
• Speech and text analytics

Learn more about Zendesk for Genesys.

Service Dock

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Service Dock was built for retailers with brick-and-mortar stores. The platform is centered around leveraging messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp to enable retailers to provide an experience that blends the best parts of e-commerce and physical stores. Using Service Dock, your physical stores can capture and respond to feedback in real- time. The real-time dashboard is always live and provides immediate notifications so your team can spot issues quickly and follow up before your customers have left the store.

You can also use Service Dock to capture customer emails, convert in-store customers, and collect more reviews from your happiest customers. Using Service Dock, you can aggregate reviews from physical survey kiosks, website popups, in-app messaging surveys, and more. Plus, Zendesk has an app for Service Dock which means you can leverage all the power of Service Dock without ever leaving your Zendesk workspace.

Pricing not available

Free trial: 60 days

Features

• Survey bot
• AI-powered dashboards
• Real-time notifications
• Data source aggregation
• Multi-unit reporting
• All-in-one mobile application
• GDPR compliant

Learn more about Zendesk for ServiceDock.

Solvvy

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Solvvy is a customer experience solution that focuses on using conversational artificial intelligence and automation to lighten the load on customer service agents. Solvvy’s software gets better over time by using historical ticket data to learn how to recognize your customer’s intent and direct their queries accordingly. The solution deals with simple requests, like FAQs, and directs more complicated issues to agents when needed.

For Zendesk users, the Solvvy app can be integrated in hours (not days) without the intervention of engineers. According toone review of the app“用最少的维护,Solvvy溶胶ve about the same amount of tickets each month as a full-time technical support representative.” In 2023, Zoom is expected tofinalize its acquisition of Solvvy, further demonstrating the software’s attractive capabilities.

Pricing not available

Free trial: 14 days

Features

• Intelligent self-service Q&A
• CSAT surveys
• Workflow builders
• Persona-based routing
• Multi-support channel
• Reporting dashboards
• Custom integrations

Learn more about Zendesk for Solvvy.

Salesforce

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Salesforce tends to be known for itscustomizable CRM, but it also has a customer experience solution, the Salesforce Service Cloud. Its CX platform arms your team with a suite of productivity tools, a unified dashboard, and omnichannel support. Customer 360, another Salesforce product, can enhance your Service Cloud deployment by providing a single view of your customers throughout their journey which includes their history, interests, and prior feedback.

Just keep in mind that Salesforce can be costly and complicated to implement depending on your customization requirements. However, if you’re already a Salesforce user, it will likely be easier to implement Service Cloud since (hopefully) most of your customer data is already integrated. In any case, you can expect all the basics of what you’d require in a CX platform from Salesforce—knowledge base management, workflow automations, ticketing management, and more.

Pricing

• Essentials: $25 per user/month
• Professional: $75 per user/month
• Enterprise: $150 per user/month
• Unlimited: $300 per user/month

Free trial: 30 days

Features

• AI-powered bots
• Skill and availability-based routing
• Full ticket history
• Customer activity notifications
• Service process automation
• Knowledge management
• Service desk analytics
• Online training and on-demand webinars
• APIs, SDKs, native, and 3rd party integrations
• Omnichannel support
• Asset management
• Community forums

Learn more about using Salesforce with Zendesk

Qualtrics

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从服务channe Qualtrics可以引入反馈ls, such as your website, mobile app, SMS, and social media. You can use Qualtrics to build custom surveys specific to customer segments, buyer journey stages, and more. Or you can use itsNPS softwareto gauge how likely customers are to promote your brand.

Qualtrics also helps teams measure and analyze customer feedback. And you can close the loop on customer feedback in real-time with automated inbound ticketing processes. Or, as with the other tools on this list, you can combine Qualtrics with Zendesk so you can do things like trigger customized surveys based on Zendesk events.

Pricing not available

Free trial not available

Features

• Embedded feedback collection
• Precision targeting
• Online reputation management
• Contact center
• NPS, CSAT, and CES analytics
• Multi-language support
• Tagging and segmentation
• Thematic and sentiment analysis
• Online reviews and surveys
• Custom branding support
• Social, SMS, web, and app-based surveys
• Employee lifecycle-based surveys

Learn more about Zendesk for Qualtrics

SAS

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SAS provides a suite of solutions they call the SAS Adaptive Customer Experience. It’s geared towards marketers to collect important customer data and use it to construct complete customer profiles that can inform more effective, personalized marketing communications. Where SAS sets itself apart is in its unification of customer data across online and offline sources—data from your call center and point of sale device as well as your website and mobile applications can all be brought to bear within the SAS customer experience platform.

It’s also worth noting that you can extend upon the SAS CX platform through a full integration with the SAS Customer Intelligence Suite. This solution includes tools to help you put your insights into action and execute multi-channel, fully automated marketing campaigns. You can even leverage analytics from social media to segment real-time offers based on insights pulled from social channels.

Of course, with the SAS CX platform being marketer-focused, it’s important to have tools that also empower your service and support teams. Fortunately, you can integrate a tool like Zendesk to supplement the SAS CX solution so you can empower your team to deliver a top-notch customer experience from start to finish.

Pricing not available

Free trial not available

Features

• Customizable branding
• Data connectors
• Email management
• Event-triggered actions
• Multi-channel attribution
• NLP
• Real-time analytics
• Surveys and feedback
• Website analytics
• Third-party integrations

How to choose a CX platform

残雪平台广泛的品种,所以知道何鸿燊w to choose the right customer experience platform for your business can be overwhelming. It’s not just a question of which solution has the best combination of features, cost, and interface. It’s also about what works best for your current team, fits in with your short and long-term goals, and is compatible with your existing tech stack. Plus, many CX platforms are geared toward certain industries—like retail—or business models—like SaaS.

Here are a few things to consider when choosing a customer experience solution.

Balance of ease of use and functionality:Plenty of tech buyers fall into the trap of chasing functionality. They find the option with the longest list of features for the most affordable price and they assume that’s their best bet. But features are only as good as your employees’ abilities to leverage those features. Customer service analytics, for example, are a great way to find opportunities for service improvement, but only if you can get sufficiently granular with those analytics to discover valuable insights.

Another great example of balance between ease of use and functionality is Zendesk’s intuitive chatbot conversation builder, Flow Builder, which allows users to create and manage AI conversation flows out of the box.

Time-to-value:Initial time-to-value and continuous time-to-value are key considerations when choosing the right customer experience solution. You’ll want to find a solution that enables you to get up and running quickly. But it could also not be more important to pick an open platform that allows you to change quickly, and go wherever your customers go next.

Integration with your existing business systems:No technology exists in a vacuum, and CX solutions are no exception. So when choosing between tools for your team, you want to pay close attention to how those tools fit (or don’t fit) with the software and systems you currently use.

And since change is constant, you shouldn’t just audit your current setup. Instead, think through the service channels and customer experience tools you want to offer in the near and long-term, and consider what workflows might be needed to support those channels. This will save you and your team time and resources in the future.

Return on investment:While attitudes are changing, ourCX Trends 2022 Reportshows that many executives still treat customer service as a cost center. That thinking inevitably trickles down to the rest of the organization and into CX platform purchasing decisions. As a result, many CX technology buyers center purchases around cost, rather than their total return on investment.

Yet our report also shows that customers are exceedingly willing and likely to spend more money with the companies that provide them the best service. When choosing a CX platform, consider the following stats:

• 93% of customers will spend more with companies that offer their preferred option to reach customer service.
• 92% will spend more with companies that ensure they won’t need to repeat information.
• 90% of customers will spend more with companies that offer personalized customer service.
• 89% will spend more with companies that allow them to find answers online without needing to contact the company.

Of course, to capture this additional customer value, you need a CX platform that enables you to offer these customer benefits.

Customer experience management software FAQs