Customer experience (CX) plays an important role in turning customers into returning customers. Studies show that customers not only expect a great experience, but 86% are also willing to pay more for it. What’s more, 72% of customers will tell others about their excellent experience, which can lead to more opportunities to wow more people!
That said, user experience isn’t something you should leave to chance. Brands need to take an active role in shaping how customers experience your business, whether it’s via your website or call center or even in person.
The right customer experience software can help. It gives you insights into how customers are already experiencing your business so you can find opportunities to improve.
We’ve done some of the hard work for you by rounding up the eight best customer experience tools to include in your CX strategy. Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents:
What are the benefits of customer experience software?
9 best customer experience software & platforms in 2024
Choosing the best customer experience solution
What are the benefits of customer experience software?
When designing your customer experience process, the right software or platform can help with the heavy lifting.
A customer experience platform is designed to support CX initiatives. It includes purpose-built features that make it easy to collect and analyze CX data. In many cases, your customer experience software will include features and functions you might not have thought of when creating your CX strategy.
Most importantly, a customer experience management platform will help you deploy your strategy across every customer touchpoint. Use it to identify potential issues, strengths, weaknesses, and even behavior-based trends.
9 best customer experience software & platforms in 2024
Searching for the best customer experience software? The journey is subjective, depending on your goals, needs, company size, and budget.
Choosing the right customer experience software or platform can help you develop your CX strategy and continue meeting your customers’ needs.
Here are our top picks for the best customer experience software solutions:
Meltwater
- Best For: Small businesses, SMEs, and large enterprises
- Price: Custom Pricing
Meltwater's AI-powered consumer intelligence platform represents best-in-class customer experience solutions. This is largely due to its combination of AI and machine learning, human data scientists, robust data analytics, and market research expertise.
Consumer research is the beating heart of our platform, offering real-time insights into the customer experience.
Meltwater's consumer intelligence solution scours publicly available
- social media data
- news
- blogs
- and more
to learn what people are talking about online. It combines AI with human data scientists to add context to the data it collects.
As a result, you get reports that are easy to read, understand, and act on. These reports span the entire customer journey, from discovery to purchase and beyond. Use your findings to improve customer satisfaction metrics (such as your promoter score), increase customer engagement, and maximize all of your customer interactions.
With today’s buying decisions largely driven by influencers, online reviews, and conversations, our consumer intelligence solution plays an integral role in CX. It automatically aggregates your online ratings, reviews, social media conversations, and other information sources so you can see how your customers view your brand.
Our consumer intelligence solution is also a customer experience analytics platform. With customizable single-view dashboards and reports, you get real-time insights at a glance. This is a great way to spot and react to trends and conversations as they’re happening to mitigate any damage to your reputation.
By tapping into these conversations — straight from the mouths of your customers — you can learn more about the customer experience through their eyes. See where you need to improve, whether customers have unmet needs, and what makes them buy from you.
LiveAgent
- Best For: Start-ups and SMEs
- Price: Free plan available; paid plans start at $9/agent/month.
LiveAgent provides an all-in-one help desk for social media, call centers, and websites. It packs a ton of pre-built out-of-the-box features that will help you deploy your customer-centric strategy with ease. Companies can choose between live chats with an agent or chatbot, a self-service knowledge base, or a combination of these.
LiveAgent includes a ticketing system where agents can handle all inquiries from a single view, regardless of how a customer contacts them. The software prompts customers to leave an agent review after the interaction so companies can track whether they’re meeting customer expectations.
Time-saving features like the ability to automate replies, predefined answers, and mass actions can help agents save time, allowing them to help more customers. By consolidating all touchpoints in a single interface, brands can gain a better understanding of how well they’re delivering support to customers who need it.
Zendesk
- Best For: SMEs and large enterprises
- Price: Starting at $55/agent/month
One of the most recognized names in all-in-one customer experience solutions, Zendesk combines sales, CRM, and support into one software.
Customers experience a brand in many ways — before the sale, during the sale, and after the purchase. Zendesk takes all of these touchpoints into account to provide a comprehensive view of each customer’s experiences, purchases, and interactions. It includes tons of features, including a mobile-friendly interface, a customer service ticketing system, a visual sales pipeline, and third-party integrations.
There’s also a free trial available so brands can test-drive the system before committing to a paid plan.
LiveChatAI
- Best For: Startups, SMEs, and large enterprises
- Price: Free plan & starting at $39/month
LiveChatAI is a software that lets you create an AI chatbot and train it with your own data to customize it to handle conversations with your customers/users. It helps to resolve customer support inquiries faster and more seamlessly and increase customer experience within your website/app.
Plus, whenever a customer requires more detailed or complex assistance, LiveChatAI makes bringing human-agent support into the conversation possible for a more responsive and comprehensive customer service experience, ensuring none of your customer's needs are overlooked.
Providing a multilingual support option, a manageable chat inbox, various chat forms (inline, full-page, messenger), and WhatsApp integration are among what can take you to the next level.
It is possible to expand the limit of AI and with AI actions that you can use with Make.com, webhook, and Open API.
Qualtrics
- Best For: Large enterprise-level customer experience solution
- Price: Custom Pricing
Qualtrics’ complete customer experience platform makes it one of the best customer experience services for large brands. Because customer experience is so much more than inbound support, brands can gain a holistic view of their customer's needs and build stronger customer loyalty. The CX platform includes features for product design, brand tracking, market research, and even the employee experience.
Focusing just on its CustomerXM product, Qualtrics embraces the total customer lifecycle from discovery to purchase to support and more. It supports an omnichannel customer experience strategy, from surveys to social media to the contact center and more.
Capture real-time feedback from customers across many data sources. Learn how customers are thinking and feeling about your brand. Uncover trends in behaviors and mentions so you can adjust your approach. It’s a scalable solution that gives you confidence in where and how you’re moving the needle.
Zoho CRM Plus
Best For: Companies of all sizes and industries
Price: Free trial; paid plans start at $52/user/month
One of the leading names in cloud-based CRM is also a powerhouse in customer experience platforms. Zoho CRM Plus unifies your sales team, marketing, and customer support into a single interface to increase consistency across every touchpoint.
Track the customer’s journey across email, live chat, social media, text messaging, and customer feedback surveys. Get real-time alerts when users open an email, respond to a survey, contact customer service, or take other actions so you can respond in a timely manner.
Maintaining high engagement across every channel will help you to be more in tune with your customers’ needs when it matters most.
Tip: Take a look at alternatives to Zoho Social.
Podium
- Best For: Small, medium, and large-sized companies across multiple industries
- Price: Plans start at $249/month
Maintaining a unified front across multiple channels presents a range of communication, reputational, and engagement challenges. Podium’s customer experience platform seeks to bring it all under one umbrella.
Podium takes a three-prong approach to business improvement — growth, communication, and payments. It includes features to collect more online reviews, capture website leads, create text message campaigns, and manage all customer messages in a single inbox.
The customer experience platform also includes features to ease transactions, making it easy for customers to do business with their chosen brands. With features like text-to-pay and digital payment options, customers can pay their way and enjoy a more customized experience.
Medallia
- Best For: Small to large businesses
- Price: Custom Pricing
Built for enterprises of all sizes, Medallia’s suite of customer experience tools ensures no stone is left unturned. It combines social listening with customer experience analysis tools to give you actionable insights.
Medallia collects customer data from social media channels and other online sources to create rich views of every customer.
Combining these insights with things like a ticketing system and online behaviors, brands can learn more about their customers’ experiences. It works across every channel and gives you in-the-moment insights so you can take immediate action.
ProProfs Chat
- Best For: Startups, SMEs, and large enterprises
- Price: Free plan & starting at $19.99/user/month
ProProfs Chat is a website lead generation and CX platform designed for meaningful, real-time interactions. You can easily monitor visitor behaviour on your website and welcome them with chat invitation pop-ups and personalized greetings to boost engagement.
The best part is that anyone can create AI-powered chatbots without any prior coding skills. You can get started with pre-designed chatbot templates or train your bot using your own data. When it comes to integrations, ProProfs Chat seamlessly integrates with popular e-commerce and CRM platforms like Shopify, Magento, Salesforce, etc., ensuring smooth information flow between systems. You can also leverage intelligent chat routing to prevent agent burnout and ensure every interaction is assigned to the most suitable team member.
Choosing the best customer experience solution
When looking for the best customer experience tool, start with your goals in mind. Whether you want to gain cross-channel insights, get detailed customer profiles, improve e-commerce conversions, or future-proof your reputation, there’s a customer experience solution to help.
The best customer experience companies listed above each offer something a little different. At Meltwater, we differentiate ourselves by providing a centralized source for social listening, consumer intelligence, customer intelligence, customer intelligence analytics, and customer experience analytics software.
We don’t just collect the data — we also help you make sense of it so you can gain spelled-out insights and take action when and where it’s needed. Our easy-to-use dashboards and interfaces help you ramp up your CXM faster, allowing you to create more happy customers.
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