Customer Experience 
Ever had a customer experience that left you questioning the effectiveness of your company’s client interactions? In a large enterprise, where every touchpoint is critical, even one negative experience can damage your bottom line.
Delivering a great customer experience is critical for differentiation and growth for mid-market and enterprise organizations. The stats prove it’s profitable, with 86% of customers willing to pay premiums for great service experiences.
Customer experience platforms are essential for larger businesses to understand complex customer journeys, align service across channels, and personalize experiences at scale. These solutions highlight pain points and drive customer loyalty and satisfaction to fuel sustained growth.
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As Jason Lemkin, CEO of SaaStr, says:
“If you (as a SaaS provider) make your customers even somewhat successful, you’re going to get at least 112% revenue retention each year…so never stop investing in customer success. Ever.”
Enterprises can turn customer satisfaction into a competitive advantage by leveraging the right customer experience tools. But the big question is, which tools should you use?
We discuss which CX tools to use here with actionable insights for choosing the right customer experience tech stack for your organization.
What Are Customer Experience Tools?
Customer experience tools are software platforms purpose-built to help businesses better understand interactions and overall experiences across the customer lifecycle. They’re able to:
- Gather the voice of customer feedback: These tools allow you to collect direct customer insights through intuitive feedback surveys, online reviews, social listening, and other contact methods. This “voice of customer” data is central to pinpointing areas for improvement.
- Analyze behavioral data and identify insights: By leveraging advanced analytics capabilities, often using machine learning algorithms, top-performing customer experience tools transform raw data into invaluable insights about customer behaviors, motivations and pain points and drivers of satisfaction or churn. Visual dashboards highlight key metrics.
- Enable proactive, personalized engagements: With a unified view of each customer’s needs and preferences, businesses can tailor experiences with personalized interactions, timely outreach, and predictive services, which nurtures customer relationship management.
- Streamline customer journeys: These tools help map out every step of the customer journey across physical and digital experience channels, which enables optimization of processes and handoffs for smoother experiences.
- Automate workflows and self-service: Intelligent automation and self-service portals powered by AI can handle routine queries and tasks, freeing agents to focus on more complex needs. This drives efficiency while providing convenience.
- Boost loyalty and advocacy: When customer needs are consistently met with accuracy and empathy, it fosters long-term loyalty and brand advocacy. Customer experience tools empower businesses to deliver on rising experience expectations.
Identifying the customer experience tools that will be most beneficial for your business depends on factors like your goals, customers, current pain points, processes, and tech stack. Understanding your unique needs will guide your evaluation of potential solutions.
Related: 4 Proven Strategies for Optimizing Your Customer Journey
Contact Center Platforms
Contact center platforms help businesses manage customer communications across multiple channels like phone, email, chat, and social media. Popular features include:
- Omnichannel routing and integration
- AI-powered automation and self-service
- Advanced analytics and reporting
- Workforce management tools
1. Nextiva
Nextiva offers an omnichannel contact center solution that combines all your essential customer service channels into a unified platform. It has powerful routing and automation capabilities, plus remote work-friendly features for on-the-go teams.
2. Five9
Five9 provides an intelligent cloud contact center with advanced routing, CRM integration, and workforce management tools to optimize agent productivity and customer experiences.
3. Genesys
Genesys is an enterprise-grade omnichannel platform with robust self-service options and deep analytics. It’s highly scalable and customizable for large contact center operations.
Customer Feedback & Analytics Tools
These tools allow you to collect customer feedback through surveys, reviews, and social listening. They also provide analytics to measure satisfaction, identify trends, follow up, and pinpoint areas for improvement.
1. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an experience management platform with robust reporting, data visualization, and advanced analysis capabilities for customer, employee, brand, and product insights. These insights help organizations identify what people need and when they need it, facilitating customer interactions that engage and drive profitable action.
2. SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey offers a user-friendly interface for creating various types of surveys and customer feedback forms. It has many app integrations and good analytical capabilities, helping brands capture the voices and opinions of their target audiences.
3. Typeform
Typeform allows organizations to create visually engaging, interactive surveys with features like logic jumps and conditional questioning for personalized feedback collection and improved response rates.
Personalization & Engagement Solutions
These platforms leverage customer data and AI to deliver personalized experiences across channels and touchpoints through targeted content, segmentation, offers, and recommendations.
1. Adobe Experience Cloud
Adobe Experience Cloud, a content management system, comprises tools for personalizing customer journeys with tailored content and commerce experiences across websites, mobile apps, and other channels.
2. Salesforce Customer 360
Customer 360 merges customer data from multiple sources, including an organization’s marketing, sales, commerce, service, and IT departments, to provide a single view, enabling more personalized marketing and customer experiences.
3. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a powerful product analytics platform that helps organizations understand user behaviors and leverage those insights to drive personalized engagement and experiences.
Conversational Customer Experience Software
Conversational tools use AI chatbots, live chat, and messaging apps to enable real-time interactions and support across digital channels.
1. Drift
Drift is a conversational marketing and sales platform that uses AI to connect buyers and sellers. Its services include lead generation, ABM campaigns, website personalization, and sales efficiency tools.
2. Intercom
Intercom offers an integrated customer service solution featuring AI-enhanced tools, omnichannel messaging, and proactive support. This platform aims to improve customer satisfaction and team efficiency across various industries, including financial services, e-commerce, and education.
3. Manychat
Manychat helps businesses automate conversations on Instagram, WhatsApp, Messenger, and SMS. It focuses on driving sales and conversions through chat automation, allowing businesses to engage with customers 24/7, capture leads, and increase conversion rates.
Helpdesk & Support Platforms
These customer service platforms provide tools like ticketing systems, knowledge bases, and self-service portals to streamline processes for support teams.
1. Zendesk
Zendesk offers organizations various services, including a ticketing system, messaging, live chat, help centers, reporting and analytics, AI, automation, a sales CRM, and a marketplace. They enhance customer experiences in several industries, from education to finance, healthcare, and retail.
2. Freshdesk
Freshdesk is a user-friendly helpdesk solution offering features like team huddles, shared ownership, event-triggered automation, email notifications, and feedback mechanisms. It stands out for its ease of use and diverse price plans, catering to various business needs.
3. Help Scout
Help Scout enhances customer service by providing a simple yet collaborative email-based customer support platform that integrates with live chat, phone systems, CRMs, and email marketing tools, making it versatile for various customer support needs.
Customer Journey Mapping & Engagement Solutions
Customer journey mapping tools help visualize and analyze the steps customers take when interacting with your business across multiple touchpoints. This customer experience management process is vital for understanding the customer journey.
1. Custellence
Custellence is an interactive SaaS platform that allows organizations to create multi-touchpoint journey maps to better understand and improve their customer experience. Its intuitive, drag-and-drop interface, combined with smart journey mapping, helps organizations visualize customer journeys and take profitable action.
2. Smaply
Smaply is a smart cloud-based tool for creating detailed user flowcharts, journey maps, and personas to optimize customer interactions. It has high data security, is GDPR compliant, and allows companies to create, collaborate on, and manage customer journey maps.
3. Hotjar
While not a dedicated journey mapping tool, Hotjar provides heatmaps, recordings, and analytics that show how website visitors navigate and interact with a website. These tools show where users click, move, and scroll and capture users’ opinions about the site, enabling businesses to improve their experience.
Related: What Is Unified Customer Experience Management (CXM)?
How to Find the Right Customer Experience Tool for Your Business
With so many customer experience software options, it can be overwhelming to select the best solutions to improve your customer experience strategy. These tips can help you make the right investments.
1. Define your goals
Be specific about your customer experience goals and the challenges you want to tackle. Is it improving CSAT and NPS, reducing churn, and increasing customer lifetime value or boosting sales conversions? Defining your priority goals first will inform which customer experience capabilities you need most.
2. Know your customers
Who are your target customer personas — what are their needs, behaviors, expectations, and preferences? How do they want to interact with businesses in your industry? Choose customer experience tools that align with how your customers actually want to communicate and receive service.
3. Conduct a “needs” assessment
Make a comprehensive list of all the must-have features and capabilities required to achieve your customer experience goals. These needs could include omnichannel support, advanced data analytics, personalization engines, workflow automation, and robust reporting dashboards. Prioritize your needs to guide your search.
4. Keep scalability in mind
Don’t just consider your current business and technology requirements. Any customer experience platform you invest in should be able to scale and adapt seamlessly as your company grows. Look for solutions that integrate your existing tech stack and data sources.
5. Evaluate support quality
Working with new software often includes a learning curve and periodic optimization needs. The quality and availability of support from the vendor can make or break your long-term success and ROI. Evaluate their customer service, onboarding process, training resources, and online community.
6. Focus on user experience
Even the most powerful customer experience tool won’t drive adoption if it’s too complicated for your staff. Look for solutions with an intuitive, modern interface that will be easy for your customer service team members to navigate daily. Free trials can help you assess usability.
7. Understand implementation requirements
Different customer experience platforms may require varying levels of service, integrations, and customizations for proper implementation. Get realistic estimates of setup time, costs, and resources required for a smooth deployment based on your capabilities.
Once you’ve thoroughly assessed your business needs against available solutions, you can confidently choose the right customer experience tools to elevate your customer experience initiatives.
Transform Your Customer Experience With Nextiva
When it comes to best-in-class contact center capabilities as part of your customer experience tech stack, Nextiva stands head and shoulders above its competition.
Nextiva’s omnichannel platform seamlessly combines all your essential service channels, like phone, chat, email, SMS, video, and social media, into one unified solution. This enables effortless pivoting between channels during interactions.
The intelligent routing and automation functionalities ensure inquiries are routed to the right agent or bot swiftly based on factors like skillset, language, and customer history. For added convenience, automated self-service options powered by AI can resolve routine queries without agent involvement.
On the analytics side, Nextiva provides real-time and historical data visualizations of metrics such as handle times, resolutions, and satisfaction scores. Call recordings and customer journey maps reveal opportunities for process optimization.
The platform is extremely scalable to meet changing contact volumes, with the ability to quickly and easily add or adjust capacity and new communication channels as needed. And it’s remote-work friendly with mobile apps and cloud capabilities.
Nextiva also constantly expands functionality through partnerships, like its recent integration with Zapier, which allows you to sync it with over 5,000 other business apps. Its commitment to innovation, security, and reliability makes it the trusted customer experience partner of enterprises worldwide.
Investing in the right customer experience solutions, such as Nextiva, doesn’t incrementally improve customer experience — it transforms your ability to deliver exceptional service that stands out in your industry.
Check out Nextiva’s powerful customer journey solutions and see how easy it is to take your customer experience to new heights!
Related: Voice of Customer Program: What Is VoC & What to Do With It
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