Businesses live and die on their customer relationships, but engaging customers effectively is a heavy lift. Customers expect personalized help, immediate responses, and an all-knowing understanding of past conversations. If you’re asking yourself, “How do companies do it?!” I have a simple answer for you.
They use a customer engagement platform — it changes everything about the customer (and internal team) experience. But before you can engage customers better, you have to sort through dozens of platforms and choose one for your business.
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What Is a Customer Engagement Platform?
A customer engagement platform is software that helps businesses manage customer interactions successfully. Basic features include messaging channels and help ticket resolution. Advanced platforms combine customer service tools with artificial intelligence (AI) and customer data analysis to improve customer engagement. With a customer engagement platform, it’s possible to manage complex customer relationships en masse.
How I Tested the Best Customer Engagement Platforms
Like all SaaS tools, customer engagement platforms come in different shapes and sizes. After hours of research, review, and testing, here are the criteria that I used to evaluate the most popular customer engagement platforms:
- Price. It’s not just a number. Access to customer engagement tools is determined by the price. Scalable pricing catering to both small businesses and enterprise companies is a plus.
- Features. Each platform has dozens or hundreds of features; I looked for the basic boxes to be checked, then examined the features that are unique and noteworthy.
- AI Integration. AI has become synonymous with customer engagement. I evaluated how AI is integrated to help save time and improve customer satisfaction and user experience.
- Reviews. How satisfied are current customers? It’s the elephant in the room when you’re making a software purchase. I’ve read reviews for all these customer engagement platforms and will give you the gist.
10 Best Customer Engagement Platforms
The number of platforms on the market is overwhelming. You don’t have to drown in the endless lists of features, customer reviews, and statistics — board my life raft, and I’ll give you the overview you need to see where each platform shines.
1. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is a platform that handles everything from basic customer support requests to complex customer interactions. You can easily switch between messaging channels, like email and live chat, in the simple in-app messaging platform. Your resource center, meetings, and other customer support resources are all integrated, and you prioritize enhancing customer satisfaction with built-in service level agreements.
Price: Free plan, then $20 per month.
Key Features
- Advanced customer help desk support.
- Customer calling.
- Knowledge base.
- Messaging capabilities.
- Built-in AI.
- Integration with HubSpot CRM (our beloved customer relationship management tool).
AI Integration: Built-in AI automatically tracks and updates customer ticket status based on your interactions. You can leverage AI in other helpful ways, like writing a message to a customer and then asking AI to change the tone (for example, making your message more professional).
Reviews: Customers love the engaged support that they receive from the HubSpot support team when they call or have a support ticket. This has been my experience as a HubSpot customer as well — even when using free products, you get an immediate response from a human. Customers also love the ease of use, while some wish it had more features.
What I like: I test a lot (a LOT) of SaaS tools and the ease of the HubSpot Service Hub is above and beyond. The focus on rapid onboarding makes it the most user-friendly customer engagement software.
2. Salesforce Service Cloud
While this platform is technically a CRM, Salesforce itself says that a CRM can serve as a customer engagement platform when it integrates customer engagement tools. The integration between email, social media messaging, WhatsApp, chatbots, and more provides a really complete picture of customer communication touchpoints. All of these engagements are funneled into the Service Cloud, where you can quickly manage customer interactions.
Price: Try it for free, then pay $25 per user/month.
Key Features
- Mobile app for field service reps.
- Omnichannel messaging.
- Customer service routing automation.
AI Integration: Salesforce’s generative AI bot, called Einstein, has a wide range of functions, including text messaging response. AI is also used to help customer service reps navigate internal knowledge bases faster, shortening response times.
Reviews: Customers rave about the diverse applications but some say it’s easy to get lost in the endless features and settings of the platform. That’s been my experience as well.
What I like: The platform is undoubtedly powerful, but I echo some of the customer reviews that the interface feels clunky.
3. Zendesk Support Suite
Zendesk Support Suite is an AI-driven customer engagement platform that integrates diverse communication channels into one dashboard. While all customer engagement platforms manage help tickets and calls, Zendesk Support Suite also manages comments on community forums. When customers reach out on multiple channels, all communication is condensed into one help ticket to save your customer service team’s time.
Something I like is the onboarding process. New customers answer a few questions about their company and then are onboarded based on their needs. Then, you’re given an account setup checklist and a guided walk-through.
Price: Free trial, then $19 per month when billed annually.
Key Features
- Thorough communication channels like messaging, live chat, and voice.
- AI-integrated agent workspace and help center.
AI Integration: AI is deeply embedded in the Zendesk Support Suite, both on the front-facing customer side and the internal agent side. Customers’ tickets are resolved more quickly with AI support that takes previous interactions into account while processing queries. The copilot AI feature proactively gathers customer information to brief agents before they even begin their customer interaction.
Reviews: Users love how customizable this platform is but wish that it had more features.
What I like: I like how customizable and modern the platform is. Zendesk really prioritizes the user experience and that speeds up onboarding and personalizing the platform to your business.
4. Freshdesk
Freshdesk by Freshworks is a customer engagement platform that boasts fast onboarding and minimal training required to help your team hit the ground running. This intention comes through right away when you sign up — you start with a guided setup, and then you’re invited to a live hands-on training with staff that helps new users set up their accounts.
I think Freshdesk is great because it integrates with more than 1,000 other tools, scales as your business grows, and has a detailed ticketing system.
Price: Free plan, then $15 per month billed annually.
Key Features
- Advanced support ticket management.
- Streamlined agent space.
- Real-time analytics to provide immediate data insights.
AI Integration: Freshdesk AI aims to reduce agents’ time spent on email, using generative AI to help respond to tickets, assess tone, and edit. Emails can be generated with just a few keywords. Customers also benefit from AI via chatbots and automated routing to get assigned to an agent more quickly.
Reviews: Customers enjoy that Freshdesk is simple and easy to use, with many features available, with some complaints of the platform being slower than others and having less control over platform customization.
What I like: Freshdesk checks the technical boxes like similar tools, but I really like the addition of Freshdesk Arcade. This is a gamification system that awards points to agents as a way to encourage and energize repetitive tasks. I think it’s a brilliant approach to making a customer engagement platform enjoyable for the internal team.
5. Tidio
Tidio is a user-friendly customer engagement platform that was designed for ease of use; they even say that you can get it up and running within five minutes! I think they follow through on that promise — the interface is intuitive and guides you through creating your first chatbot.
The more advanced features naturally take longer to implement. The customer tracking feature generates insights into where each customer is at in the customer journey and what they need to engage and convert. Tidio integrates with 125+ tools, which is more restrictive than competitors (for comparison, Freshdesk integrates with 1,000+).
Price: Custom pricing for each company.
Key Features
- Advanced custom bots that are sales-oriented, such as an abandoned cart bot, first-time customer bot, and product recommendation bot.
AI Integration: Standard AI features are included, like AI chatbot and sentiment analysis. The chatbot feature is more robust and ecommerce-oriented than many other tools.
Reviews: Online reviewers love the onboarding ease but some say the platform is on the slower side, with some saying it slowed down their entire website.
What I like: I really like the “flows” feature. Flows are organized in your dashboard according to goals (upsell, re-engage, etc.), and you can see how many times certain flows have been used by other Tidio customers.
This makes me feel like I can easily follow in the footsteps of other big brands while I’m getting oriented, which is a really cool feature for small business owners who are wearing a lot of different hats and trying to make quick decisions.
6. Kustomer
Kustomer is a customer engagement platform acquired by Meta in 2023, which should make it no surprise that it has a heavy data focus. The data and functionality of the platform dive deep into the customer experience. I think it’s interesting that they actually built their platform around customer profiles instead of open tickets.
Price: Prices are customized to each company.
Key Features
- AI agents for customers.
- AI assistants for reps.
- CRM.
- Cross-channel communication consolidation.
AI Integration: Kustomer uses AI to enable fast, personalized interactions. Some customer support issues are handled completely by AI, such as simple inquiries, while customer service reps also get AI agents to assist them.
Reviews: Kustomer has fewer online reviews than other platforms, but the reviews are glowing. Reviewers love how easy it is to use and frequently say that they have no product complaints.
What I like: Customer data can be overwhelming, and I like that Kustomer focuses on making the data actionable. The interface is also simpler and more intuitive than some of the more expansive platforms.
7. Khoros
Khoros is a customer engagement platform that also serves as a social media management software that brings social listening into your reach. I like how this platform uses task prioritization, tagging, and routing to improve efficiency for communication across all digital channels and voice calls.
Based on the lack of free trial and a very underwhelming product tour, I was not sold on the value of Khoros until I saw the impressive roster of tech companies that use it, including Microsoft, Airbnb, and Zoom. These tech giants made me do a double take and look at what makes Khoros special.
Price: Pricing is customized to each company, but online reviewers mention that it’s pricey.
Key Features
- All standard features, such as self-service and agent assist, are covered by Khoros.
- A unique feature is Khoros Communities, which creates forums and rewards peer-to-peer interactions.
AI Integration: Chatbots, internal AI assistants, and all standard features are present in Khoros. This platform also offers AI to moderate your community forums, which is a unique feature (and very timely).
Reviews: Online reviewers like the powerful features of Khoros, but comment on the steep learning curve and the price. Likewise, I didn’t get the sense that this was a tool you jump into quickly without a time-heavy setup.
What I like: Community forums have had a resurgence in popularity (have you noticed all of the Reddit and Quora results on Google?), so I really like the advanced communities feature; it feels very forward-thinking. I think the gamification aspect for members, where they earn points for being active, is brilliant and has huge returns for companies that have chatty online communities.
8. Zoho
Zoho has dozens of applications, two of which merge to create a powerful customer engagement system: Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk. Zoho CRM focuses on attracting, tracking, and closing leads, and it integrates with Zoho Desk to fulfill customer support needs.
You can get both of these (and much more) with Zoho One, an umbrella subscription that encompasses all of Zoho’s applications in one massive customer engagement tool. Zoho’s logo includes building blocks, which I find is very representative of how the platform works.
Price: Zoho One pricing starts at $37 per month and scales with the number of employees.
Key Features
- Customer support ticketing.
- Privacy and compliance.
- Sales and marketing automation.
- Omnichannel communication.
AI Integration: AI is integrated throughout the entire customer journey and user experience — generative AI, chatbots, anomaly detection in data, and more.
Reviews: Reviewers are happy with the advanced functionality and tool integration, while complaints include the learning curve and customer support.
What I like: The onboarding process is undoubtedly intimidating, thanks to all of the applications and options, but those with the patience to set it up are rewarded with advanced functionality. My experience has taught me that more isn’t always better with software, so I don’t think this is the right fit for simple needs.
9. Intercom
Intercom is a customer engagement platform with a focus on ease of use and robust communication. Users can easily switch between communication channels, going from chatting to voice calls to video calls to customer screen-sharing within the application. This is a unique feature that’s ideal for SaaS companies.
Price: Free trial, then $29 per month.
Key Features
- Inbox management.
- Help desk customization.
- Workflow design.
- Fluency in 25+ languages.
AI Integration: Intercom describes itself as an “AI-first” customer service platform, and has an AI agent for customers, an AI copilot for customer reps, plus an AI analyst generating recommendations for leaders.
Reviews: Intercom gets raving reviews. In G2’s 2024 customer satisfaction survey, Intercom had the highest scores in the help desk category.
What I like: Most tools focus on two user groups: customers and representatives. I like that Intercom also brings leaders into the conversation and makes it easy for them to understand the data and take action. They don’t assume you have an entire data department briefing you, which I appreciate as a small business owner.
10. Sprinklr Service
Sprinklr Service is an engagement platform that works to reduce customer support resolution times and costs. I like the focus on improving the internal team experience by creating a collaborative view, consolidating all customer contact points into one area so new agents can be briefed on complex customer relationships immediately. This also improves customer service, working hard so that customers never need to repeat themselves.
Price: Free trial, and then $199 per month when billed annually.
Key Features
- Multilingual support.
- Monitoring for irregularities and trends.
- Chatbots.
- Agent assistance.
- Advanced reporting.
AI Integration: AI is used for all standard features (automation, sentiment analysis, etc.), as well as quality monitoring. This is a unique feature that I think adds a lot of value to companies that are trying to recover from poor customer satisfaction ratings.
Reviews: Existing customers like the robust features and the ease of use, but slow load times and software bugs were top complaints. I second this, because I experienced bugs while testing — I followed their steps to sign up for a trial and was immediately hit with an access denied page and this message: “Welcome to Sprinklr! Looks like the app for which you have permission is disabled by the admin.”
What I like: All platforms provide reporting, analytics, and AI, but I really like the specific application of combining these into the quality monitoring feature.
Making Moves for Your Customers
There’s a lot of money on the table when it comes to engaging customers, and customers keep expecting more and more. Thankfully, with the tools on the market and their rapidly evolving capabilities, companies are able to meet those high expectations at scale.
I hope that my walk-through of the most popular platforms makes their similarities and differences easier to understand — and easier for you to choose the right platform for your team.
Free Help Desk & Ticketing Software
Keep track of customer requests in one unified help desk that connects to your CRM database.
- Provide personalized, AI-powered support to your customers
- Save time, reduce errors, and streamline service processes
- Improve rep efficiency & time to resolution
- And more!