What is customer experience?
Simply put, Customer experience (CX) is your customer’s perception of your brand.
How do your customers really regard their experience with your brand when they use your companies’ products or services? Customer experience relates to just this. Spanning the entire relationship that a customer has with a company, CX encompasses each and every touchpoint – from in-store to online shopping, browsing a website, and interacting with customer support teams.
In today’s day and age, customer experience is everything. Brands that develop an effective customer-centric strategy set themselves up for financial success. In fact, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. On the flip side, one in three customers stated they will leave a brand they love after having one negative experience.
Companies are starting to take note and are investing more into their CX operations. 45.9% of brands list customer experience as a top priority for their business over the next five years. It’s no wonder why customer experience is so important. Monitoring, measuring, and improving CX is where Customer Experience Management systems come in.
What is Customer Experience Management?
Customer experience management, or CEM, is a system companies use to track, supervise, and respond to all customer and business interactions. So many companies want to improve their customers’ experiences and that all starts with identifying a baseline.
A strong CEM system will essentially allow companies to increase customer satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy.
What is the difference between Customer Experience Management and Customer Service?
The main difference between Customer Experience Management and Customer Service is that customer service tends to be reactive while customer experience management is more proactive.
Customer service kicks into action only when a customer encounters a challenge. Conversely, CEM anticipates any future challenges that a customer may encounter, and preemptively tries to resolve them.
The concept of CEM describes how a company takes the reins in how it interacts with its customers. It is all about observing and then enhancing the interactions between a business and its customer, looking solely at it from the customers’ perspective — and then sustaining that throughout their entire journey with a business.
A unified approach like this offers leaders and teams full visibility into which areas of their business are impacting customer satisfaction both positively and negatively. This approach also sheds light on customer issues across all product lines, channels, and market segments. Where are customers experiencing points of friction, if any, and how can this be easily remedied?
New evidence suggests more brands should remove silos between sales and customer service to deliver a great customer experience. One report found that organizations with extensive integration were 5.9x more likely to report that integrating both sales and service data had a game-changing impact on sales success.
One integral step in the integration journey includes the creation of 360° customer profiles. Essentially, 360° customer profiles consolidate all interactions and transactions made by a customer into a single profile.
This idea of consolidation and a 360° view lies at the heart of customer experience software.
What does customer experience software do?
Customer experience software analyzes all customer interactions and gathers valuable insights to then take action on issues to increase customer loyalty, and enhance the overall experience.
Providing a memorable customer experience is more than just greeting customers by name or remembering that they prefer turkey sandwiches over tuna. There is the opportunity to dig deeper.
Fortunately, we have the ability to harness the power of data, and a wealth of analytical tools at our disposal to keep track of key elements of the customer journey. This is where customer experience tools enter the picture. In the competitive business landscape of today, and amid an era of evolving customer expectations and preferences, customer experience tools allow businesses to stay one step ahead.
How to select the right customer experience software
Not all customer experience platforms are the same. Some are more focused on a website’s visual design elements, while others are primarily focused on offering various forms of surveys.
Before selecting a software, it is important to first consider your overarching goal.
Are you implementing it in an effort to evaluate and boost the performance of your customer service team, or are you seeking to uncover certain aspects related to customer satisfaction?
Other points to consider include the survey types or questions you prefer to deploy, and whether the software comes equipped with insightful analytics and reporting functionalities. Are its key features, such as feedback management, predictive analytics, and customer self service, easily accessible and intuitive to use?
What Are The Different Types of Customer Experience Tools?
Customer experience tools are a diverse set of software solutions designed to help businesses optimize, monitor, and enhance the overall customer journey. These tools can be grouped into several categories:
- Customer feedback and survey tools
These solutions help gather input from customers through surveys, reviews, and other forms of feedback to identify trends and areas for improvement.
- Customer analytics and data management platforms
These tools help businesses collect, analyze, and interpret customer data to gain insights into customer preferences, behavior, and experiences.
- Customer service and support tools
These platforms enable businesses to efficiently manage and resolve customer issues through various channels, such as live chat, email, and social media.
- Customer engagement and communication tools
These solutions help businesses foster strong relationships with customers by facilitating personalized, targeted, and timely interactions.
- Personalization and recommendation engines
These tools leverage data and machine learning algorithms to provide tailored content, offers, and experiences for individual customers.
What Are CRM Tools for Customer Experience?
CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools are software solutions designed to manage a company’s interactions with customers, prospects, and leads. These tools help businesses keep track of customer information, communication history, and sales opportunities. While CRM tools primarily focus on managing customer data and sales processes, they can also contribute to customer experience by:
- Facilitating personalized interactions
CRM tools store customer information and preferences, allowing businesses to tailor their communication and marketing efforts to individual customers.
- Improving customer support
CRM solutions can help customer support teams access relevant customer information quickly and efficiently, leading to faster issue resolution and improved customer satisfaction.
- Streamlining sales and marketing efforts
By providing insights into customer behavior and preferences, CRM tools can help businesses optimize their marketing and sales strategies to better meet customer needs and expectations.
What Are The 3 Main Components of Customer Experience?
The three main components of customer experience are:
- Customer journey
This refers to the entire lifecycle of a customer’s relationship with a company, from initial awareness and consideration to purchase, usage, and eventual advocacy or churn. Businesses should aim to optimize each stage of the customer journey to deliver a seamless and satisfying experience.
- Customer touchpoints
These are the various points of interaction between customers and a business, including website visits, in-store experiences, customer support interactions, and social media engagement. By carefully managing these touchpoints, businesses can ensure consistent and positive experiences for their customers.
- Customer feedback and insights
Understanding customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points is crucial to delivering exceptional customer experiences. Gathering and analyzing customer feedback can help businesses identify areas for improvement and tailor their offerings to better meet customer expectations.
What Are The 4 Es of Customer Experience?
The 4 Es of customer experience refer to a framework that highlights the essential elements of a successful customer experience strategy. These are:
- Experience
Experience encompasses the overall quality of the interactions and encounters customers have with a brand across all touchpoints. The goal is to create memorable and positive experiences that exceed customer expectations.
- Engagement
Engagement refers to the extent to which customers are actively involved with a brand, its products, and services. Businesses should strive to foster strong connections with customers by providing relevant, timely, and personalized content and interactions.
- Emotion
Emotion plays a significant role in customer experience, as customers are more likely to remember and share experiences that evoke strong emotions. By understanding and catering to customers’ emotional needs, businesses can build lasting relationships and drive customer loyalty.
- Execution
Execution refers to the effective implementation of customer experience strategies and initiatives. This involves coordinating efforts across departments, using data and insights to inform decision-making, and continually refining and optimizing processes to improve the overall customer experience.
Best Customer Experience Tools for 2023
- Netomi
- Zendesk Sunshine
- Sprinklr
- Adobe Experience Manager
- HubSpot
- Clarabridge
- Contentsquare x Clicktale
- Gemius Prism
- Genesys
- Medallia
- Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization
- Qualtrics
- Responsetek
- Satmetrix
- Tealeaf by IBM
- UserZoom
- Netomi
- A chatbot that scales its support functions across web chat, social media messaging platforms, SMS, and voice, to delight customers with the effortless, convenient, and personalized support that they demand – whenever and wherever
- Autonomous resolution, resolving the majority of a team’s tickets with zero human effort
- Native integration with Zendesk Chat, Salesforce Chat, and other leading Web chat platforms, enabling teams to fully automate the repetitive customer questions, and well as provide hyper-relevant articles from a company’s knowledge base
- Real-time analytics and reporting, to offer actionable insights and areas for optimization
- Zendesk Sunshine
- Reporting and analytics software to uncover customer insights
- Sunshine Conversations, a messaging platform designed for innovative conversational experiences, and can be integrated with existing business systems
- AI-powered search and Zendesk chatbots such as Netomi to deliver relevant information immediately and automatically, and provide a personalized experience
- Zendesk Sunshine offers agents a single view of the customer, enabling teams to connect and understand all customer data, unifying information across systems such as order history, loyalty status, and web activity
- Integration with Zendesk’s other customer service tools, along with hundreds of third-party apps via the Zendesk marketplace
- Sprinklr
- AI-powered social listening that identifies critical cases by analyzing millions of conversations per day, and automated routing that sends them to the right agents so they can proactively respond
- AI-powered message sorting that classifies messages as engageable or non-engageable — so customer service teams can focus on conversations that require a human touch
- AI Agent Assist that surfaces relevant cases and knowledge articles, offers smart responses, and highlights a customer’s previous satisfaction scores, to help agents deliver the right response at the right time
- Adobe Experience Manager
- Content insights to provide performance information about every page that is created, using web analytics and SEO recommendations, enabling businesses to make better content decisions
- AI and machine-learning capabilities that leverage unified customer profiles to deliver tailored experiences
- Responsive web design to streamline and reuse content across devices, allowing for “multiple devices with one web experience”
- Native connectivity across Adobe Creative Cloud apps and services, so teams can connect, create and collaborate, without leaving their current applications
- HubSpot
- NPS, CSAT, CES and custom surveys to gather customer feedback, which can then be used to build a better customer experience
- Conversation intelligence that automatically capture details from every call so teams can uncover the “why” behind their performance
- Contact scoring that enables businesses to assign scores to their contacts, so they can track the health of their customers and prioritize outreach and follow-ups
- Customer portals that give customers ownership over their service experience, and provide a home base for customers to interact with support and services teams
- Clarabridge
- AI-powered NLU that analyzes all feedback and conversations at scale to reveal topics, perception of effort, emotion, empathy, sentiment, and intent, using machine learning to assess over 50+ emotions
- Clarabridge Studio that provides easy-to-use tools to aggregate all experience data and analyze it in one place, along with highly customizable reporting dashboards, intelligent search capabilities, and automated alerts
- Intelligent Scoring that leverages the platform’s NLU capabilities to automatically score and evaluate all customer interactions, across every feedback channel
- Contentsquare x Clicktale
- AI insights that automatically surfaces a business’s biggest opportunities and issues, allowing them to prioritize where to focus, based on revenue and goal impact
- Zone-bases heatmaps that visualize how users interact with each element on a website, so teams can boost site performance
- Customer journey analytics that enable teams to see how visitors progress through a site, revealing unexpected journey and looping behaviors
- Struggle analysis that detects areas of friction, pinpointing where in the journey customers are frustrated, and why
- Gemius Prism
- Multi-platform data collection, and easy cross-domain measurement
- An advanced sampling mechanism that allows for the delivery of instant and highly flexible reports, and rapid generation of reports for large sets of data
- Advanced traffic segmentation that allows businesses to compare the performance of acquiring visitors from a variety of sources, such as search engines and social media, and how visitors perform in each segment
- Genesys
- Modern speech analytics software that provides businesses with the ability to mine the content of all calls, and also includes complete voice transcription and speech-to-phrase recognition
- Customer journey management that uses customer data as a guide for new interactions, providing agents with the entire story about who contacts them, and empowering them to react in a personalized way
- Medallia
- Medallia Conversations uses event-based triggers, enabling businesses to have real-time interactions with their customers, and engage them in the moment through popular messaging channels such as SMS and Facebook Messenger
- Comprehensive feedback collection to get the voice of customers and employees through various channels of their choice, such as email, website, mobile messaging, and IoT connected devices
- Medallia Athena applies AI and machine learning to uncover patterns and trends, analyze journeys and predict customer behavior, as well as suggest actions to improve experiences and maximize business impact
- Integrations with tools such as Workday, Salesforce and Adobe allows data to be shared across systems and teams
- Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization
- A/B and multivariate testing to reveal customer preferences, and determine the optimal customer experience
- Data-driven predictive insights, including heatmaps that highlight visitor interest
- Product suggestions are offered via a recommendations block, allowing marketers to insert objects into campaigns to see which offers resonate with customers
- Campaign Performance and Group Sequential Analysis that enable marketers to find winning campaign experiences, faster
- Qualtrics
- Qualtrics iQ applies sophisticated AI, machine learning, and natural language processing, analyzing data to proactively spot opportunities for improvement and recommend next actions to take
- A comprehensive suite of listening tools to capture real-time feedback, including device/IoT management, social media feedback and sentiment, and email surveys
- XM Automated Actions to deliver recommended actions to the right people and teams so that they can respond accordingly, driving efficiency through automation
- Responsetek
- Automated and on-demand reporting that enables teams to access customer insights as soon as survey results are received
- User-friendly & advanced AI-driven text analytics technology that makes it easy for teams to analyze large volumes of open-ended responses, including Automatic mapping of topics to survey scores and real-time sentiment analysis
- Automated alerts and notifications that automatically identify at-risk customers and immediately notify the most appropriate person to follow up
- Satmetrix
- Enlighten AI Feedback proactively prevents customer churn and increases lifetime value, by identifying unresolved issues and negative sentiment
- Hyper-personalized, conversational and contextual surveys to proactively close the loop
- Advanced text and speech analytics to understand how customers feel and detect emerging trends
- Tealeaf by IBM
- cxVerify stores permanent records of customer actions for future reference, to investigate any disputes
- cxOverstat optimizes the page flow of a website through visual analytics, to identify any areas where customers may struggle
- cxView offers a proactive warning system, alerting businesses of significant changes in crucial customer behavior
- A replay ability (a page-by-page, browser-level recording of the actual customer experience) allows users to quickly diagnose and fix problems that cause poor experiences
- UserZoom
What makes Netomi one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
While not technically classified under the category of “customer experience software,” Netomi’s AI chatbot plays a key role in enhancing and aiding customer service teams in delivering world-class support. Used alongside customer experience software, such as those listed below, results in a powerful partnership, for the ultimate customer experience.
Netomi’s key features
What makes Zendesk Sunshine one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
As “champions of customer service,” and boasting a powerful combination of both broad customer service expertise and deep product knowledge, the Zendesk customer experience platform helps businesses deliver a differentiated CX. Sunshine, the “foundation beneath Zendesk,” is an open and flexible platform, built natively on AWS.
Zendesk Sunshine’s key features
What makes Sprinklr one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
Sprinklr’s unified customer experience management platform (Unified-CXM) uses industry-leading AI to create insight-driven strategies and enhanced customer experiences. By bringing together communications from more than 30 digital channels onto one single, unified platform, customer service agents are better equipped to handle cases, and can create a seamless experience for customers.
Sprinklr’s key features
What makes Adobe Experience Manager one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
Combining digital asset management with the power of a content management system, Adobe Experience Manager helps businesses create, manage, deliver and optimize personalized content to customers. The tool’s AI capabilities speeds up the content creation process, enabling teams to scale to all channels, quickly.
Adobe Experience Manager’s key features
What makes Hubspot one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
Known as the go-to tool for marketers in the digital space, HubSpot’s Service Hub includes conversational tools, help desk automation and customer feedback surveys – all powered by a CRM – to give businesses one unified view of each customer interaction. It also offers advanced and detailed reports that can easily be shared with any team member or stakeholder.
HubSpot’s key features
What makes Clarabridge one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
Clarabridge, a leader in omnichannel conversational analytics, uses AI-powered speech and text analytics, along with Natural Language Understanding (NLU), to evaluate the conversations that customers and employees are having daily, via phone calls, live chats, private messages and on social media. Clarabridge was acquired by Qualtrics, the world’s #1 Experience Management (XM) provider, in 2021, and with the powerful combination, “organizations will be able to tune into, analyze and act on everything customers and employees are saying, wherever they’re saying it, all on the world’s #1 experience management platform.”
Clarabridge’s key features
What makes Contentsquare x Clicktale one of the best CX tools of 2023?
In 2019, Clicktale and Contentsquare, two leading digital experience insights platforms, joined forces to become “the definitive global leader in the experience analytics market.” By capturing every in-page interaction and micro-gesture, the platform helps businesses understand the how and why of customer behavior.
Contentsquare x Clicktale’s key features
What makes Gemius Prism one of the best CX tools of 2023?
Offering flexible analytics, monitoring and reporting on user interaction with digital products, Gemius Prism enables businesses to “see through their users.” The platform’s advanced segmentation options help businesses with analyzing large numbers of visitors.
Gemius Prism’s key features
What makes Genesys one of the best CX tools of 2023?
“It’s hard to conduct a customer experience (CX) concerto when you have to spend the bulk of your IT resources just tuning instruments,” the company states 9 on its website. The Genesys Cloud platform touts its all-in-one design, complete with an extensive suite of native capabilities, and an intuitive interface that is easy for agents to master, to create more personalized, empathetic customer experiences. Genesys offers predictive engagement with three solutions: Cloud CX, Genesys Multicloud CX and Genesys DX.
Genesys’ key features
What makes Medallia one of the best CX tools of 2023?
A pioneer and market leader in Experience Management, Medallia’s SaaS platform is focused on capturing and analyzing signals at every touchpoint, to drive loyalty at all points along the customer journey.
Medallia’s key features
What makes Oracle Maxymiser one of the best CX tools of 2023?
A product within the Oracle Marketing suite, Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization provides advanced website testing, real-time behavioral targeting, in-session personalization, and product recommendations across mobile apps and websites. The platform helps marketing teams access quality data, so they can offer smart recommendations and make data-driven decisions.
Oracle Maxymiser Testing and Optimization’s key features
What makes Genesys one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
With its powerful listening engine, predictive intelligence and analytics, as well as full closed-loop actioning capabilities, Qualtrics enables businesses to gain a holistic view of their customers’ experiences and take the right actions to drive meaningful impact.
Qualtrics’s key features
What makes Responsetek one of the best customer experience tools of 2023?
As “experts at highly personalized transactional surveys,” Responsetek’s cloud–based solution offers customers the power to express their opinions in simple and efficient formats, its range of collection methods including social media listening, web and email surveys, and mobile survey via QR codes.
Responsetek’s key features
What makes Satmetrix one of the best CX tools of 2023?
For Satmetrix, all emphasis is on capturing and bringing together all forms of customer feedback, in order to gain a comprehensive view of the customer experience across all touchpoints. Its holistic VOC (Voice of the Customer) solution helps businesses to uncover blind spots, and customer feedback is collected from all sources, including through SMS conversational surveys and digital social media channels.
Satmetrix’s key features
What makes TeaLeaf one of the best CX tools of 2023?
Capturing customers’ interactions with a website, Tealeaf allows businesses to discover how users interact with their mobile sites or apps, offering complete visibility into their online experience. Armed with these valuable insights, businesses can then track metrics, identify any issues, and make improvements to their websites.
TeaLeaf’s key features
What makes UserZoom one of the best CX tools of 2023?
How is the current design of a website/mobile app affecting the user experience? A UX (user experience) insights solution, UserZoom enables digital teams to “create better digital experiences, with confidence.” Centered around quick design iteration, making user-focused product decisions, and measuring UX performance over time, the platform is fully equipped with all the necessary tools to conduct any UX research or study.
UserZoom’s key features
- Surveys to quickly collect feedback at scale, both open-ended (allowing users to answer in their own words), and closed (having users select from a list of pre-defined answers)
- Click testing to better inform decisions when designing a new page or product, allowing businesses to see where users are focusing their attention
- Usability testing to identify any issues with a digital product’s design, and reveal improvements that can be made
- Card sorting to ensure that content is structured in a way that makes sense to users, and can be conducted early in the design process before wireframes or prototypes have been created
Narrowing down the options of customer experience tools
As your business needs are unique to your team and your industry, select the one that fits the most seamlessly within your organization, and one that can bring a lasting impact.
These customer experience tools are dynamic as they are, but their full powers are truly unlocked by a robust AI-powered chatbot, like Netomi’s. Automatically resolving over 80% of routine queries, our chatbots allow agents to focus on tasks that require a uniquely human touch. The result? An increase in customer satisfaction, and support that is delivered across channels – from email, to chat and messaging.
To learn more about improving the customer experience, visit:
- How Ticket Triage AI Can Revolutionize Customer Service