| What are customer engagement tools? These are software solutions that help businesses interact with customers, build relationships, and drive loyalty. |
Nowadays, going the extra mile in customer service is standard practice. Customers expect a stellar customer experience (CX) whenever and wherever they interact with your brand. Users might disengage and lose sight of your business if your user experience isn’t intuitive, frictionless, and personalized.
Positive interactions can encourage customers to stick around longer, which increases retention and revenue. But it’s not always obvious which CX analytics will clue you into where you need improvement. The right customer engagement tools can measure and analyze customer data and help you turn it into actionable insights to retain more customers.
These are today’s nine best customer engagement tools to improve CX, boost retention, and increase revenue.
| Customer Engagement Tool | Best For | Features | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nextiva | Most businesses | Omnichannel support, detailed reports, third-party integrations | $18.95 per user per month, billed annually |
| LiveChat | Live agent customer support | Customizable chat widget, omnichannel support | $20 per person per month, billed annually |
| Drift | Creating customer communication strategies | Playbook functions for out-of-the-box automations | $2,500 per month, billed annually |
| Intuit Mailchimp | Email marketing campaigns | Customer journey builder, A/B testing | Free |
| SurveyMonkey | Collecting and analyzing feedback | AI-powered surveys and targeting | $25 per month, billed annually |
| Hubspot Service Hub | Managing support tickets | Customer portal for all interactions at a glance | $90 per month per seat, billed annually |
| Hotjar | Tracking visitor movements | Audience heatmaps, visitor session recordings | Free |
| Keap | Personalized account management | Automation builders, lead dashboards | $159 per month, billed annually |
| Qualaroo | Creating custom surveys | Targeted survey questions, adaptable skip logic | Free |
1. Nextiva
Best overall tool
Nextiva is an AI-driven platform that helps facilitate seamless, personalized customer interactions on every channel. It offers a full suite of business communication tools to boost customer engagement, from Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) phone service to full CRM integration.
With data-driven insights from all your customer touchpoints, you can determine:
- Where your customers are engaging the least
- Which pages your customers read before buying
- What customers do when your proactive chat appears
Fostering engagement and building relationships is key to survival, no matter how big your business is. With engagement insights, you can see where you’re falling short on that mark and what you need to fix.
Features
Nextiva has first-class features to help you level up customer engagement, which include:
- Unified communications to streamline communications across multiple channels into one convenient dashboard
- Advanced customer analytics that gives you details into team performance and specifics on customer interactions
- Built-in video conferencing for seamless cross-team collaboration and file-sharing, ensuring everyone has the information they need
Plus, with Nextiva, you have the peace of mind that 24/7 customer support and data encryption can offer.
Pricing
Nextiva offers a wide range of pricing options depending on your desired features, how many seats you need, and your preferred payment terms.
- Essential: $18.95 per user per month, billed annually
- Professional: $22.95 per user per month, billed annually
- Enterprise: $32.95 per user per month, billed annually
The Professional and Enterprise plans also feature mobile SMS and MMS messaging, plus unlimited conference calls.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Detailed customer insights Third-party integrations Comprehensive reporting dashboards Unlimited voice and video calls and faxes | Live support limitations Not suitable for companies outside of the US |
2. LiveChat
Best for live agent customer support
LiveChat is a live chat software solution with a chat widget that you can add to your website. It allows your users to interact with customer support agents or sales representatives.
Features
LiveChat helps manage your customer conversations with features such as:
- Customizable chat widget for a consistent, familiar experience on all devices
- Detailed reports and analytics to review customer satisfaction and chatbot performance, including missed and abandoned chats
- Omnichannel support across communication channels like SMS, WhatsApp, and Facebook Messenger
Notably, LiveChat’s starter package only keeps a 60-day chat history. If your customer tickets are ever open for that long or longer, you may lose access to valuable conversation context.
Pricing
LiveChat offers three main pricing tiers depending on how many monthly visitors you want to track:
- Starter: $20 per person per month, billed annually (limit to one seat) for tracking up to 100 monthly visitors
- Team: $41 per person per month, billed annually for tracking up to 400 monthly visitors
- Business: $59 per person per month, billed annually for tracking up to 1,000 monthly visitors
If you need greater tracking capabilities or prefer a dedicated account manager, you can also opt for LiveChat’s Enterprise package.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| High-quality live chat support User-friendly interface Third-party integrations | Lack of notification options if the customer forgets the chat Limited number of live chat agents |
3. Drift
Best for creating customer communication strategies
Drift is a customer engagement platform that focuses on improving marketing and sales through conversational artificial intelligence (AI). It offers a chatbot feature that you can use to engage with website visitors in real time, answer questions, qualify leads, and schedule appointments.
Features
Drift has some great features to help boost customer engagement, like:
- Playbook functions with out-of-the-box automations for inbound and outbound customer communications
- Machine learning that analyzes user behavior to develop high-converting communication strategies
- Trainable AI that can analyze your trusted knowledge sources for brand and messaging consistency
It also offers email automation and analytics tools to help you personalize your customer interactions.
Pricing
Drift has only one price package for small businesses:
- Premium: $2,500 per month, billed annually
If your business is larger or needs more complex insights and options like audience mapping or A/B testing, opt for Drift’s Advanced or Enterprise plans.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Automatic lead collection Comprehensive reporting dashboards Third-party integrations | More expensive than competitors Limited functions for teams outside the Enterprise plan |
4. Intuit Mailchimp
Best for email marketing campaigns
Intuit Mailchimp is a marketing platform that can help manage your email campaigns, create automated workflows, and analyze campaign performance.
Features
Intuit Mailchimp has many features that contribute to its status as a leading email marketing platform:
- Customer journey builder to tailor communications based on preferences and behaviors
- Landing page builder to create custom pages and showcase products
- A/B testing to test out and analyze campaign performance
Intuit Mailchimp also has generative AI to help speed up your email campaign creation process.
Pricing
Intuit Mailchimp’s pricing for each of its four tiers changes based on how many contacts you have.
- Free: $0 per month for one seat and audience; up to 500 contacts and 1,000 monthly email sends
- Essentials: $13 per month for three seats and audiences; up to 150,000 monthly email sends
- Standard: $20 per month for five seats and audiences; up to 6,000 monthly email sends
- Premium: $350 per month for unlimited seats and audiences; up to 150,000 monthly email sends
This pricing reflects each tier at a max of 500 contacts — and the Free tier is only available for up to 500 contacts. For an additional cost, the Essentials tier can accommodate up to 50,000 contacts, and the Standard tier has a limit of 100,000 contacts. The Premium tier doesn’t have a contact limit.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| User-friendly interface Automatic lead collection Third-party integrations | Unsubscribed users count toward your contact limit Limitations on the Free plan |
5. SurveyMonkey
Best for collecting and analyzing customer feedback
SurveyMonkey is a survey platform that helps you create surveys to gather feedback from respondents. It offers more than 250 survey templates, plus over 100 third-party integrations and the ability to distribute surveys across nearly every channel.
Features
SurveyMonkey offers several features to pique customer engagement, including:
- AI-powered guidance for faster survey questions and unique recommendations to avoid response bias
- Targeted questions triggered by the user’s time on the page, pages viewed, or visit frequency
- Skip logic to add or remove survey questions based on the responses given by the user
In addition to creating and distributing surveys, SurveyMonkey can help you analyze responses and generate reports summarizing them.
Pricing
If you’re a solopreneur or have a very small team with no need to share control of surveys and data, you might opt for an individual plan. But if you want to take advantage of survey sharing with different team members, SurveyMonkey offers two Team Plans that start at three users per plan:
- Team Advantage: $25 per month, billed annually
- Team Premier: $75 per month, billed annually
If your needs balloon in the future, SurveyMonkey also offers enterprise plans for large businesses.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| User-friendly interface Extensive survey templates Survey customization capabilities Third-party integrations | No free trial period Limited customer support |
6. HubSpot Service Hub
Best for managing customer support tickets
Hubspot Service Hub is a customer engagement tool that can help you manage customer inquiries, tickets, and feedback. It organizes customer interactions and automates support to make communication more efficient; it can also help measure CX via metrics like customer satisfaction (CSAT).
Features
Service Hub has several features to foster better customer engagement:
- Customer portal for tracking all customer interactions, including inbound calls and ticket conversations
- KnowledgeBase self-service integration so customers can tackle low-level inquiries on their own
- Live chat to route customers to the right destination automatically
It also integrates with HubSpot’s CRM platform, allowing you to manage customer relationships across sales, marketing, and support teams.
Pricing
You can choose from two Service Hub pricing tiers for your business:
- Professional: $90 per month per seat, billed annually; $1,500 one-time onboarding fee
- Enterprise: $130 per month per seat, billed annually; $3,500 one-time onboarding fee
Service Hub also offers a free plan to give the product a test run or individual plans if you’re a solopreneur or a very small business.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Fully-integrated CRM software Detailed customer insights Service-level agreements for transparency | Limited automations Costly onboarding fee |
7. Hotjar
Best for tracking visitor movements
Hotjar is a visitor recording tool that allows businesses to see real-time customer movement across platforms. This helps spot areas where customers might commonly leave your site, indicating poor customer engagement.
Features
Hotjar has several features that help to map your customer engagement:
- Audience heatmaps to visualize how your customers interact with your brand
- Session recordings to track customer movements across channels in real time
- AI-powered surveys to hear firsthand customer opinions with little to no effort
Hotjar requires a bit of coding, so you should make sure someone on your team has developer experience.
Pricing
Hotjar separates its audience heat mapping and surveying functions into two packages: Hotjar Observe and Hotjar Ask. Each has a free tier plus three priced options:
Hotjar Observe
- Basic: $0 per month for up to 35 daily sessions
- Plus: $32 per month for up to 100 daily sessions, billed annually
- Business: $80 per month for up to 500 daily sessions, billed annually
- Scale: $171 per month for up to 500 daily sessions, billed annually
Hotjar Ask
- Basic: $0 monthly for up to 20 monthly responses on up to three surveys and feedback widgets
- Plus: $48 monthly for up to 250 monthly responses on unlimited surveys and feedback widgets, billed annually
- Business: $64 monthly for up to 500 monthly responses on unlimited surveys and feedback widgets, billed annually
- Scale: $128 monthly for up to 500 monthly responses on unlimited surveys and feedback widgets, billed annually
Hotjar also allows you to customize your package, combining selections from the Observe and Ask offerings. You can increase your daily session limits up to 270,000 and your monthly response limits for the Business (up to 100,000) and Scale (up to 1 million) tiers for additional costs.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Detailed customer insights Accurate heat mapping Real-time session recordings Third-party integrations | Difficult user interface Limited customer support |
8. Keap
Best for personalizing account management
Keap is a CRM software that is particularly useful for contact management. It can help you keep an eye on your customer relationships and allow you to automate marketing campaigns and streamline your sales process.
Thanks to its useful CRM interface, Keap can create personalized email campaigns and track your leads as they move through the sales funnel.
Features
Keap’s features help you optimize account management:
- Automation builders to take over repetitive tasks and email follow-ups
- Lead dashboards so you can capture, organize, and close leads in one view
- Integrations with thousands of third-party apps for automated workflows
Keap also offers a business phone number that can send automated replies to missed calls.
Pricing
You can choose one of three paid tiers from Keap:
- Pro: $159 per month, billed annually for 1,500 contacts and two seats; $29 monthly per additional user
- Max: $229 per month, billed annually for 2,500 contacts and three seats; $29 monthly per additional user
- Ultimate: $229 per month, billed annually for 2,500 contacts and three seats; $29 monthly per additional user
Keap can continue scaling with your business, even when your contact list grows to more than 4 million strong.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Automatic lead collection Combined sales and marketing automations | Difficult user interface Costly fees with some integrations Pricing model increases with your contact list size No free trial period |
9. Qualaroo
Best for creating customized surveys
Qualaroo from ProProfs is a customer feedback and survey tool that can help you gather insights from website visitors and customers.
Features
Qualaroo offers several different customer feedback features:
- Exit surveys to gain insight into failed user conversions, abandoned carts, and more
- Targeted questions triggered by the user’s time on page, pages viewed, or visit frequency
- Skip logic to add or remove survey questions based on the responses given by the user
Qualaroo also offers Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys that you can embed to collect feedback from different touchpoints.
Pricing
Qualaroo offers a free tier and a paid tier:
- Free Plan: $0 for up to 50 survey responses
- Business Plan: $19.99 monthly per 100 survey responses, billed annually
For the Business Plan, users can save 50% with annual billing options. “One hundred survey responses” also assumes 5,000 email sends and 100,000 pageviews.
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
| Survey customization capabilities Third-party integrations | Limited starting survey templates Difficult user interface No live customer support |
What Sets the Best Customer Engagement Software Apart?
Not all user engagement tools are alike. You need a tool that helps you understand your customers’ behaviors while allowing you to adapt strategies on the fly. A tool that helps manage CX in multiple ways will have long-term relevance, giving you forward-thinking insights and helping future-proof your CX strategy.
The best customer engagement management tools have:
- Seamless integrations to mesh with your existing business systems
- Professional onboarding to quickly adopt and leverage the tool’s full capabilities
- Omnichannel support for frictionless communication across channels like email, chat, and social media
- Personalization capabilities to adapt to customer behavior, preferences, and history
- Detailed data analytics and insights to make data-driven decisions that enhance engagement
- Automation and AI to streamline processes like personalized messaging and routing
- Scalability and flexibility to accommodate growing business needs and adapt to changing engagement trends
Together, these qualities help free up internal resources for more meaningful customer interactions. Think about it: If an intelligent virtual agent handles customer engagement at lower-priority touchpoints, your team has more bandwidth to address high-priority tasks and solve more complex problems.
Related: Intelligent Customer Experience (ICX): How to Deliver It
Level Up Your Customer Engagement with Nextiva
Improving customer retention is easy if you have the right customer engagement tools in place. These tools give you the know-how to see exactly where your CX strategy needs improvement. That could lead to redesigning your site, adding new channel capabilities, or leveling your AI-driven customer service automations.
There are dozens of tools to grab customers’ attention, but the best ones will help you build truly engaging experiences that lead to higher customer retention and lifetime value.
Net Promoter, Net Promoter Score, and NPS are registered trademarks of Satmetrix Systems, Inc., Bain & Company, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.
Customer Engagement Tools FAQs
For even more on customer engagement tools, review these frequently asked questions.
Customer engagement matters because it can clue you in on how to boost your customer loyalty, revenue, and brand reputation.
Loyal customers are more likely to be repeat buyers and brand advocates, leading to higher customer lifetime value and lower churn. And data backs up the assertion that you should engage customers. More than two-thirds of customers want you to proactively engage them rather than having to come to you.
Customer engagement strategies vary between small businesses and enterprises mostly due to differences in these businesses’ scale, resources, and customer base.
Small businesses might know their customers better and be able to offer more personalized, hands-on support. On the other hand, enterprises have access to more resources to expand their customer engagement efforts.
The most common challenges when implementing website engagement tools are:
Integration complexity pairs the new analytics tools with your existing business systems
Data management maintains your customer’s data privacy and security
User adoption ensures that your employees are trained and motivated to use the new tools
Scalability allows the software with your business without compromising performance
Additionally, customer engagement apps can be expensive to implement and maintain.
You can measure the ROI on customer engagement strategies by:
Setting clear, measurable objectives
Tracking key customer service metrics
Analyzing customer data across channels
A/B testing to compare different strategies
You can also ask for customer feedback through surveys, interviews, and reviews to understand their perception of your engagement strategy and its impact on their experience.
