What is customer engagement software?

Customer engagement software is a tool that helps you track and analyze customer behavior at every stage of the customer journey.

Through automated interactions, you can engage with your customers at each point throughout their user journey.

Customer engagement software is not a CRM (also known as customer relationship management), although both do collect data.

The main difference is that a CRM collects data about your team’s interactions with customers, and customer engagement software collects information about how your customer engages with your product. This in turn allows you to create automated engagements across the user journey.

Must have features of a customer engagement platform

Here’s what you should care about before picking your ideal customer engagement tool:

• Option to build in-app flows using a wide range of UI elements to encourage customer interactions.
• Segmentation capabilities so you can offer personalized experiences, which is crucial for facilitating customer engagement.
• Behavior tracking ability for monitoring customer engagement using event tracking, heatmaps, or session recordings to detect friction and optimize product experience.
• Features for sending in-app surveys so you can collect customer feedback directly within your product and identify improvement opportunities.

10 Best customer engagement tools for improving engagement across the customer journey

With the must-have features in mind, here are our recommendations of the best customer engagement platforms.

#1 Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how customers use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

Main features

Userpilot helps you build personalized experiences that are essential to driving customer engagement. It also gives you an eagle-eye view of customer engagement through customer data analytics, trend/funnel reports, and feedback collection through different types of surveys.

Here’s how it helps:

• In-app flows: Userpilot lets you add user interface elements like modals, slideouts, tooltips, driven actions, hotspots, and banners as parts of in-app flows or standalone spotlights. The best part is that all of these UI patterns are available for use even on the entry-level Starter plan.

• Feature engagement: Userpilot’s click-to-track feature tagger lets you see how often a feature is used and by how many people. You’ll also be able to see the top 20 events for a certain time or create custom events that group multiple features for clearer insights.

• User analytics: The users dashboard gives you an overview of all your customer data while letting you sort by segment, company, or when they were last seen. You can also export user data in bulk as a CSV or click on the Insights tab to see segment-specific insights for a given time period.

• Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels reports let you track certain events like a specific feature’s usage, add filters to narrow down the data, and then create a breakdown based on segmentation data or user attributes — offering quick and actionable CX reports.

• Customer satisfaction benchmarking: Userpilot has a built-in NPS dashboard that tracks customer loyalty over time. In addition to the NPS dashboard, you can also use Userpilot’s survey templates to run CSAT or CES surveys and gather additional quantitative and qualitative insights on the customer experience.

• Self-service support: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers, which can include feedback widgets to collect feedback passively, checklists to walk users through specific processes, or integrations with knowledge bases to leverage existing documentation. And the best part? You can build native resource centers without coding!

Pricing

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

#2 HelpScout

Help Scout is a communication platform that assists teams in building strong customer relationships. It provides easy-to-use tools for engaging with your audience at any point in their journey.

Main features

As a communication-focused solution, the tool helps with customer engagement by delivering contextual messages that prompt customer interactions.

Here are the details:

• Customer profile: The platform allows you to build customer profiles that include contact details, conversation history, and more.

• Proactive messages: Help Scout’s engagement widget, Beacon, enables teams to deliver targeted messaging. This includes standard, banner, and modal messages, tailored to specific customer criteria such as time-on-page, date and time, or custom properties determined by your team.
• Feedback collection: Its microsurveys feature allows you to deploy various survey styles, including NPS, multiple choice, free form text box, and simple thumbs up/thumbs down options.
• Self-service hub: Its knowledge base solution, Docs, enables customers to independently access information and find answers to their queries. However, if you want to personalize your self-service center, you’ll need to have your CSS developer involved.

To sum up, if you need a tool for managing customer relationships and driving contextual engagement through in-app communication channels, then this might be one of your choices. Nevertheless, if you need to dive deep into customer behavior to facilitate meaningful engagement, you have to look elsewhere.

Pricing

The tool’s pricing starts at 20$ per user and it’s not ideal if you have a large team. The most valuable feature for customer engagement – proactive messaging is also calculated based on the number of customer views. This can cost you a lot as your business scales.

#3 Mixpanel

Mixpanel provides customer insights that add value, improving decision-making times by keeping you well informed through advanced analytics functionality, which is focused on unique event tracking.

You can use Mixpanel to learn more about why and how your customers use your products, with clear insights into the health of each account.

Main features

Mixpanel analytics have been designed to enable teams to become more efficient through real-time user data analysis. You will find the following features in Mixpanel:

• You can use Mixpanel to help identify trends through customer engagement, understand user behavior, and make key decisions about your product
• Customizable dashboards allow you to tailor which analytics you see for faster decision making
• Measure group analytics to calculate metrics at an organisation level, useful for B2B SaaS companies.
• Analyze the actions that your users perform through their platform to gain greater insights into user behavior and drive retention, engagement, and conversion.
• Through Mixpanel’s ‘MoEngage’ functionality, you get detailed personalization at scale across mobile, email, and web, as well as SMS and other messaging channels.

However, you will need the help of your engineering team to set up and configure the tool — The platform’s advanced functionalities, custom event tracking, and segmentation might require a steeper learning curve, especially for those without a strong background in data analysis.

Pricing

Mixpanel’s pricing starts at $20 and is divided into 3 plans: the starter plan (free), the enterprise plan, and the growth plan.

Although its free plan comes with very advanced product analytics functionality but it has no engagement layer or feedback features like that of Userpilot.

#4 Pendo

Pendo has two main solutions-focused capabilities: product experience and digital adoption.

Additionally, Pendo also lets you survey users, segment customers, and see how many site visitors or MAUs your web app is getting. Certain features like product areas, data explorer, product engagement score, and resource centers are locked to the Starter plan or higher.

Main features

Pendo enables users to capture customer activity and engagement across all of your products. It offers:

• In-app guidance: With a variety of tips, walkthroughs, and in-app resources, users can navigate some of the more complex areas of your products, with more clarity, as part of the in-service experience.

• Dashboard widgets: There are 26 different analytics widgets that you can add to your Pendo dashboard. These widgets can track feature adoption, guide engagement, user sentiment, and cohort data like which operating system is being used.
• Segmentation: Pendo segmentation settings like you create different flows, guides, and onboarding journeys for each user. You can segment users based on the type of device they’re on, what operating system it’s running on, which browser they’re using, or when they joined.
• Self-service: As part of its customer engagement automation, Pendo’s in-app self-service resources are a tool to increase customer satisfaction.

Pricing

Pricing for most paid Pendo plans (except Starter) is only provided on a quote basis and there are no listed price ranges on the solution’s website. That said, certain reviews have stated that prices start at upwards of $20,000 per year for a single product and more than twice that for higher plans.

Pendo has three paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but challenging to scale in the long run.

#5 Appcues

Appcues is a customer engagement solution that makes product adoption easier. With Appcues, you can design personalized experiences for your products through their no-code builder, which simplifies the process.

Main features

Appcues offers a host of features that are designed to help you impress customers with your product. They help enhance the various interactions a customer has with your product.

Appcues helps curate a powerful product experience with the following features:

• UI patterns, such as banners, checklists, hotspots, modals, and tooltips, let you build in-app guides and product tours.

• In-app surveys that help you collect customer feedback and improve product development. The survey options aren’t as varied as Userpilot, though.
• In-app announcements to notify users about scheduled downtime, unexpected slowdowns, and product updates.
• User segmentation for personalized targeting.
• Mobile onboarding for a seamless experience across various devices.
• It’s worth noting that Appcues only offers basic user behavioral data and analytics. For advanced analytics, you’ll have to connect it to an external tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics (which means more costs). In comparison, Userpilot offers more in-depth user data and analytics.

That said, Appcues alone can’t guarantee a flawless product experience. It only covers the onboarding aspect of PX.

You’ll need to focus on other aspects like customer support and relationship-building to improve the overall UX, and for those you need multiple types of user surveys, on-demand support (using a resource center), and advanced analytics, which Appcues lacks.

Pricing

Pricing for Appcues starts at $249 per month, with the platform offering three distinct tiers – Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise. The total cost can vary depending on the number of monthly active users (MAU). For instance, the Essential plan starts at $249 per month for 2500 MAU but jumps to $299 for 5000 MAU.

In general, it is pricier than some of the other product adoption tools available in the market, including Userpilot. For example, Userpilot’s basic tier (Starter) lets you add up to 10 audience segments and includes the complete set of UI patterns.

#6 Hubspot

Hubspot offers a varied service, leading with its CRM offering that focuses on inbound marketing automation. It also helps track and monitor user engagement for marketing efforts.

Its customer engagement elements focus on scaling customer support, whilst empowering customer success teams on a single platform.

Main features

Here’s what you’ll find in Hubspot:

• Engagement analytics: With Hubspot, you can monitor both the quantity and quality of traffic to your website. You can filter analytics either by country or URL to identify key traffic sources that are driving engagement.
• Segmentation: Content mapping through Hubspot’s marketing software allows you to segment your audience based on their engagement and experience with you, ideal for lead generation.
• Customer engagement automation: Hubspot’s engagement automation focuses on supporting your customers through conversational tools such as chatbots, help desk automation, knowledge base functionality, as well as customer feedback surveys and reporting.

Pricing

For businesses and enterprises, its customer service offers start at $450/month. If you are a small team or startup, you can choose its Starter plan which only costs from $18 a month!

#7 Userguiding

UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption tool that lets users create in-app walkthroughs, guides, and checklists. The solution makes it possible for teams to onboard, engage, and retain users without needing coding skills to create these in-app experiences.

Main features

Because UserGuiding was built to create no-code onboarding flows, its features are better suited to the earlier stages of the user journey rather than the full course of the customer experience.

That said, there are still certain UserGuiding features that can be adapted for driving customer engagement optimization:

• UserGuiding does have the features necessary for creating basic product tours, but the no-code implementation will depend on how complex you need these onboarding flows to be. Full integration of the UserGuiding solution does require some updates to your coding.
• Surveys: Customer experience optimization (CXO) is heavily reliant on gathering feedback that can help improve and streamline user journeys. Collecting qualitative feedback with UserGuiding surveys can be the first step towards improving the customer experience.
• MAUs: While the MAU metric isn’t as granular as customer satisfaction metrics like NPS or CSAT scores, looking at trends in how many MAUs your product is getting from month to month can help you determine if the customer experience is getting better or worse.
• Activity feed: UserGuiding’s activity feed can show you which areas of the tool users have been engaging with the most. You can then use these insights to identify areas where the customer experience could be improved.

Pricing

UserGuiding has three plans to choose from, targeted towards a range of business sizes from startup to enterprise. Pricing for each plan starts at $89, $499, and $999 a month.

#8 Intercom

Intercom is a popular platform that sales and marketing teams use to reach out to potential customers through in-app messages, chats, and surveys.

Main features

For improving customer engagement, Intercom offers features as follow:

• Customer communication: Intercom enables proactive engagement with potential customers through in-app messaging, chat conversations, email, and surveys.

• Customer support: With added features such as a shared inbox and a knowledge base builder, the tool provides a comprehensive customer support solution.
• Customer guidance: It allows users to create and deliver product tours and in-app tool tips without the need for coding, making it a valuable resource, especially for teams with limited developer resources.
• Customizable chatbots: Users can develop custom chatbots on Intercom that automate issue resolution and facilitate multilingual conversations with customers, enhancing overall customer support and engagement.

Pricing

Intercom comes at a significant cost, particularly its higher-tiered plans. Even the Starter plan, priced at $74 per month, might be considered steep for smaller teams or tighter budgets. Not to mention, it doesn’t come with advanced analytics for understanding engagement across the customer journey.

While it remains an excellent choice for larger enterprises, those with limited resources might find more affordable options elsewhere.

#9 Drift

Drift identifies as a revenue acceleration platform that helps you engage with your users from their initial interaction, right the way through to close.

By identifying each visitor, Drift lets you personalize your customers’ visits in ways that are unique to them, to drive conversion rates, it also helps your team to engage more productively with your users.

Main features

As a customer engagement software, Drift comes with the following features:

• Through Drift Automation, powerful and customizable chatbots harness strong communication AI to engage with your customers and move them through the sales process both quickly and effectively.
• Through Drift segments, you can filter contacts based on attributes and events, allowing you to provide a great buying experience for your customers. Drift’s platform provides both static (only lets you see those accounts as part of your filter criteria) and dynamic (which grows as you add more accounts to match your filter criteria) segmentation functionality.
• Drift’s analytics capabilities provide a clear picture of website performance, analyzing which conversations on which pages offer the highest lead conversion

Pricing

This is a pricey tool comparing to other options on the list. Its pricing starts at $2,500/month.

#10 Drip

Drip is a marketing automation platform that focuses on eCommerce automation, through a combination of email, SMS and third-party integrations that help organizations drive their revenue.

Main features

Given its primary focus as a marketing automation tool for eCommerce businesses, Drip specializes in enhancing customer engagement through several key features:

• You can view consolidated email metrics, to export key metrics specific for your reporting. See clicks from new users or existing subscribers, track events, and conversions, and monitor recent activities.
• Drip lets you personalize the marketing that your audience receives, which is tailored based on their historical engagement with you. Custom campaigns and workflows enable you to market clearly to each segment of your audience.
• With Drip, you can send emails and texts with personalized and dynamic product recommendations, which can all be automated through Drip’s visual workflow builder.

Pricing

Drip’s pricing depends on how many customers are there in your email list. And it starts at $39 a month for 2500 customers.

Conclusion

2023 is a big year for customer engagement software, these tools are becoming more intelligent and more personalized than ever before.

Consider your analytics and your goals, the segmentation capabilities you need to maximize your customer engagement. Test out what feels right for you and your customers, and don’t forget to check the third-party integrations that match your setup so you can create the most seamless experiences.

If you are looking for customer engagement software for your SaaS, book a demo today to see how Userpilot can help!

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