What is user engagement?

Customer engagement refers to the ongoing interactions between a business and its customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

It is the process of facilitating interactions with your SaaS users to improve customer experience throughout the entire customer lifecycle. Optimizing user engagement drives customer retention, improves customer loyalty, and customer experience and ultimately encourages your customers to engage with your product further and adopt your product.

What are user engagement tools?

Customer engagement tools aim to improve the customer relationship with your business through different types of engagement like user onboarding, customer support, customer success, self-service support, etc.

Using a customer engagement tool can improve your customer experience by making your customer interactions more contextual, personalized, and relevant.

Some common user engagement tools include:

• User onboarding platform: User onboarding platforms facilitate the process of introducing new users to a product or service, guiding them through key features and functionalities. They often utilize in-app guides, tutorials, and tooltips to help users get started quickly and effectively, ultimately improving user adoption and retention rates.
• Analytics platform: Analytics tools collect, analyze, and interpret data related to user behavior, interactions, and performance metrics. They provide valuable insights into how users engage with a website, application, or digital platform, enabling businesses to make informed decisions, optimize user experiences, and drive better outcomes.
• Email marketing tool: Email marketing tools enable businesses to create, send, and manage email campaigns to engage with their audience. They typically offer features such as email template design, contact management, automation, and analytics, allowing businesses to nurture leads, promote products, and maintain communication with customers effectively.
• Marketing automation tool: Marketing automation tools streamline repetitive marketing tasks and workflows, such as lead nurturing, campaign management, and customer segmentation. They automate personalized interactions with users across multiple channels, driving engagement, and improving marketing efficiency.
• Social media management software: These tools offer features such as scheduling posts, monitoring mentions and conversations, analyzing performance metrics, and engaging with followers, enabling businesses to build brand awareness, foster relationships, and drive engagement on social media.
• Communications platform: Communications platforms facilitate real-time communication and collaboration between businesses and their customers through various channels such as chat, messaging, and support tickets. They centralize customer interactions, streamline communication processes, and provide tools for managing inquiries, resolving issues, and delivering exceptional customer support.

Customer engagement platform vs customer relationship management system

While both customer engagement platforms (CEPs) and customer relationship management (CRM) systems are focused on managing interactions with customers, they serve different purposes and have distinct functionalities:

What features should customer engagement tools have?

When talking about customer engagement, we’re talking about listening to your users and responding. 

It’s all about the conversation you’re having with them.

In essence, there are three main components when it comes to customer relationship management. Some tools we’re mentioning may cover all three of these components, whereas some may focus on just one.

Analyzing customer behavior

Where are your users finding value in your product, what features do they use, where do they get stuck, and where do they fall off? The right behavioral analytics tool should help you dive into the data but also translate those behaviors into actionable feedback.

Collecting qualitative feedback

Getting direct, actionable feedback to improve your product experience is extremely valuable. However, this sometimes can be very time-consuming and requires you to survey users at the right time. Some of the tools we’ll mention below have in-app micro survey features to gauge customer satisfaction, which can be targeted towards the right folks you want feedback from.

Communicating with your users

Whether it’s in-app or using a third-party platform to facilitate customer interaction, staying proactive and keeping the conversation flowing is up to the product owners.

Depending on what your immediate product needs are, you may want to prioritize certain components more than others. We generally recommend getting your qualitative feedback systems in place after identifying the main pain points through your quantitative data.

1. Userpilot: Best customer engagement software for SaaS companies

Call us biased, but we think Userpilot deserves a mention on this list of the best customer engagement software for SaaS.

Here are some Userpilot features you can use when engaging your users:

• No-code builder: Creating flows with Userpilot is as simple as installing the Chrome extension, selecting the UI patterns you’d like to use, and then editing the content/settings to suit your use case. You can also use templates to create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions.

• Native tooltips: Userpilot lets you create native tooltips that show up when users hover over an element or click on an information badge. Since these native tooltips attach to the element itself, they aren’t page-dependent and will show up on any screen where that element is visible.

• Funnel analytics: Userpilot’s advanced analytics lets you create funnel reports that track the onboarding journey. You can also add filters (like name, user ID, signup date, operating system, country, etc.) and monitor the total conversion rate from the first step of the funnel to the last.

• User segmentation: Userpilot lets you segment users based on the device they’re using, where they’re located, their engagement data, or which NPS rating they selected on the latest survey. You can then filter your analytics dashboards to see which segments struggle with onboarding.

• Survey builder: Userpilot’s survey builder lets you edit the content, update the widget’s style/placement, and set page-specific or event-specific triggers to ensure that users see the survey at the most contextual moment — all without writing a single line of code. You can also translate surveys into your audience’s native language.

• Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from with a wide array of different use cases. You can collect qualitative responses on how to improve the user/product experience or quantitative data for customer satisfaction benchmarking such as CSAT and CES scores.

• Advanced analytics: Userpilot’s advanced survey analytics will show you what the most common responses were, what percentage of users selected a specific option, and display open-ended feedback about your product or specific features.

• NPS dashboard: Userpilot’s NPS dashboard compiles response data from all NPS surveys so you don’t have to manually go into each survey and check its analytics. You’ll be able to view key metrics like response rates, total views, and NPS history and sort all the data by different segments.

Userpilot 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, user feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $499/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. Heap: Best customer engagement software for analyzing customer data and user behavior

Heap offers several features to help you track user actions, behavior, and properties. It lets you dig deeper into how users navigate your product and interact with different elements on a page.

The particularly useful features include:

• You can track various user sessions and filter the data based on date range and other parameters. It’s also possible to export the data into a CSV file or Google Sheets.

• You can use a variety of heatmaps (Clickmaps, Scroll Depth, and Attention Maps) to understand user intent, identify points of friction, and improve UI.

• The Session Replays feature lets you visualize the exact journey a user takes when acting.

• You can use the Funnels, Journey Maps, Engagement, and Retention analysis features for a more detailed look at user behavior.

• You can segment users into different groups and filter all kinds of data for each segment. Loads of segment criteria are offered by Heap too.

• The Effort Analysis feature helps you quantify user friction and make immediate fixes to improve the user experience. It particularly helps with retention.
• The Pro and Premier plans also offer account-based analytics to help you monitor account health and churn. It’s particularly valuable for B2B companies and helps minimize churn.

Heap pricing

Pricing for Heap is available on request. You’ll have to contact the sales team for a quote. The final price will depend on various factors, including the number of sessions and integrations you need.

That said, Heap offers a free plan that lets you track up to 10,000 user sessions per month and stores your data for 6 months. Review platforms like G2 say that paid plans start at $3,600 per year. All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial, too.

You can choose from the following plans:

• Free – Ideal for teams looking to establish product-market fit.
• Starter – Suitable for startups looking to scale their business.
• Growth – Useful for companies that need advanced features, such as account analytics and report alerts.
• Pro – Tailored for enterprise businesses with robust security and compliance requirements.

It’s worth mentioning here that Heap offers a handy ROI calculator to help you get a clearer picture of whether it’s worth the investment.

3. Mixpanel: Best customer engagement platform for customer behavior and customer journey insights

If Heap is the new up-and-comer, then Mixpanel is the wise old hermit, and we mean that in the best possible way.

Mixpanel is an advanced analytics platform that was designed to help companies and organizations of every size to monitor and analyze customer actions. It measures the steps taken by people who enter your app and shows you everything they are doing in it.

Mixpanel has long been the leader when it comes to product analytics, and with good reason.

Mixpanel product analytics functionalities work based on:

• User segmentation: User segmentation is the bedrock of effective product analytics in Mixpanel. You can divide your user base into distinct groups based on attributes, behaviors, or properties and uncover meaningful trends and preferences among various user groups.
• Funnel analysis: Mixpanel’s funnel analysis feature allows you to create sequences of events that users should ideally complete. This helps you gain insights into where users drop off and where they progress.
• Retention analysis: With the retention analysis feature, you can track how often users return to your application after their initial interaction.

Mixpanel offers a free plan with very advanced product analytics functionality but no engagement layer or feedback features like that of Userpilot. Even though Userpilot may not support such advanced analytics as Mixpanel, it still offers enough to enable product managers to make data-driven decisions.

Mixpanel pricing

Mixpanel’s pricing plan is divided into 3 plans; the starter plan, the enterprise plan, and the growth plan.

Here’s an overview of the pricing plans and features of each plan:

• Starter plan: This plan features essentials to find product-market fit. It is free and allows up to 20M monthly events. In addition, you get access to all core reports for user journey analysis, templates to get started easily, unlimited integrations, and unlimited collaborators.
• Growth plan: This plan costs $20 per month for up to 100M monthly events. You get all features in the starter plan plus unlimited saved reports to monitor, update & iterate on KPIs, Mixpanel modeling layer, and group analytics & data pipeline add-ons.
• Enterprise plan: This plan empowers your team, especially if you have a large organization. You’ll have to contact their sales representatives for the cost. This plan features all the benefits of the growth plan plus advanced access controls, shared data views for collaboration, automated provisioning & SSO, and prioritized support.

4. Pendo: Best customer engagement platform for mobile

Pendo is one of the all-in-one customer engagement platforms, like Userpilot.

It has the usual onboarding features that are commonly included with similar solutions. However, those using Pendo Free will need to note that they’ll need to find a new onboarding solution once they cross 500 MAUs or upgrade to the paid version.

Unlike most product adoption solutions, Pendo works with mobile apps on both iOS and Android operating systems. For this reason, developers who are creating software for mobile platforms usually go straight to Pendo.

There are a few ways you can use Pendo to drive customer engagement:

• Guide Layouts: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
• Flow Triggers: Pendo’s guide activation options let you trigger an onboarding flow when new users land on a particular URL, use a specific device type, interact with a tagged element, or match the target segment.
• Localization Settings: Localization settings can stop an onboarding flow from triggering if it hasn’t been translated into the user’s chosen language. Because Pendo has no AI-powered localization features, you’ll need to upload language CSVs manually for this to work.
• Onboarding Module: You can add the onboarding module to your in-app resource center in two clicks then change the color, text style, and progress icon to align it with your product’s brand palette.
• 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.

Pendo pricing

Pricing for paid Pendo plans 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 two paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run.

Here are the differences between each Pendo plan:

• Pendo Free: The free version of Pendo can accommodate 500 MAUs and has features like native analytics dashboards, feature tagging, event tracking, segmentation, NPS surveys (with Pendo branding), analytics reports, and in-app guides.

• Growth: Pendo’s Growth plan is designed to be used for a single web or mobile app but can accommodate a custom number of MAUs. It includes features like native analytics dashboards, in-app guides, NPS surveys and response tracking, and customer support.
• Portfolio: Pendo’s Portfolio plan is targeted towards customers who want to use the tool for multiple web and/or mobile apps. Features include guide experiment capabilities, cross-app executive dashboards, cross-app journey reporting, and access to product engagement scores.

5. Typeform: Best customer engagement platform for collecting customer feedback

One of the easiest ways to start collecting feedback is to send a survey out to your customers. There are plenty of customer survey tools out there, but one of the best is Typeform.

There’s something about Typeform’s surveys — maybe the clean and minimal styling, or the simple user experience they provide — that makes them stand out from the likes of SurveyMonkey and Google Forms.

While Typeform may be a bit more costly, you do get access to some useful features you can use to engage customers. You can, for example, create logic jumps to adapt the survey to a user’s answers. You can also use “hidden fields” to greet users by name and personalize their experience.

Typeform’s conversational approach can help you increase your response rates. It also tends to improve the quality of the feedback you gather.

If you’re looking for a high-quality customer engagement solution to collect customer data through surveys, then Typeform is one of the best.

Typeform pricing

Typeform offers several pricing plans to cater to different needs and budgets. Here’s an overview of the available plans:

• Basic: $25 per month (billed yearly).
• Plus: $50 per month (billed yearly).
• Business: $83 per month (billed yearly).
• Enterprise: Contact sales for pricing.

6. Hotjar: Best customer engagement platform for analyzing customer journeys

Of course, the kind of qualitative feedback you can get from surveys is only one type of customer satisfaction data you can collect from your users. Hotjar offers a way to collect even more data and translate raw user behavior data into actionable insights. Hotjar can help you see what your customers do, and understand why they do it. That’s why it’s on our list of the best customer engagement software and survey tools.

Hotjar’s user analytics mostly focus on the actions and behaviors that users perform/exhibit during sessions on your website or web application.

Here’s an overview of the user metrics that Hotjar’s session recordings track:

• Country: All session recordings will tell you which country the user was from so you can identify untapped markets and target your content localization efforts accordingly. Note that this geographic data may not be 100% reliable if your website visitors are using a VPN.
• Relevance: Each session recording is assigned a relevance score to help you figure out which recordings are worth reviewing. The score is based on multiple factors, including how long the user’s session lasted, how many pages they visited, the number of actions, and more.
• Engagement: Every session has engagement and frustration scores on a scale of 1-3. This will help you spot, at a glance, the engagement level and psychological valence behind the session (i.e. how positive or negative the experience was).

Hotjar pricing

Hotjar’s has a free version (Basic) while its entry-level paid plan (Plus) starts at $39/month. Its Business and Scale plans start at $99/month and $213/month, respectively, but incorporate a usage-based pricing model — which means your subscription cost will increase as daily sessions grow.

For instance, the Business tier will cost $789/month for 8k daily sessions, while the Scale plan will cost $827/month for just 2.5k daily sessions. Switching to an annual billing schedule can save you 20% on all of Hotjar’s paid plans.

Here’s an overview of Hotjar’s four plans to choose from:

• Basic: Hotjar’s free Basic plan can accommodate up to 35 daily sessions and includes automatic data capturing, unlimited heatmaps, and access to the HubSpot integration. Once your website passes 35 daily sessions, you’ll need to upgrade to one of Hotjar’s paid plans.
• Plus: The entry-level Plus plan starts at $39/month and can accommodate up to 100 daily sessions. It also includes features like filtering/segmenting data and an event-tracking API for custom user actions.
• Business: The Business plan starts at $99/month and can accommodate up to 500 daily sessions at the base price. It includes access to 25 integrations, the Identify API for tracking customer user attributes, and frustration/confusion signals like rage clicks or U-turns.
• Scale: The Scale plan starts at $213/month and can accommodate up to 500 daily sessions at the price price. It includes funnel analysis, trends reports, console tracking, a dedicated success manager, and direct access to the Hotjar API.

Note: The prices above are for Hotjar Observe — which includes heatmaps and behavioral analytics. To conduct surveys or interviews, you’ll need to pay extra for either Hotjar Ask or Hotjar Engage. Both tools have free tiers, but they’re quite limited.

7. Productboard: Best customer engagement platform for customer communications

One of the biggest problems with collecting feedback is that it often ends up spread out across different channels. If you’re looking for customer engagement solutions to consolidate all that data, check ProductBoard.

Productboard helps you consolidate all the feedback in one place, making it a great customer engagement platform.

With Productboard, you can link all your channels together. Email, social media, Intercom, Zendesk — all your feedback will be fed into one place. This makes it far easier to gain valuable insights and to identify any patterns or trends.

You can then link these feedback trends to relevant feature ideas. This enables your product managers and designers to understand what they should work on next.

You can also communicate any decisions back to your customers with the public road-mapping feature. This way your customers know what to expect from your product in the future.

Productboard pricing

Productboard offers three plans to choose from:

• Essentials – $25 per maker/month
• Pro – $75 per maker/month
• Enterprise – comes with a custom quote.

But remember that each offer is custom-made based on your needs, so use this only as a rough estimation.

8. HubSpot CRM Suite: Best CRM & customer engagement platform

If you’re seeking an all-encompassing customer engagement platform, HubSpot could be the ideal solution.

HubSpot operates as a comprehensive CRM offering a suite of products, including Marketing Hub, Sales Hub, Service Hub, CMS (content management system) Hub, and Operations Hub. These products are strategically designed to consolidate all customer interactions onto a single platform.

With HubSpot’s diverse range of tools, you gain control over virtually every aspect of customer engagement. You can effectively manage customer communications, track support inquiries, nurture sales leads, create and manage a blog, orchestrate email campaigns, curate user lists, conduct A/B testing on landing pages and email content, access detailed reporting dashboards, and much more.

Businesses have the option to sign up for individual “hub” plans or leverage HubSpot’s CRM Suite, which includes access to all hubs, available for free. While the platform’s free plans offer considerable value, it’s essential to recognize that many advanced features are exclusive to paid plans.

You can also integrate HubSpot with Userpilot to be able to send highly targeted email campaigns.

HubSpot CRM Suite pricing

Here’s an overview of HubSpot’s CRM Suite plans:

• Professional Plan: Starts at $1,600 per month, billed annually at $19,201.
• Enterprise Plan: Starts at $5,000 per month, billed annually at $60,000.

9. Intercom: Best customer engagement software for in-app messaging

Intercom is a renowned engagement platform widely utilized by sales and marketing teams to proactively interact with potential customers through various channels such as in-app messaging, chat conversations, and surveys. Over the years, it has expanded its capabilities to encompass customer support functionalities like a shared inbox and knowledge base builder, making it a comprehensive customer communications platform.

In addition to traditional engagement tools like live chat and in-app messaging, Intercom offers features such as code-free product tours and in-app tooltips, which can be particularly beneficial for teams with limited developer resources. Users can also leverage custom chatbots to automate issue resolution and communicate with customers in multiple languages.

While Intercom provides a robust set of features, it comes at a premium price.

Intercom pricing

Intercom’s plans start at $74/month on the entry-level plan and use custom pricing for the Pro tier or higher. There’s no free version available, but Intercom does offer a 14-day free trial that lets you test all features on the Starter tier before upgrading to a paid subscription.

Intercom has three paid plans to choose from and different add-ons priced separately:

• Starter: Starts at $74/month and includes two team seats, and features like the messenger widget, automated chatbots, shared inbox, real-time tickets, help center, macros, and basic analytics reporting capabilities.
• Pro: Custom pricing based on the number of team seats and MAUs. It includes features like multiple inboxes, assignment rules, ticketing systems, localized help centers, and advanced automation/analytics.
• Premium: Custom pricing based on the number of team seats and MAUs. It includes features like a real-time dashboard, custom analytics, workload management, and a service level agreement.

In addition to the base subscription cost, you’ll need to pay an additional $199/month if you want to use the Product Tours add-on. This means that, even on the Starter plan, you’d still be paying almost $300/month in total if you get the Product Tours add-on to go with it.

10. Drip: Best customer engagement software for email marketing automation

Email marketing is one of the most effective ways to engage customers, improve the customer experience, and help your users down the customer journey. One email marketing tool worth mentioning is Drip.

Drip is a CRM software and email marketing automation platform that helps users customize and automate their email marketing workflows. Drip supports email campaigns that suit the different promotional and marketing needs of individuals, teams, and organizations. This variety provides them with the opportunity to send targeted emails to their subscribers.

With Drip, users can connect their favorite communication channels, applications, and solutions through the API or the built-in third-party integrations. This helps them expand the functionality of Drip and gain valuable insights to grow their product.

Unlike other email customer engagement tools, Drip focuses on segmentation and sending the right email flows to the right customers. This means you can automatically communicate with your customers based on their behavior.

Drip isn’t fully focused on email though. It also enables you to send targeted, personalized messages via social media, SMS, and even direct mail to your customer base. You can also split-test any messaging so you hone in on the right copy or imagery.

Drip is a great customer engagement software for when you want to keep customers in the loop and automate some of your communication.

Drip pricing

Drip’s pricing is based on the number of contacts in your list and you get all features in all subscription plans.

0-2500 – $39/month

It is incremental as the number of contacts in your email list increases. For more than 180K contacts in your list, they would want to talk to you and give you custom pricing.

It doesn’t have a forever free plan but you can get a 14-day free trial to access all the features.

11. Help Scout: Best customer engagement software for small businesses

Help Scout offers a wide array of reports that help your customer service teams monitor customer support performance and improve user engagement. For instance:

• You can track metrics, such as new conversations and conversations per day, across different channels, including email, phone, and live chat. You can even identify the busiest day of the week for customer support.

  

• You can set custom date ranges to analyze these metrics over time and even compare data from different timeframes. Additionally, you can specify various conditions to create a new report view.

  

• You can check the Happiness Score to get an idea of customer satisfaction across different channels.
• Additionally, the Docs report offers an overview of how users engage with your knowledge base.

  

It is, however, worth noting that Help Scout’s analytics is restricted to customer support metrics. You don’t get granular insights into in-app user activity or behavior. If you’re looking for more in-depth user analytics, a platform like Userpilot would be a better choice.

Help Scout pricing

Help Scout offers three different pricing plans, with the total cost based on the number of users.

The plans include:

• Standard: It starts at $20 per user per month (billed annually) or $25 per user per month (billed monthly). It includes 2 shared inboxes and 1 Docs knowledge base. Also, you’ll have to pay extra for in-app messaging if the total number of viewers exceeds 2000.
• Plus: It starts at $40 per user per month (billed annually) or $50 per user per month (billed monthly). It includes everything in the Standard plan, along with advanced analytics, custom reporting, AI features, and integration with popular apps like Salesforce and HubSpot.
• Pro: It starts at $65 per user per month and only offers an annual subscription. It includes everything in the Plus plan, along with concierge onboarding services, a dedicated account manager, and enterprise-level security and compliance.

While the Standard plan is suitable for small teams with limited budgets, the Pro plan is a good fit for large businesses. However, keep in mind that pricing is based on the number of users, and the costs can quickly escalate as your team grows.

Help Scout offers a 15-day free trial that allows you to test various features and tools and determine whether it’s the right fit for your needs.

12. FullStory: Best customer engagement software for collecting user experience data

FullStory is a user engagement tool that provides businesses with comprehensive insights into user behavior on their websites and web applications. It allows companies to understand how users interact with their digital platforms by capturing and analyzing user sessions in real time.

Here’s an overview of FullStory as a user engagement tool:

• Session Replay: FullStory records every user session, capturing mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, form interactions, and more. This feature allows businesses to replay user sessions to understand exactly how users navigate and interact with their website or application.
• Heatmaps: FullStory generates heatmaps based on user interactions, showing which areas of a webpage receive the most engagement. Heatmaps provide valuable insights into user behavior and help identify areas for optimization.
• Click Maps: Similar to heatmaps, click maps highlight specific elements on a webpage that users interact with the most. This feature helps businesses understand user preferences and optimize their website layout and design accordingly.

FullStory pricing

FullStory doesn’t disclose its pricing information publicly but offers a 14-day free trial.

Conclusion

There are plenty of great user engagement tools out there. The ones we’ve covered in this list will all help you to improve your relationship with your users. However, user engagement looks different for every Saas, so choosing the right tool for your product may depend on some research but also trying them out for fit!

If you’re looking for an all-in-one customer engagement platform to drive in-app engagement and product adoption as well as tracking user behavior and collecting feedback, get a Userpilot demo and see how easy it is to get started.

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