What Is a Digital Engagement Platform? Top Features + 2025 Picks

What is a digital engagement platform? Customers have high expectations. They want fast, seamless, cross-channel, and personalized experiences from initial marketing touchpoints through to onboarding and post-purchase support. If businesses can’t keep up, those customers will be liable to turn elsewhere.

As a result, organizations are increasingly investing in customer engagement. Nextiva’s State of Customer Experience Report found that 96% of respondents said company leadership believed CX is a key driver of business outcomes, and 67% said it’s easier to get approvals for CX investments today than it was five years ago.

One of the investments that brands are focusing on? Creating a digital engagement strategy, which includes leveraging digital engagement platforms.

What Is a Digital Engagement Platform?

Digital engagement platforms enable businesses to engage customers across different online channels in a unified, data-driven, and highly scalable way. They centralize customer data, enable personalized communication, and automate workflows across the entire digital customer journey.

It’s important to note that customer engagement is different from customer experience. While the two are interconnected in many ways, customer engagement focuses more on driving additional interactions, while CX focuses on long-term relationship building.

Common capabilities of digital engagement platforms

Digital engagement platforms typically have the following capabilities:

• Multichannel messaging: Facilitate messaging across multiple communication channels, including email, SMS, chat, in-app, and social media platforms like WhatsApp or Messenger.
• Real-time customer interaction tracking: Detailed analytics help you understand customer interactions and detect trends as they emerge.
• AI-driven chatbots and automation: Reduce the burden of administrative or repetitive tasks for team members, which often improves response times.
• CRM and CDP integrations: Integrate with your CRM and CDP platforms for 360-degree customer views to support more personalized interactions.
• Segmentation and behavioral triggers: Automate outreach campaigns based on customer behaviors or segmented lists.
• Self-service knowledge bases and IVR support: Provide resources ranging from basic FAQ features to AI-powered chat that customers can use to resolve minor issues.

Essential Features of a Digital Engagement Platform

Each digital engagement platform will have its own unique focus. Some may be centered around social media management, while others prioritize in-product engagement. That said, the best platforms will have most of the following essential features.

Omnichannel messaging

Most digital engagement platforms facilitate customer interactions from a single system across SMS, email, live chat, social media, and more. UCaaS platforms like Nextiva also incorporate voice and video chat features.

Omnichannel customer engagement is exceptionally important. A recent study found that 79% of customers expected consistent interactions across all departments in an organization, but 55% said they felt like they were talking to separate departments instead of a single company. Using tools to help resolve this issue is a smart strategic move.

Personalization & segmentation

A McKinsey study found that 71% of customers expect personalized interactions from companies, and 76% will get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

Digital engagement platforms can help resolve this concern by helping your team leverage first-party data, like past customer interactions, to deliver more personalized support. Using behavioral data and CRM fields can help you customize every touchpoint, which is critical for engaging customers.

AI & automation

AI and automation are a significant focus for the majority of businesses. Our CX Trends Reports found that 81% of respondents said their organizations were either slightly or significantly increasing investments into AI for CX in the coming year.

Digital engagement platforms can help with this. They use AI to drive proactive support features, route messages intelligently to the right person, and automate follow-ups.

CRM integration

Most digital engagement platforms integrate with your CRM and CDPs so that your team has a holistic customer view at all times.

A CRM integration can help your team surface relevant data in real time to personalize engagement, and we’ve already discussed how important personalization is! This can help create more centralized service, which 60% of our report’s respondents said was essential for delivering great CX.

Analytics & reporting

Digital engagement platforms should all have advanced analytics and detailed reporting so you can track critical KPIs like resolution time, open rates, customer satisfaction score (CSAT), and conversion rates. This data can help you identify bottlenecks in CX, allowing for proactive intervention with customer engagement strategies.

Self-service options

Our Trends Report found that self-service options are one of the top use cases for AI in CX today. This isn’t surprising, as 61% of customers prefer to use self-service options to resolve simple issues when possible.

Digital engagement platforms can help you offer knowledge base content, AI-powered chatbots, and smart IVR to reduce the workload of your live agents. This allows your team to focus on more complex issues that actually need their attention, improving response times for everyone.

Open APIs & integrations

Open APIs and native integrations allow you to connect the digital engagement platform with your existing marketing and sales tech stacks or other crucial internal systems. This is essential for seamless automation across different platforms and can play a vital role in improved data management.

Mobile & in-app support

Digital engagement platforms can provide support from mobile apps and within a product app. This includes enabling push notifications and real-time in-app engagement features to keep users interacting with your brand.

8 Top Digital Engagement Platforms for 2025

If you’re ready to take your engagement strategy to the next level, these are the best customer engagement platforms to consider in 2025.

1. Nextiva — Best all-in-one engagement platform for support, sales, and service

Nextiva’s CX platform combines voice, SMS, email, video, live chat, and CRM data into a single interface to streamline both internal and external communication. Nextiva is the most popular NICE CXone alternative.

Your support, sales, and marketing teams can get a complete customer view, including past purchases and interactions, to help you determine how to best proceed.

Key features include:

• AI-driven automation to handle chat routing, workflow triggers, and predictive engagement.
• Integrations with leading tools, like Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, Microsoft Teams, and more, so you can access all your critical data in one place.
• Smart IVR and self-service tools like AI-powered chatbots to reduce ticket volume while boosting overall customer satisfaction.
• Real-time dashboards to track critical metrics like CSAT, first response time, first contact resolution, and channel engagement KPIs.
• Built-in CDP capabilities for a complete 360-degree view of each customer.

Nextiva is ideal for: Companies seeking unified communications and digital engagement in a single platform.

2. Userpilot — Best for in-app product engagement

Userpilot is a product growth platform with strong in-app product engagement, making it a popular choice for SaaS businesses and subscription companies. You can leverage user insights and direct feedback to make changes to the product itself as needed.

Key features include:

• No-code builder for onboarding flows, feature announcements, and tooltips.
• AI assistant to help refine copy and run A/B tests on messaging.
• Auto-capture of user behavior (clicks, forms, etc.) without manual tagging.
• Integrated net promoter score surveys and engagement dashboards.

Userpilot is ideal for: SaaS companies focused on onboarding and feature adoption.

3. Intercom — Best for conversational support & multilingual chat

Intercom is an AI-powered customer communication and service platform that offers extensive multilingual chat and conversational support options.

Key features include:

• AI chatbot (Fin) that resolves common issues, collects customer interaction data, and routes high-intent leads to the right department.
• Multilingual live chat and seamless human handoff capabilities.
• Help center, ticketing, and inbox within a single shared workspace.
• Behavioral targeting and outbound messaging campaigns.

Intercom is ideal for: Global brands with high inbound volume and live chat use cases.

4. Pendo — Best for mobile and web app engagement

Pendo is a customer engagement tool that focuses on mobile and web app engagement. It has exceptional analytics to help you understand and improve how customers are interacting with your product.

Key features include:

• Guide creation and flow triggers for mobile, desktop, and tablet.
• Onboarding support, feature discovery, and survey delivery in-app.
• AI chat and knowledge base widgets to reduce support dependency.
• Deep usage analytics with segmentation by behavior and demographics.

Pendo is ideal for: Product-led growth teams that want to create rich in-app user journeys.

5. Salesforce Marketing Cloud — Best enterprise engagement platform

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is a digital automation and marketing platform with advanced AI agent features. The tool has features to personalize customer interactions across the entire lifecycle with the help of automation and AI.

Key features include:

• Advanced segmentation and dynamic content personalization.
• Journey Builder to connect touchpoints across SMS, email, social, and paid media.
• Einstein AI to help predict customer behaviors and optimize send times.
• Built-in integrations with Sales Cloud, Service Cloud, and external CDPs.

Salesforce Marketing Cloud is ideal for: Large teams orchestrating complex customer journeys.

6. Chatbase — Best for conversational sales & B2B engagement

Chatbase centers around leveraging AI agents to improve customer support and sales conversations to increase revenue. The AI agents can help with basic tasks like upgrading a customer’s plan or processing simple requests.

Key features include:

• Intelligent chatbots to qualify leads, book meetings, and route high-intent conversations.
• Live chat using CRM data, account-based routing, and scheduling tools.
• Support of playbooks for proactive outreach across the web, email, and chat.
• Seamless integration with Salesforce, Marketo, and LinkedIn Ads.

Chatbase is ideal for: B2B sales and marketing teams focused on real-time conversions.

7. Braze — Best for lifecycle marketing and real-time campaigns

Braze is centered around building long-term customer relationships, with a focus on cross-platform real-time campaigns. It’s a versatile platform that works well for agile teams moving and making changes quickly.

Key features include:

• High-performance messaging across push notifications, email, in-app, and web.
• Advanced personalization via Liquid templating and predictive segmentation.
• AI-powered frequency capping and channel prioritization.
• Real-time audience updates and engagement-triggered workflows.

Braze is ideal for: Mobile-first brands and consumer-facing businesses.

8. Sprout Social — Best for social media engagement and CX

Sprout Social offers strong social media and community management features, including AI-powered solutions to speed up message handling with features like “needs response detection” and content summaries.

Key features include:

• Unified inbox for Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and LinkedIn.
• Built-in social listening and sentiment tracking, including mention spike alerts to identify a potential crisis early.
• Message tagging, automation rules, and team-based case assignment.
• Campaign planning and post scheduling integrated into the same UI.

Sprout Social is ideal for: Social-first brands and support teams managing DMs and comments.

Use Cases for Digital Engagement Platforms

There are multiple use cases for customer engagement software, depending on your engagement strategies and your business. Let’s discuss some of the most valuable use cases to consider.

Customer support

Use AI-powered automation, self-service options, and historical customer data to deliver faster, more contextual customer service across multiple platforms. By using a single, unified communication platform, customers can get the same outstanding experience whether they get in touch through live chat, SMS, voice, or social media.

Sales enablement

Engage prospects in real time with chat, outbound email marketing, and smart routing. You can use live chat to answer simple customer questions, qualify potential leads, keep prospects engaged with email, and ultimately route them to the right rep when they’re ready to purchase.

Onboarding & activation

Onboarding and activation can be critical parts of the customer journey, especially for technical and SaaS products. One study found that 68% of users would abandon a product altogether due to a poor onboarding experience.

Use digital engagement platforms to guide users with personalized product tours and tooltips based on their expected use. This can be a critical component of customer success and drastically improves the user experience.

Marketing automation

Marketing automation allows you to run segmented campaigns triggered by individual user behavior across email, SMS, and even push notifications. Autoresponder campaigns can be highly efficient, delivering the right message at the right time.

Teams can also use marketing automation features to improve data syncing across different tools, reducing manual errors and boosting productivity. A study even found that employers who use automation can see 15% higher levels of productivity and efficiency, which can increase the output of your marketing efforts.

Retention & loyalty

Customer engagement strategies can help engage customers, retain customers longer, and establish brand loyalty. You can also use retention-specific engagement models to engage dormant users with timely, personalized reactivation campaigns to help bring them back into the fold.

Healthcare & financial services

Both healthcare and financial industries are highly regulated, with customer privacy and security being paramount concerns.

Healthcare companies can enable HIPAA-compliant messaging, IVR triage, and secure self-service options to help patients get the support they need quickly, whether for a prescription refill request or an urgent healthcare question.

Similarly, financial companies can now offer advanced self-service options with IVR and live chat, including options to securely check your account balance or make a payment.

Just make sure that you’re using tools that comply with all necessary industry privacy and security regulations.

E-commerce

Digital engagement platforms can be incredibly helpful in driving more e-commerce purchases and re-engaging customers.

You can reduce cart abandonment with proactive SMS and email alerts, which can include discount codes and reminders to incentivize purchases. In-app pop-ups can also be used to upsell or cross-sell customers with relevant items based on the customer’s past history and current cart to increase your average order value.

Why High-Growth Businesses Choose Nextiva

Nextiva’s CX platform empowers support, marketing, and sales teams to engage with customers both smarter and faster, all while improving essential CX metrics like your CSAT and first call resolution scores. If you’re looking to improve your digital customer engagement, we can help.

Multiple features contribute to this, including:

• A unified platform that integrates with your CRM to prevent siloed data.
• Real-time engagement data alongside historical context.
• Powerful automation and AI capabilities, including AI-powered chatbots, advanced IVR, and automated workflow features.
• Full contact center and business phone system integration.
• Best-in-class onboarding, reliability, and support.

Our engagement solution can help you centralize and improve CX across the entire customer journey. Check out our customer experience solution to get started.