- What are customer experience (CX) tools? TLDR — They're software platforms that help businesses manage, analyze, map, and measure all customer interactions throughout the buyer's journey to create delightful experiences that increase loyalty and retention.
- What's the best comprehensive CX management platform for growing businesses? TLDR — Service Hub offers end-to-end customer experience management with feedback surveys (NPS, CSAT, CES), omnichannel support, knowledge base, ticketing automation, and seamless CRM integration on one unified platform.
- How do customer journey mapping tools help improve CX? TLDR — Tools like LucidChart and Smaply create visual maps showing how customers interact with your brand, revealing pain points, emotions at each stage, and opportunities to optimize the buyer's journey from their perspective.
- What should businesses measure to understand their customer experience? TLDR — Use tools like ChurnZero and Survicate to track customer growth, product usage, account health, satisfaction scores (NPS/CSAT), and feedback across multiple channels to identify improvement opportunities and prevent churn.
When you offer a delightful customer experience, your customers enjoy interacting with your reps, content, products, and business as a whole.
A delightful customer experience is how you convert more leads into new customers — and more importantly, retain current customers. It’s how you increase customer loyalty and keep your target audience members coming back for more.
Customer Experience Tools
Customer experience (CX) tools provide easy and effective ways to help you offer and maintain that delightful experience for your customers. In this blog post, we'll cover some of the best CX tools available today.
You’ll notice that the customer experience tools listed below are broken down into sections (customer experience management, customer experience mapping, customer experience analysis, and customer experience measurement tools). Something important to note is that many of the tools listed in this blog post fit into multiple sections.
For instance, all tools below are different types of customer management tools. Additionally, many of the customer experience measurement tools could fit into the customer experience analysis tool section and vice versa.
Best Customer Experience Tools at a Glance
|
CRM |
HubSpot Service Hub |
Qualtrics |
ClientSuccess |
|
Key Features |
Customer onboarding and support management, Custom surveys (NPS, CES, CSAT) CRM integration with centralized data storage Omnichannel support strategy Self-service tools (knowledge base, help desk, ticketing automation, chat) Dashboard organization for survey responses |
Real-time customer feedback collection Customer listening across multiple platforms Account-specific insights and health visualization Stakeholder perception and sentiment analysis Predictive AI for renewal and churn likelihood, Support prioritization tools |
Customer onboarding solutions Customer adoption tracking Renewal rate improvement Customer base growth tools Custom customer journey building Account experience optimization |
|
Pricing |
Starter: $15/month per seat, Professional: $90/month per seat, Enterprise: $150/month per seat. Annual commitment required for Professional and Enterprise plans |
Custom pricing based on responses and features. Online option: $420/month (1,000 responses annually). Contact sales for higher volumes |
Custom pricing. Startup plan starts around $15,000/year. Growth and Enterprise plans available upon request |
|
Free Trial |
Yes - Free tools available with basic functionality |
Yes - 30-day Strategic Research trial, plus free Surveys account with 500 responses |
No free trial, but demo available |
Customer Experience Management Tools
Customer experience management tools may be broad in their CX capabilities or focus on a specific aspect of the customer experience. If they are broad in their capabilities, like the three examples we’re going to cover in this section, then they’re able to help your business manage all customer interactions so that you can enhance the buyer’s journey and delight more customers at scale.
1. HubSpot Service Hub
HubSpot Service Hub is customer service management software that allows you to onboard customers, provide efficient customer support, and deepen your relationships with customers. It delivers efficient, end-to-end service that delights your customers at scale.
Service Hub has a variety of customer experience management features including Customer Feedback Software. This tool allows you to send custom, NPS, customer effort score (CES), and customer satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to your customers, allowing you to gauge loyalty, determine how easy it is for customers to get the support they need, understand satisfaction at different points of the buyer’s journey, and more.
All survey responses will be organized in your dashboard for you, no matter if they were shared via email or your website.
Furthermore, Service Hub features AI capabilities to automate the customer experience. For example, Breeze Customer Agent provides 24/7 automated customer support to scale support teams.
Service Hub connects seamlessly to HubSpot Smart CRM for unified data management. Therefore, all of your customer data is centrally stored and updated, and easily accessible.
Service Hub also provides the necessary tools and features to activate an omnichannel support strategy and offer self-service support (e.g. knowledge base, help desk and ticketing automation, and chat).
2. Qualtrics
Qualtrics is an experience management platform that offers customer experience products to help you increase loyalty and better understand your customers and their unique needs. There’s a customer listening feature that gives you the ability to obtain real-time feedback and interact with them via the platforms they’re already on.
There are account-specific insights so you can visualize and understand the health of your accounts — this is helpful so you can prioritize support and any necessary outreach. Stakeholder perception and sentiment, as well as predictive AI, help you identify the likelihood of renewal and churn.
3. ClientSuccess
ClientSuccess is customer success software meant for improving customer retention rates and building your business's unique customer journey. The tool has solutions for onboarding customers, adopting customers, renewing customers, and growing your customer base.
The onboarding solution understands the basis of your customers' relationships with your brand. The adoption solution shows your customers the value of your product. The renew solution improves customer retention rates. Lastly, the grow solution identifies the most effective ways to improve the customer experience for all of your accounts.
4. Zonka Feedback
Zonka Feedback is a powerful customer experience tool that makes it easy for businesses to collect and act on customer feedback. With Zonka Feedback, you can create customizable surveys and forms to gather feedback through various channels, including mobile, web, website, online, offline, email, and SMS.
Zonka Feedback provides real-time analytics and reporting, sentiment analysis, intelligent routing, and customizable notifications, enabling businesses to quickly identify trends and make data-driven decisions to improve their customer experience. The tool also integrates with popular platforms like HubSpot, Zapier, and Slack, making it easy to sync customer data and feedback with existing workflows.
Customer Experience Mapping Tools
Customer experience maps, also known as customer journey mapping tools, provide you with a visual of how and where your customers interact with your brand in order to help you see your business from their perspective. They offer context around how and why leads and customers engage with you, and what they're feeling while doing so.
1. LucidChart
LucidChart is an online diagram software that combines data visuals and diagrams in a collaborative workspace so your team can improve the customer journey.
The tool has customizable templates and formatting so you can map your customer journey in a way that works for your team and customers, and is flexible enough to be updated as your business grows and customer journey changes.
Outline the ways that your buyer personas navigate your site up to the point of purchase so you can understand the reasons behind their conversion.
2. Smaply
Smaply is a customer experience innovation software that helps you create, share, and present customer journey maps, personas, and stakeholder maps.
The customer journey mapping tool surfaces any pain points customers experience throughout the buyer's journey. Persona mapping allows you to better understand the needs and expectations of your customers. And stakeholder mapping shows you which stakeholders influence your customer service most.
3. UXPressia
UXPressia is a customer experience platform that offers collaborative customer journey mapping tools. It gives you an understanding of your customers' experiences at every stage of the buyer's journey via different channels. This makes it easy to identify current customer paths, ideal customer paths, and areas of opportunity throughout the customer experience.
There are 48 different emotions that you can choose from to help you visualize your customers' emotions during various stages of the buyer's journey and their interactions with your brand.
Customer Experience Analysis Tools
Customer experience analysis tools allow you to evaluate and study your customer experience from different angles to determine which parts of the buyer's journey are working well for your customers and audience, and where you could improve.
1. Hotjar
Hotjar is a website heatmap and behavioral analytics tool — use it to gain insight into how your visitors navigate your website. Gather and turn user feedback into actionable insights to determine the most effective ways to convert more of your website visitors.
In terms of tracking behavior, Hotjar offers heatmaps and recordings. In terms of feedback, the tool has incoming feedback and survey solutions. All of this data is organized and visualized so you can easily and quickly identify the best ways to improve the customer experience.
You can leverage Hotjar's robust feedback and survey solutions through its integration with with HubSpot and transform your user feedback into actionable insights.
2. Gainsight
Gainsight is customer success and product experience software. It combines customer feedback surveys, customer journey maps, and other customer-related analytics to help you determine the most effective ways to improve the customer experience.
Determine which issues are the most important to your customers using the tool's Natural Language Processing function and collect the customer feedback you need using NPS, CSAT, CES, and custom surveys.
Gainsight centralizes customer experience data so you can identify trends, collaborate on how to improve the customer experience, and ensure everyone on your team has access to the data they need.
3. Wootric
Wootric is a customer experience management and insight software that helps you better understand the customer journey.
There are customer journey analytics features that provide insight into the touchpoints that cause the most friction for your customers as well as which experiences result in the greatest amount of loyalty. The tool incorporates machine learning to auto-categorize customer comments — this way, you can prioritize follow-up with the customers who are at the greatest risk of churning.
Customer Experience Measurement Tools
Customer experience measurement tools provide insight into how much your customers are enjoying their interactions with your business throughout the buyer's journey (whether the buyer's journey as a whole or at a specific point in the buyer's journey).
1. ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a customer success software with a variety of customer experience measurement features. For example, you can track and measure customer growth, trends, product usage, and account health.
All of your data will be visualized on in-depth dashboards — if you're looking for a high-level view of that data, use ChurnZero's summary views.
2. Survicate
Survicate is customer feedback and survey software that helps you collect customer feedback, run targeted surveys (e.g. website, app, etc.), and send surveys via different channels (e.g. email, chat, etc.).
Survicate offers 1) marketing insights so you can understand prospects and customers on a deeper level, 2) product feedback so you can identify areas of improvement regarding the product you sell, and 3) customer satisfaction data to understand lifetime value, retention, and more.
3. Birdeye
Birdeye is an experience-marketing platform. It helps you obtain customer feedback and then turn that data into actionable business insights so you can directly improve the customer experience.
With the tool's Natural Language Processing feature (called Athena), you can easily analyze insights from customer reviews, customer feedback surveys, and social media. Additionally, you can measure customer experience performance by category — meaning you can group keywords into categories and sub-categories to measure all parts of your business.
Grow Better With Customer Experience Tools
Customer experience tools give you the context necessary to improve the buyer's journey, delight more customers, and provide remarkable support that allows you to retain more customers and increase loyalty.
