Guide to Choosing a Customer Experience Platform

We are certainly living in interesting times and everyone would agree to this except for business owners. If you ask them about the business environment nowadays, they would undoubtedly start complaining that now it is harder than ever to sell, customers keep coming and leaving and competition is at an all-time high. And that situation remains true for every sphere of business.

Okay, then how to survive in such a complicated business environment? We’ll answer this and other questions in the article. Check it out.

Why Businesses Choose Customer-Centricity

Trying to succeed in the present-day challenging market, companies adopt customer-centric methodology and focus on customer interactions expecting this will lead to customer loyalty, advocacy and, ultimately, business growth. Look at the rising trend to get to the core of the problem.

Rising Business Trend: Customer Obsession

Have you ever heard the term customer obsession? Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it?

 But what does it mean exactly? Customer obsession refers to a business strategy where a company prioritizes customer satisfaction above everything else. This means putting a customer and their needs at the center of all decisions on how to create and sell products or services. This modern approach to customer experience management is getting more and more popular in today’s business climate, so if you are not yet familiar with customer obsession, it is high time for you to start incorporating this term into your corporate dictionary.

To effectively manage the customer journey at all its stages, businesses turn to customer experience software as their solution. In this article, we will look into what customer experience software is, explore its benefits, discover how to find the best customer experience management solution for your business and identify some of the top software providers in the market.

So whether you are new to the concept or looking to upgrade your existing workflows and systems, this article will help you unleash the full potential of your business and cultivate a customer-centric corporate culture.

What is Customer Experience Software?

Customer experience software solutions provide a unified workspace to organize, manage and track customer interactions throughout the entire customer journey. The goal is to create a comprehensive view of the customer journey, understand customer sentiment, strengthen customer loyalty and improve customer retention.

Typically, customer experience tools allow you to collect customer feedback across multiple channels, analyze acquired customer data, create reports that provide actionable insights, automate existing workflows and collaborate effectively.

Envision a scenario where one potential customer contacts your customer service team because of a problem they’ve encountered, while another reaches out to your sales rep asking for a demo. At the same time, a third potential customer writes to you on LinkedIn inquiring about your pricing. Typically, information about each customer would be stored only within one tool – the one through which they interacted with you. Sounds like a mess, right? Not anymore. Customer experience management tools are capable of gathering all touchpoints from all channels in one place so it can be easier for you to manage and analyze them.

Importance of Customer Experience Platforms

Did you know that 96% of customers do not trust advertising—and the figures are even lower in the USA and Europe? Whether we like it or not, the fact remains. When it comes to a purchasing decision, people are more inclined to trust their peers than advertising.

In such an environment, making your customer happy becomes of paramount importance. And one of the steps on the path to success is incorporating customer experience software into your business workflow. But is it really that good? Let us look at the competitive advantages that such a tool can bring to your company.

Competitive Advantages

Better customer retention

81 percent of customers say there is a high likelihood they’ll make another purchase after they get a positive customer experience. Enhancing customer experience will thus have a positive impact on customer engagement and improve customer loyalty in the long run.

Bigger checks

It’s already an axiom of the modern business world that customers who get personalized customer service and positive customer experiences tend to spend more with those companies. You might say it’s like a fairy tale – the customers are happy and the revenue is growing. Exactly!

Higher brand loyalty

Positive customer interactions and experiences build trust in your brand brick by brick and extend the customer lifecycle. And let’s not forget, who do loyal customers become? That’s right – advocates for your brand.

Benefits of Customer Experience Software

Those were the general competitive advantages the right customer experience software solution can bring. But let’s delve even deeper and explore the actual benefits your teams can get from it.

High level of personalization: Customer experience tools allow businesses to offer a consistent, personalized experience across multiple communication channels. More than that, using powerful analytics features that most of such tools have, companies can categorize their customers into meaningful groups and then use that segmentation for targeted marketing and communication strategies.oups and then use that segmentation for targeted marketing and communication strategies.

Operational efficiency:  Having all important customer information at hand and all communication channels consolidated in one hub reduces the burden on customer support teams, sales reps and marketing specialists. And that’s not to mention the potential for process automation that many of the best customer experience management tools offer.

Improved response times: Customer experience management software platforms allow customer service teams to respond faster to customer issues and inquiries. Many of these platforms provide the knowledge base functionality and having this central hub of company knowledge enables the staff to find required information way faster.

Easier feedback management: It is difficult to overestimate the importance of timely and relevant customer feedback. Customer feedback surveys allow businesses to get insights into customer behavior, needs and expectations. Nowadays, information is the most powerful weapon and customer feedback definitely falls into that category.

Proactive problem solving: Being equipped with robust analytics and reporting tools, businesses can monitor customer trends and react to issues before they escalate.

Enhanced communication: Customer experience software often comes with collaboration and communication tools that can improve both internal and external communication for better customer service.

Data centralization: Customer experience software platforms are capable of consolidating crucial end-user data gathered on different touchpoints. This data can then be used to paint a customer’s comprehensive picture.

Key Features of Customer Experience Software

Now that you already know what customer experience software is and what benefits it can offer, let us explore the features you should hunt for when choosing the best customer experience management sNow that you already know what customer experience software is and what benefits it can offer, let us explore the features you should hunt for when choosing the best customer experience management solution for your company.

Multi-channel support

Remember we mentioned that business today is all about customer satisfaction? IInteracting with your customer via their preferred channel is one of the pillars of that strategy. Email, instant messengers, social media, phone—you should be present everywhere to answer your customer’s inquiry. And customer experience software allows you to achieve that without much pain.

Customer feedback tools

Through customer surveys, sales and marketing teams can easily analyze customer experiences and grasp actionable insights on customer satisfaction levels and whether they need to be improved.

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey mapping is a visual representation of a path a customer takes with the brand: from initial awareness through first purchase to brand advocacy. This technique allows businesses to identify pain points, optimize certain stages of customer interactions and access the efficiency of the customer experience management in the company.

Self-service options

A modern customer is more introverted than ever; they would try to avoid personal communication as much as possible. That is why self-service options such as FAQs, knowledge bases, community forums, self-service portals, etc. are becoming increasingly popular today. Those are beneficial not only for the customer but for the business too: self-service reduces the load on customer support agents, allows for scalability and reduces costs and helps gather valuable data on customer behavior, needs and preferences.

Integration capabilities

When choosing the right customer experience software for your company, you need to pay attention to the supported integrations. The more systems and platforms the selected solution can integrate with, the easier it would be for you to incorporate it into your existing workflow.

Customer segmentation

The capability to categorize all your customers based on behavioral analytic data will allow you to personalize communication, target advertisements, process customer requests quicker and increase customer satisfaction in the long term.

Security

Both your business data and your customers’ personal data should be well-protected. This is a must. The best customer experience software solutions in the market typically offer high levels of data protection but you definitely need to investigate the matter.

7 Leading Customer Experience Software Solutions

Now that you are equipped with knowledge of what customer experience management software is, which benefits it can bring to your business and what features to look for in the best customer experience tool for your company, we can proceed to the list of best customer experience software available in the modern market.

Let us examine those tools closely, study their strong and weak points and look at their ratings and pricing options. In other words, let us study everything that can help you make the right purchasing decision.

#1 FuseBase (formerly Nimbus)

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) started as a note-taking app people could use to take and store notes. The distinctive features of early FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) were its super friendly user interface and the ability to consolidate various types of content within one workspace: plain text, tasks, tables, databases, images, videos, embeds from other sites, etc.

With time, FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) evolved into a powerful collaboration hub allowing for efficient knowledge management, customer engagement and customer experience management. Let us look at the features that make it one of the best customer experience software to try.

Knowledge bases

With FuseBase (formerly Nimbus), you can easily create both internal and external knowledge bases that are easy to set up and configure. There are almost endless opportunities to organize the content: the super documents feature allows for gathering multi-format information within one page (or super document); a powerful editor enables you to present your content in a visually appealing way; and last but not least, advanced analytics tools provide you with the knowledge of what your visitors are looking for and how customers interact with your knowledge base portal.

More than that, a knowledge base can be used as customer self-service allowing customers to resolve their issues independently without direct interaction with support agents. FuseBase`s (formerly Nimbus) knowledge bases are more than just information repositories—theу are full-fledged content management systems.

Client portals

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) allows creating secure hubs where you can interact with your customers, share and exchange data, including personal and financial data.

Rich integrations

With FuseBase (formerly Nimbus), you won’t need to switch between multiple tools as it enables you to seamlessly integrate your projects with Excel tables, Google Analytics, Calendly, YouTube, etc. Overall, FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) offers support for over 2,000 different integrations.

Permission management

FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) allows you to grant or revoke permissions and set different editing rights in your workspaces and folders. The roles can vary from complete access to editing materials to only viewing them.

Pricing: Starts at $99/month. Contact sales for a customized pricing quote.

Capterra rating: 4.6 (158 reviews).

Free trial: Available.

#2 Zendesk

Zendesk offers a set of powerful out-of-the-box tools for organizing and managing customer experience that are easy to configure and use. Zendesk allows businesses to keep track of customer conversations on multiple channels, personalize experiences across customer journeys, gather feedback and conduct customer experience surveys. One should also mention Zendesk’s visual sales pipeline, which offers a graphical representation of sales prospects and helps sales teams manage leads, opportunities and deals more effectively.

Let us dive deeper into what makes Zendesk one of the best customer experience software tools available in the present-day market.

Ticket management system

Zendesk is well-known for its ticket management tools which play a crucial role in delivering exceptional customer experiences. Its help desk software integrates seamlessly with various channels such as email, chat, phone and social media. This helps centralize support requests in a single location and thus reduce support time and significantly improve customer service interactions.

Customer satisfaction surveys

Zendesk allows businesses to get customer insights through real-time feedback, social media channels and satisfaction surveys sent via mobile apps. Product teams can then use the collected customer data to map customer journeys and analyze their clients’ behaviors, preferences and interests.

Workflow automation

With Zendesk you can easily automate customer queries resolution by assigning tickets to the appropriate agents based on their workload or expertise. You can also configure the system to trigger responses and actions based on ticket attributes. This helps reduce manual effort and increases the effectiveness of the help desk staff – all for a seamless customer experience.

Pricing: Starts at $19/month.

Capterra rating: 4.4 (3718 reviews).

Free trial: Available for 14 days.

#3 Hubspot

Hubspot is a powerful CRM platform that can connect your sales, marketing, and support teams in their customer relationship management efforts. It is often referred to as a go-to tool for inbound marketers since its enterprise edition allows tracking the actions of your website visitors and then personalizing customer experiences based on the collected data.

Let us look at what makes Hubspot one of the best customer experience software options today.

Email marketing automation

Hubspot allows for creating and delivering personalized and optimized emails so that businesses could engage with their target audience more effectively, better meet customer expectations and reduce customer churn.

Sales tools

Hubspot’s Sales Hub has all the necessary utilities for sales representatives to efficiently manage customer experience during the purchasing process: from monitoring the deals’ progress to automating sales processes. With Hubspot, your sellers will be equipped with all the data and insights they need to effectively close deals.

Ticketing system

Hubspot provides companies with the ability to organize and track customer issues through tickets and provide their customers with self-service options through knowledge bases and FAQs.

Pricing: Starts at $20/month.

Capterra rating: 4.5 (3826 reviews).

Free trial: Available for 30 days.

#4 Zoho

Our next contender for the best customer experience tool is Zoho CRM. It is positioned as a universal customer experience solution that can be used by marketing, sales and customer service teams. The Zoho customer experience platform features a bunch of tools that come in handy.

The Zoho customer experience platform is rightly called one of the best customer experience software tools that can be found on the market today. But let us prove it by exploring its main features.

Omnichannel support

With Zoho, you can direct all interactions from all the platforms your company has a presence in, into one unified inbox. What does this mean? This means that your customer service specialist can respond to customers’ email queries, social media messages, live chat and more, all from one interface.

All-in-one solution

Zoho CRM equips organizations with a complete customer relationship life-cycle management software that can meet the needs of all the teams involved in customer experience management. From real-time feedback through market research to predictive analytics – Zoho has everything your business might need.

Channel-specific customizations

Zoho allows tailoring your interactions with customers to the specific platform. In other words, you can configure automated marketing messages to differ in contents or in style depending on the channel they are being delivered through.

Pricing: Starts at $14/month.

Capterra rating: 4.3 (6386 reviews).

Free trial: Available for 15 days.

#5 Adobe Experience Manager

Another software in our list that claims to be the best customer experience tool to use is Adobe Experience Manager (previously known as Adobe CQ). It is a part of the Adobe Experience Cloud and is designed to join the power of a content management system and digital asset management tools – all for more positive customer emotions and better customer experience.

Okay, now let’s look at the features that make the Adobe Experience Manager a decent customer experience solution to consider.

Web content management system

Adobe Experience Manager boasts an intuitive interface for creating, managing and deploying content across various websites, which allows businesses to ensure a consistent and personalized digital experience for users. Coupled with web analytics and the ability to A/B test digital content, it can become a mighty weapon in the hands of your marketing team.

Powerful analytics

Adobe Experience Manager integrates with Adobe Analytics for even deeper insights into the peculiarities of the customer lifecycle, behavior and preferences. Marketing teams can use real-time customer data to create detailed customer profiles and then fine-tune their strategies accordingly.

Self-service options

Adobe Experience Manager allows companies to grant a certain level of autonomy to their users by giving them the possibility to access, search and manage content.

Pricing: Available on request.

Capterra rating: 4.3 (109 reviews).

Free trial: There is no free trial available.

#6 Oracle Cloud CX

Another customer experience tool vying for the best customer experience software is developed by Oracle Corporation. Oracle Cloud CX integrates advertising, sales, commerce, market research and service functionalities to help businesses build meaningful interactions with their customers.

Advertising

The Oracle Cloud client management software comes with tools to unify advertising data across different channels, enabling businesses to optimize their ad spend, measure effectiveness and, of course, enhance return on investment.

Customer data management

A core strength of the Oracle Cloud suite is its capability to consolidate data collection from various touchpoints and provide a 360-degree view of the customer.

Predictive analytics

The system gathers various data types, such as CRM, sector-specific and behavioral data, about each website visitor to craft comprehensive customer profiles. Consequently, Oracle CX enables its users to anticipate the optimal experience for every client and deliver personalized promotions.

Pricing: Varies based on the selected package and the tools included in the suite. For accurate quotes, please contact the provider directly.

Capterra rating: 4.3 (16 reviews).

Free trial: Available for 30 days.

#7 Qualtrics

And last but not least in our list of the best customer experience software platforms is Qualtrics. It promises businesses to help them listen to their customers’ voices to address any disappointing experience.

Unified feedback collection

Qualtrics facilitates the collection of customer responses across various channels – be it through web, mobile, social media or even offline methods. This allows businesses to gain highly granular insights into customer and sales experiences.

Conversational analytics

The platform uses conversational analytics to follow sentiments from social media posts and comments. By leveraging AI and natural language processing (NLP), Qualtrics can determine the sentiment behind customer conversations, categorizing feedback as positive, negative or neutral.

XM Discover

XM Discover, part of the Qualtrics Experience Management platform, has advanced capabilities to detect even the subtlest nuances within feedback data. Once the system identifies custom phrases or combinations of words that a company deems important, it immediately sends out alerts. This ensures that the relevant stakeholders can address the feedback promptly.

Pricing: Available on request.

Capterra rating: 4.8 (400 reviews).

Free trial: Available for 30 days.

Conclusion

‘Customer is King’ – do you remember that old mantra reflecting the importance of a customer in the sales process? Well, that mantra has never been more true than today.

In this article, we have reviewed the best customer experience management software you can find. Out of all the tools discussed, FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) stands out as the best value for the money as it offers an impressive feature pack for decent money.

So if you are interested in enhancing customer experience in your company, we recommend giving FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) a try. Get started free and discover yourself how it can revolutionize your interactions and leave your customers more satisfied than ever. Don’t just meet expectations, exceed them!

Disclaimer

Parties other than FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) may provide products, services, recommendations, or views on FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) site (“Third Party Materials”). FuseBase (formerly Nimbus) is not responsible for examining or evaluating such Third Party Materials, and does not provide any warranties relating to the Third Party Materials. Links to such Third Party Materials are for your convenience and do not constitute an endorsement of such Third Party Materials.