The 7 best customer engagement software for great customer experiences | #customersupport #supporticket

As you build a new company or scale up an existing one, there are several factors to be aware of and tools to consider. You want to enable your staff’s workflow to be at maximum efficiency, and you want structures in place that allow both communication and engagement with your customer base. 

At the foundation of any communications infrastructure should be a solid system like RingCentral Office®. With integrated messaging, video, and phone calls, it means that communication within your company is quick and easy. And it also means it is easier to communicate with your customers.

While we always want to attract new customers, we also want to maintain high rates of customer retention and encourage customer loyalty. Ensuring customer journeys are smooth and that customer satisfaction is high should always be two of your main priorities. And with customers and businesses using multiple communication channels, you must consider how to cater to that. 

A big part of doing so is putting customer engagement at the core of your planning. And in the modern world of automation, there are multiple choices when it comes to customer engagement solutions. Knowing which customer engagement software to use or which customer engagement platforms best suit your needs can be a big help when it comes to planning. 

But how do you know which is the best fit? How do you decide which platform or software best suits customer interaction for your business? Which tool offers the functionality or functionalities you need? Which allows you to streamline different aspects of your customer engagement? We look at seven of the best choices to help you answer all those questions and more. Skip ahead if you’d like:

1. RingCentral
2. Freshdesk
3. LiveChat
4. WalkMe
5. Engati
6. SurveySparrow
7. Pipedrive

But first, let’s look at what exactly customer engagement tools are.

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What are “customer engagement tools,” exactly? 

Customer engagement tools are essentially the bridge between businesses and their consumers. 

They give you a way to connect with existing, new, and potential customers. And the really good ones will let you do it on different devices too so that you can work from anywhere. These kinds of solutions also allow businesses to manage and analyze customer behavior and patterns, and ultimately provide better, more efficient customer support—while saving money too.

How?

Well, many of these customer engagement tools let you track every interaction with your customers, whether it’s on your website or on the phone. And beyond just tracking, they often also have direct messaging features, including SMS messages, emails, and social media messages. 

Here are a few examples of scenarios in which you might be messaging or responding to customers:

• Initial welcome text to new customers—these can include current special offers and promotions for new users
• Sharing new products or company news 
• Alerts for special events, promotions, or new products
• Customized alerts when a product, or related product, from a customer’s wish list is on special offer 

When you can integrate an engagement platform with your existing communications channels, you’re taking your business to a whole new level. There are two sides to the customer engagement coin, after all. Not only does effective engagement improve your relationship with your customers, but it also allows you to analyze their buying patterns and other behavior. 

And especially for a business to compete in the digital marketplace, you need to take a holistic view of customer engagement. Can your customers engage with you across multiple channels, whether they like Twitter or Facebook or email?

And more importantly, can your team respond with the right answers—without making your customers wait? 

This is where a customer engagement software would come in handy.

The top 7 customer engagement tools

1. RingCentral Engage™

As a long-time leader in creating better ways to communicate with both your teammates and your customers and clients, it’s no surprise that RingCentral offers one of the best customer engagement solutions around. Its RingCentral Engage suite has one core goal: to make it easier for you to manage your conversations and relationships with customers from anywhere, at any time. 

This robust customer engagement solution gives you an easy way to engage with your customers across literally every channel. Do they mostly use Facebook, email, live chat, or Twitter? Engage Digital lets your team access and manage every conversation from one place, making it easier to handle different conversations without having to toggle between all the different platforms:

Do your customers prefer calling you on the phone instead? Engage Voice has an intelligent automation feature that allows you to route and direct calls to the right agents on your customer support team. AI and machine learning can analyze and filter all your calls and separate them by category. So, technical calls get routed to tech support, sales inquiries go to your sales team, and so on.

One of the neat things about RingCentral Engage is that you can customize it based on what your business needs. Only need Engage Digital or Engage Voice? You can choose one or the other. Need both? You can do that too. 

And when it comes to those all important analytics, RingCentral has that too:

The integrated analytics tool allows you to dig into the numbers and easily get all the crucial information you need, from sales and buying patterns, to what time of day you get the most calls, and more.

Oh, and Engage Digital even goes the extra mile and merges your customers’ “digital identities” for you. This helps you provide a better omnichannel experience, because anyone on your team can quickly see all the different ways in which a customer’s reached out to you in the past. Let’s say someone Facebook messaged you about an issue, then chatted with another person on your team through your website, then finally called you to provide more information. Engage Digital makes sure you get full context, every time:

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🕹️ Get a hands-on look at how RingCentral empowers even a small customer service team to punch above its weight—book a product tour to check it out!

💰 You can also use this calculator to see roughly how much your business could save by using RingCentral to support your team’s communication with each other, clients, freelancers, and more.

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2. Freshdesk

Freshdesk offers a great solution for bringing together all your omnichannel customers and offering them live chat, chatbot, and self-service options. It covers all of your needs from ticketing to analytics and boosting productivity. Many businesses see Freshdesk as a better alternative to Zendesk. 

For incoming inquiries, it manages all your tickets, no matter where they come from. And can avoid agent duplication for responses. You can also customize SLAs (service level agreements) to change time limits for different types of tickets or  business hours for different teams and departments. 

Team collaboration can have a huge impact on a customer’s satisfaction levels. If an inquiry has different facets to it, Freshdesk makes it easy for your staff to share that inquiry across all relevant teams. You can either share a single ticket across several agents or  link more than one ticket together so that staff can see how progress is being made. 

And it doesn’t matter which channel your customer is using to contact you, Freshdesk brings together all the channels you use and unifies them in a single, easy-to-access platform. From a traditional phone call through to live chat and WhatsApp, it’s never been easier for you to listen to your customers’ needs. 

With 40% of customers now preferring some form of self-service, it has never been more important to offer your consumers efficient ways of achieving this. Freshdesk offers chatbots and help widgets that help your customers find the answers they need. And, if you have forums, it can help with moderation and also allow agents to send knowledge-based articles by email. 

For analytics, you can set up the software to monitor and report on how teams or individual agents are performing based on your preferred metrics. It can also generate customer satisfaction reports to see how their experiences are. And to ensure efficiency, you can generate real-time reports on how your helpdesk is performing. 

One thing to note is that many organizations like the idea of sourcing as many tools as possible from the same provider. With so many great solutions available from RingCentral, such as their video conferencing options, some companies may see the Engage Digital software as suiting their needs better. 

3. LiveChat

LiveChat is another great way to communicate with customers, improve their journeys, and drive and increase sales. It provides you with the perfect balance between automation and interaction with live agents, thus giving your customers the choice and options they want. 

Many initial inquiries are simple in nature and do not need human responses. LiveChat’s chatbots can not only greet customers and deal with simple queries, they can route calls to relevant teams, create support tickets, and generate leads. And LiveChat’s automation can also separate and distribute your customers depending on their history.

With so many sales and communications platforms out there, you want software solutions that can integrate those options easily. LiveChat offers integrations with over 170 tools, including Shopify, WordPress, Messenger, Google Ads, and many more. This lets you provide all your customers with an optimal omnichannel experience. 

Analytics will always be a crucial factor for any type of business. LiveChat offers Google Analytics (GA) as an easy to add integration to your LiveChat system. You can then track and analyze how many people are using your platforms, where they are using them, and from what device. This makes it easy for your marketing team to monitor effectiveness. 

And having GA integrated into your system offers you more than the usual analytics. It also provides you with marketing tools and SEO data such as custom reports, visualization, and segmentation of customer groups. With so many companies using Google Analytics, adding it to LiveChat makes a lot of sense. 

But having to add an extra program may deter some companies. While Google Analytics is a useful tool, many would prefer a program that has analytical capabilities built in or a company that offers a range of in-house analytics solutions. And if things like workforce optimization are important to you, then you may wish to consider RingCentral as your provider. 

If you find you rely on mailing lists to send out information on special promotions and offers, new products, or general information about your business, then LiveChat also lets you integrate Mailchimp, allowing you to adjust or expand your subscribers list with one click. It is also a great way of asking your customers to complete surveys, giving you even more useful information. 

4. WalkMe

WalkMe provides you with a DAP (digital adoption platform) that makes it utterly simple to bring together and use any website, software, or application related to your organization. And even if you are a small business and have no dedicated IT team, they offer you step-by-step guidance as to how to set up and begin using their software.

WalkMe’s DAP allows you to collect and analyze all the customer data that matters to you. Customize and identify what metrics and KPIs are important to your business type or model. This then gives you a transparent overview of every step of the journeys your customers take and allows you to make changes and decisions based on the data you see. 

WalkMe can also help you make the shift from a reactive customer service model to a more proactive one. Rather than waiting for your customer base to bring up new queries, you can anticipate their needs, and any issues they may face, and provide them with access to help and answers. 

As with other solutions, WalkMe can help you automate the simpler tasks so that your live agents can deal with real issues. No matter what platforms and channels you use to engage with your customers, you can automate the parts you want, leading to better and increased engagement and higher productivity levels.

With a straightforward API (application programming interface), it is easy to get full 360-degree visibility into how your users interact with your systems and platforms. It also lets you see and customize essential metrics so that any changes in strategy are based on solid and reliable data. 

Versatile APIs can allow a great deal of flexibility across your business. And when you use an open platform API as the foundation of an integrated communications platform, then the end result can be a major boost to sales and revenue figures, as has happened with companies adopting RingCentral’s API platform. 

5. Engati

For many small businesses, budget may be a major factor when it comes to choosing and buying any type of software. In those cases, Engati may be the perfect solution as it is a free live web chat and bot platform, though it does offer several different pricing packages for larger organizations. 

Although it only currently supports 14 platforms, that does include all the major channels such as WeChat, Skype, WhatsApp, Line, etc. so the lesser coverage should not be a major issue. If you grow your business later and find that you have outgrown the free version of Engati, then you can look at switching to one of their bigger packages. 

That limitation may put some people off, however, especially when you consider that you get support for all platforms with RingCentral Engage Digital. Ideally, you want to be able to hit the ground running while still having scalability when you need it. 

The free Engati package offers you basic features. You get an FAQ section complete with an NLP (natural language processing) engine and the ability to broadcast messages. It also provides you with good analytics and one month of data retention. It can also build conversation flows for your systems and will offer both social media and email marketing automation and support. 

If you move up to the business package, you get more added features. Chief among them is advanced AI and ML (machine learning) capabilities. You also get six months of data retention, making it easier to look at reports over longer periods of time. And if you use online payments, or want to, then this level allows for integration of payment systems such as Stripe. 

Engati allows you to build your own chatbot to suit any of the 14 platforms. And its live chat offers advanced routing that can help improve your CSATs (customer satisfaction scores), one of your primary metrics when it comes to assessing how good your customer service is and getting positive customer feedback. 

6. SurveySparrow

Despite the name, SurveySparrow is much more than a survey tool—though that lies at the core of what it offers. As you would expect from its inclusion on this list, it is also a useful customer engagement tool that offers you a wide variety of benefits. 

But, if surveys play a major role in how you develop your marketing strategy and evolve your customer service, then this could be your ideal tool. It offers you a simple and intuitive process to build any type of survey, with a wide choice of how you collect answers, including scales, ranking, multiple choice, and more. And you can get creative by adding images, too.

But other solutions, or their partners, can offer surveys too. If your organization utilizes a call center, then you may be using advanced IVR technology such as that offered by RingCentral. This allows you the option of building surveys and collecting pertinent information from your new and existing customers. 

Those surveys can add to not only how you collect data, but also the quality of the data you are collecting. You can include surveys at every one of your customers’ touchpoints. These can help you measure your CSAT, your NPS (Net Promoter Score), CES (customer effort score), and more. It can also help you design exit surveys that can help with future marketing. 

SurveySparrow’s APIs allow you to integrate other business applications including your CRM system. You can also integrate any helpdesk applications and also any internal communications apps that you use, allowing all-around access to relevant information and data, as well as ease of communications even within larger organizations. 

With online payments being a crucial element for many companies, SurveySparrow offers you some great options for setting up payment gateways. It also allows you to easily manage promotional codes and coupons, as well as the choice of over 13 currency options to make your access to the global marketplace that much simpler.

7. Pipedrive

If your business is driven by actively seeking sales opportunities, Pipedrive may be for you. Designed by salespeople for salespeople, it focuses on using customer engagement to drive sales and to increase conversion rates for your sales team. 

Pipedrive allows you to create and customize sales pipelines that allows you to see visualizations of how your sales channels work and how they can be improved. They can be designed to suit your particular sales lifecycle, and can be assigned to teams or to individual members of those teams. 

Good leads are the lifeblood of any salesperson, and Pipedrive lets you optimize how they are generated to suit your working style. You can add leads manually, import them from any databases you have, or use other sources you utilize. And with its well-designed integrations, those leads can come from the chatbots and live chat options on your website.

If you don’t offer 24/7 live chat, let your chatbots do the work for you. Customize them to your exact needs so they ask pertinent questions, collect relevant data, and send any generated leads onto the teams specific to the inquiry. 

And those leads, or other inquiries that need human action, can be channeled to your live chat team when they are available. Whether on website or mobile app, conversations can be seamlessly transferred from a chatbot to a live agent when they are available. And, if needed, Pipedrive’s integrated scheduler allows you to set up appointments to follow up on good leads.

The downside of Pipedrive is that its main strengths lie in that sales focus. If sales is one area you want to improve performance in, but you still want a better rounded solution to all your business needs, then looking at RingCentral’s range of solutions may prove better. Their Salesforce integration may be the better option for your business.

With so much data being used, you also want to be sure that data is secure. Pipedrive offers high levels of data security so you can be sure only authorized users are accessing any of your—and your customers’—information. You can customize exceptions and alerts, such as whitelisting certain websites, based on how you and your staff operate.

Customer engagement software FAQs

What kind of customer data should you be logging in your software?

One thing to remember is the importance of data. If you can integrate some form of customer analysis into your customer engagement solution, that’ll help you gain real insights into how your customers are interacting with you, their spending patterns, the problems they encounter (if any), and more. 

This data is crucial to creating an awesome customer experience, and whatever software you choose needs to be able to record that information (while making sure it’s accessible to everyone on your customer service team). 

Don’t forget the basics:

• Interactions with you: which platforms and social media channels do they use and how often?
• Their location 
• Their age group 
• Their previous order history 
• Any current support tickets or issues and their status 

What features should you look for in a customer engagement software? How to choose?

The answer to this question depends on the type of business you run, how you already engage with customers, what areas you have identified as needing work on, and so on. 

Some of the most important features to consider include:

• Metrics. Easily trackable metrics with reports that offer understandable analysis. 
• Integration. Simple integration, especially of relevant tools such as CRM software, sales pipelines, etc.
• Management. Simple management of your clients’ accounts that allows for easy access so that anyone on the team can pick up on a conversation and help a teammate out if the need arises. (Maybe someone is on vacation or out sick!) 
• Unification. Ideally, your customer engagement platform should consolidate your customers’ information and conversation history, and make it easier to get a bird’s eye view of any customer’s relationship with your company. 

Once you find a tool with the selection of features your business needs, you can gain real-time insights into how you engage with your customers, identify the areas where there are shortfalls in engagement, and also pinpoint those areas where things are working well. It can also help highlight if there are any new services to consider that will improve your customer satisfaction rates. 

And insights also allow you to tailor marketing and other strategies to how your customers interact with you and what their behavior patterns are. RingCentral’s analytics and reporting tools let you make decisions that can result in:

• Increased response rates
• Higher levels of customer loyalty 
• Better ROI as you send relevant offers to the correct customer groups
• Lower costs of marketing campaigns 
• Great ability to identify and act on the most efficient segmentation
• Lower attrition rates and increased customer retention
• Better understanding of your target demographics 

So, now that you know the benefits of good customer engagement for your customers and your support teams, which tool should you choose? We look more closely at seven of the best customer engagement tools available to you.

Customer engagement software: The takeaway

Features ⇒	S	MC	A	MA	R	I	T/S	Ra
Program ⇩
RingCentral Engage	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐
Freshdesk	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	⭐⭐⭐⭐
LiveChat	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌*	✅	✅	⭐⭐⭐⭐
WalkMe	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	⭐⭐⭐⭐
Engati	✅	✅**	✅	✅	✅	✅	❌	⭐⭐⭐
SurveySparrow	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	⭐⭐⭐⭐
PipeDrive	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	✅	⭐⭐⭐⭐

Key: 

• S = Segmentation
• MC = Multiple communication options
• A = Automation
• MA = Mobile app
• R = Reporting
• I= Integration 
• T/S = Training and support
• Ra = Rating  
• *LiveChat requires Google Analytics as an add-on
• **Limited on free version of Engati 

Engaging with your customer base is a crucial part of any marketing strategy you employ. But how you engage with them is equally as important. Good levels and methods of engagement will lead to strong, and ideally improving, levels of customer satisfaction and better customer relationships.

What type of engagement tool or software you utilize has to depend on perspectives from both sides. They need to satisfy your requirements for factors such as analytics, leads generation, conversion rates, etc. But they must also satisfy the needs of your customers. They must be easy to access, and they must enhance the customers’ journeys in one or more ways. 

And never forget your employees. Using good customer engagement software not only helps with your analytics and customers’ experiences, but it also makes employees more productive, more efficient, and happier. With the right tools, they can reach higher levels of efficiency than ever before. This applies to existing employees and to ones you’re onboarding.

The beauty of RingCentral Engage Digital is that it offers all the functionality any business needs and will support and train your agents as they get used to the system. No matter what channels and platforms your business uses, Engage Digital will allow you 360-degree views and reporting.