Customer experience (CX) software assists businesses in better nurturing loyal customers, improving retention, and growing their revenue.
But with so many great customer experience solutions to choose from, identifying the best one for your needs can be challenging.
That’s why we’ve surveyed the market for the best CX platforms out there. We’ve put together a list of the top 5 highlighting each software’s strengths, features, and target markets, to help you choose the one that’s right for your company.
Before we get into the options that might be best for you, let’s talk about what you need from your customer experience software.
What Is Customer Experience Software?
Customer experience software is a type of application that allows teams to improve their CX across all touchpoints.
However, effective CX tools don’t just empower customer experience teams to do their everyday job.
They help other departments, such as sales and marketing, improve customer interactions, get insight into how CX impacts their business goals, and support targeted action.
There are so many different options out there for customer experience software. And, naturally, CX apps all offer different features, with some platforms delivering more than others.
4 Essential Features of Top Customer Experience Software
If you’re looking to invest in a customer experience solution, it’s important to choose one that includes these 4 essential features:
1. An intuitive interface that empowers each of your teams
The CX solution you choose will be regularly used by your CX team. However, it may also help sales, marketing, and even product teams gain valuable insights into customer sentiment and expectations.
These insights can support teams to perform their functions better and make sure their goals are customer-centric. To ensure business alignment around CX, you need everyone to be on the same page.
So, the software you pick should be easy for your teams to learn, use, and navigate! And, ideally, it would feed the right information to the right individuals and teams when they need it, making it simple for support teams to take action and close the loop quickly.
2. A range of specific CX data
Before it helps you take action, CX software must enable you to track your customers’ experiences in as great a level of detail as possible. That means that you’ll want a CX platform with the capacity to track the following:
Net Promoter Score (NPS). The most widely-used measure of customer loyalty and the likelihood of customer referrals.
Customer Satisfaction (CSAT). A measure of how satisfied your customers are with either a specific interaction or your company in general.
Customer Effort Score (CES). A measure of how much effort is involved in customers interacting with your business. Too much effort implies friction, meaning your CX needs improvement.
You can learn more about CX metrics in our article on NPS, CSAT, and CES.
4. Engagement metrics. The best customer experience platforms look beyond survey responses and results to measure how frequently customers are actually interacting with you, your support teams, or your account managers. Low engagement can be a crucial indicator of churn.
When deciding on the right CX software, it’s also important to look beyond data collection and see how convenient it is to share insights with different departments. Many CX tools focus on your customer support department and lack the capabilities to reliably feed insights to other departments, like sales.
If you want to spread Voice of Customer (VoC) insights across your company, it’s important to choose a platform that goes beyond customer support. For example, use a platform that offers deep integrations with your CRM and facilitates omnichannel data collection.
3. Clear financial data tied to CX
NPS may be the most popular CX metric, but it’s long had one flaw: it doesn’t always tie CX to financial data.
However, this is a must for businesses that want to use CX improvements to drive revenue growth. And any platform that you are using should really make the financial impacts of your CX efforts crystal clear.
For example, your tools should provide easy insight into the following:
The value of your detractors and promoters. If your detractors are made up of your largest accounts, you could be in trouble.
The cost of each driver. NPS surveys reveal which of your processes have the biggest impact on your business, but only if you consider CX data alongside revenue.
Revenue expansion opportunities. Best-in-class software like CustomerGauge will even help you identify opportunities to grow revenue, such as through upsells and referral marketing.
4. Takes your businesses’ type, size, and team into account
Not every business has the same needs and what’s best for one may not be right for another.
For example, CustomerGauge is ranked #1 by Gartner for B2B and B2B2C brands, but there are other tools like Medallia that are better suited for B2C.
So when choosing a customer experience solution, it’s important to consider:
Are you B2C, B2B, or B2B2C? B2B customer journeys, interactions, and experiences are quite different from their B2C counterparts. In B2C, you’re typically dealing with one individual per account. But, in B2B, each account has multiple decision-makers, longer decision-making times, and more customer touchpoints.
However, many customer experience IT solutions are focused on B2C needs, and they’re not equipped to handle the complexity of B2B and B2B2C interactions.
The size of your business. Are you managing large accounts with multi-contact experiences? Or do you have a limited number of customers and so only need to send a limited number of surveys?
The size of your budget will have an impact, too, as some CX software is a lot more expensive than others.
The maturity of your CX program and team. Is your team prepared to implement and manage a CX software and program effectively? Have you moved beyond simple surveying to a full-fledged CX or VoC program?
There’s no single “best” CX software. Instead, there’s only the best choice for your business.
With that said, let’s explore 5 top-rated CX solutions to help you fight churn and grow your business.
5 Top-Rated Customer Experience Software
1. CustomerGauge: The Best CX Software for B2B
G2 score: 4.6/5
Pricing: CustomerGauge’s basic pricing plan starts at $1,000 per user, annually.
According to Gartner, CustomerGauge is the #1 for B2B & B2B2C Experience, outperforming 14 of the best CX platforms. CustomerGauge was designed specifically for B2B, with the ability to handle complex B2B customer journeys, multiple touchpoints, and different account sizes.
CustomerGauge’s software is designed around the Account Experience (AX) methodology, which takes B2B brands from customer surveying to revenue expansion.
Here are some more compelling reasons to consider the CustomerGauge platform:
Conduct NPS surveys at multiple levels for each account, giving your team insights to close the loop at every level. Our platform also lets you set SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant, time-based) goals to make sure team members are closing the loop quickly.
Our customer success teams will also coach you to achieve higher response rates, like ICON Communications did, our partner that hit a 100% response rate.Grow revenue with CX. CustomerGauge identifies accounts that show signs they’re ready to refer your brand or invest in an upsell.
Monitor the hidden churn indicator: absence of signal. Absence of signal is when customers stop interacting with your business—no longer using your platform, opening support tickets, and engaging with your marketing efforts.
Research has shown absence of signal to be a vital churn indicator, so the CustomerGauge platform measures account response rates and sends alerts if an account goes dark.Direct your customer experience program. CustomerGauge’s widgets library enables you to identify drivers of NPS detractors to prioritize which CX issues need resolving first and the best course of action.
With the library of widgets, you’ll easily identify what’s driving NPS detractors and what financial value each CX improvement holds, making it easier to sell CX internally.
Customers have transformed their CX with CustomerGauge:
“Implementing CustomerGauge has allowed us to develop a sophisticated customer feedback program that’s easy to manage and report on. The best part of our experience with CustomerGauge has been the ongoing support and collaboration they have provided for helping us to continually improve our program.
Easy integration with our CRM and a variety of reporting tools within the platform have also allowed us to customize our process and get important data to the right people within our organization.” (administrator in industrial automation)
2. InMoment Customer Experience
G2 score: 4.8
Pricing: Custom quote (contact InMoment directly)
InMoment provides businesses with VoC data that spans the entire customer experience. But, unlike CustomerGauge, it’s better suited for B2C brands. The company’s primary customer base is in the retail, hospitality, and travel industries.
InMoment gives medium-to-large-sized enterprises detailed insights into their customers’ in-app experiences and the platform supports omnichannel data collection through audio, video, and text messages. It also identifies areas to improve CX and their subscription plans (both monthly and annual) come with strong phone and email support.
Overall, InMoment is an excellent customer experience solution that’s loved by its users. However, it’s limited when it comes to B2B functionality.
Here’s what one positive reviewer on G2 has to say:
“The surveys were very easy to act upon by my clients and quick. Simply integrate through Intercom to gauge their feedback at the end of each chat. I could share them on a chat at any time I'd want to. Their integration with Slack was good for live updates. Overall, a good place to start if you have the same requirements.” (administrator, small business)
3. Medallia
G2 score: 4.5/5
Pricing: Custom quote (contact Medallia directly)
Medallia is a leading CX software tailor-made for B2C. The platform is intuitive and facilitates easy, cross-functional use and claims the greatest number of functions in the CX solutions space.
Medallia makes it easy to collect feedback from different sources including surveys, reviews, unstructured sources (such as Intercom live chats), and operational signals. And, like many of the best CX platforms, Medallia supports integrations with leading CRMs and ERPs including Salesforce.
Medallia’s greatest strength, its robust and powerful features, also means that the platform comes with a considerable learning curve. Some users might find it challenging to get comfortable with the Admin Suite, for example:
One G2 review highlighted Medallia’s versatility:
“Medallia is a great resource for gauging how your service is being received by your clientele. I have found the program to be useful in a wide assortment of scenarios and we have found that it works well with Salesforce, which was a major concern.” (Salesforce admin)
4. Alchemer (previously SurveyGizmo)
G2 score: 4.4/5
Pricing: Alchemer’s basic plan is priced at $300/year per user, although its features are a little limited. The Professional plan (Alchemer’s most popula) costs $1020/year per user.
Alchemer is a simple CX software best suited for small-to-medium-sized B2C businesses. The platform lets you conduct surveys, collect and manage customer feedback, and spread VoC throughout your company by sharing data and insights with different departments.
What’s more, Alchemer is easy to implement and use (it’s much more user-friendly than platforms like Medallia). The software offers excellent support for frontline operations, which is where over 40% of the software’s implementations take place. On-site/frontline teams can use kiosk surveys and QR codes, while out-of-the-box analytics are segmented by region or branch to capture VoC.
One positive review on Gartner praises Alchemer’s versatility and ease of use:
“It provides great flexibility to design the surveys. The ease with which we can create and style our survey is quite commendable. It is easy to learn and since we had a licensed version that included videos, it was quite easy to create the surveys as per our requirements. We can also easily import the raw data from the responses easily into a CSV or excel format.” (decision analytics associate, professional services)
5. Qualtrics
G2 score: 4.3
Pricing: Qualtrics CustomerXM’s plans start at $1500/year.
Qualtrics is an excellent customer experience software for large enterprises and the biggest VoC vendor across ten industries.
The platform has rich features and a strong partner ecosystem to help integrate business workflows. It offers integrations with major platforms like Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Jira, and more.
Qualtrics’s dedicated CX platform, CustomerXM, helps businesses improve both customer and employee experiences. The tool lets you collect and analyze structured and unstructured data from various channels, including employee feedback, surveys, reviews, and chat logs.
However, Qualtrics’s robust features also make the onboarding process difficult for some users.
For example, one G2 reviewer shared his experience:
“Onboarding new people can be tough as it has a lot of advanced options, but doesn't have certain ones which make life easier for super power users. Admin tools need a complete overhaul.” (customer behavior analyst)
Additionally, Qualtrics is typically too expensive for some users.
Get Started With CustomerGauge
If you’re a B2B brand who wants technical support to boost your CX and find opportunities to grow revenue, CustomerGauge is the customer experience software for you.
While other platforms excel in B2C contexts, only CustomerGauge is designed with the specific needs of B2B brands in mind. It’s also the only CX solution out there that explicitly draws the link between your customer sentiments and revenue.
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