Customer expectations are at an all-time high, with 88% of buyers claiming the experience a company provides is as important as the actual products or services. So, good customer service is no longer just about wowing a customer at the point of sale. You’ve got to consider their entire journey and become customer-obsessed if you want to:
- Transform interactions into memorable experiences
- Set yourself miles apart from competitors
- Turn casual buyers into loyal advocates
- Boost your bottom line
While all that might seem like a tall order, the right customer experience tools will help you get there faster than you thought possible. It’s all about leveraging real insights from your audience.
In this blog post, you’ll discover the best 10 tools to fuel your customer obsession and consistently deliver exceptional experiences.
TL;DR – Customer Experience Tools
Want to skip the theory and jump straight to the practical solutions?
Here are the top 10 customer experience apps we’ll discuss in detail below:
- Marvin
- Hotjar
- Mixpanel
- Hubspot
- Qualtrics
- Talkwalker
- Productboard
- Outfunnel
- Podium
- Adobe Experience Manager
All these are individual customer experience software or platforms with multiple such tools and functionalities. They’re meant to compile large amounts of customer data, analyze it, and suggest actions to improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.
To choose one, you should:
- Determine the essential features you need to achieve your goals.
- Prioritize ease of use so you can work with it without extensive training.
- Make sure it can handle increasing amounts of data and grow with you.
- Verify if it integrates well with your existing systems.
- Opt for strong customer support.
Now that we’ve cleared the essentials, let’s move on to the nitty-gritty.
What is a Customer Experience (CX) Software?
Customer experience software is a tool for helping businesses manage and improve customer interactions across specific touchpoints. Analyzing your customers’ voices from the data you collect, CX software can show you what buyers love and what could be improved and even uncover hidden needs they might have.
The term is broad since there are many different ways to enhance customer interactions. So the market offers various types of CX tools, each focusing on different aspects of improving customer experience, such as:
- Gathering qualitative feedback
- Monitoring customer sentiments
- Managing customer data, etc.
Before we dive into a detailed classification and insights on how to make your pick, let’s take a quick look at the benefits of using such software.
Why Is Having Good CX Software Important?
Good CX software gives you clear insights into what customers truly want.
With built-in customer experience mapping tools, such software helps you make intelligent improvements, keeping customers happy and generating repeated purchases. Think of it as a way of getting inside your audience’s heads to:
- Discover how to tailor your products/services to their values and needs
- Make them feel understood and appreciated
- Build stronger relationships
- Gain their loyalty
Common values lead to loyalty and are particularly important in the bigger CX picture. One-third of consumers feel connected and more loyal to companies whose practices align with their values. Plus, 59% say that once they become loyal to a brand, they’ll remain for life.
In conclusion, good customer experience software makes a huge difference in understanding your customers, leading to long-term success. In contrast, sub-par tools with limited capabilities can lead to mismanaging or ineffectively analyzing feedback, creating broader workflow issues.
So, don’t just go with the first CX software you find. Do your best to pick a good one.
How to Select the Right Customer Experience (CX) Tool
Choosing the right customer experience tool can be tricky. No software does it all, which is why there are many options in the market. To help you get the bigger picture, understand your options, and choose accordingly, we’ve broken down the main types of CX software below:
| Type of CX software | Focus | Function |
| UX research tools | User interviews and qualitative feedback | Conduct user interviews, gather qualitative feedback, and analyze user behavior. |
| Social media analysis tools | Social media interactions and sentiment analysis | Monitor social media platforms to get customer opinions, trends, and sentiment data. |
| Website analytics tools | User behavior on websites | Track and analyze how users interact with websites, including user journeys and conversion rates. |
| Blog analytics tools | Content performance and engagement | Analyze blog content performance by tracking metrics such as page views and social shares. |
| Customer feedback management tools | Customer feedback collection and analysis | Gather and analyze feedback from surveys, reviews, and direct customer input. |
| Customer relationship management (CRM) systems | Customer interactions and data management | Store and manage customer information, track interactions, and provide personalized experiences. |
| Live chat and chatbot tools | Real-time customer support | Provide instant customer support through live chat or automated chatbots. |
You can significantly narrow your options by identifying essential features that serve your goals. If you suspect you need more than one tool, here’s how to determine the best combination of CX software:
- Assess your current challenges: Identify the primary pain points in your customer experience. Is it gathering qualitative feedback, analyzing social media sentiment, or tracking website behavior?
- Define your objectives: Clearly outline what you aim to achieve with CX software. Are you looking to improve customer satisfaction, streamline support, or gain deeper insights into user behavior?
- Pick your must-have features: Based on your challenges and objectives, list the must-have features for your CX tools. This could include real-time analytics, integration capabilities, or automated feedback collection.
Top 10 Customer Experience Tools
There are quite a few options if you’re looking for the best customer experience tools. Below, we’ve picked the top 10 options based on their popularity and capabilities. Check them out!
1. Marvin
Marvin is the perfect assistant for anyone doing qualitative user experience research. With built-in AI, our tool automates and improves data collection, organization, and analysis.
Here’s what it can do:
- Transcribe customer interviews in real-time in 40+ languages.
- Generate time-stamped notes for easy reference later.
- Summarize research and spot patterns.
- Build searchable repositories of all your research data.
- Create video clips, highlight reels, and detailed reports.
- Ensure HIPAA, GDPR, and SOC2 compliance.
- Apply privacy filters and remove personal data from interviews.
- Easily integrate with other popular tools like Google Docs, Notion, Asana, Miro, Confluence, Figma, and Jira Software.
Wouldn’t you like to never again worry about missing important details during customer interviews? Or having to spend hours transcribing and organizing notes?
Marvin does all the tedious work so you can focus on the actual interactions and better understand your customers. Book a demo today and see what it’s like to streamline your research process for more impactful decisions without effort.
2. Hotjar
As a platform that specializes in digital experience insights, Hotjar provides sophisticated audience details. It tells where website visitors get stuck or confused, clicking repeatedly, or what areas grab attention and make visitors spend the most time.
By showing how your customers interact with your website, it guides you on how to update it to make their experience smoother and more enjoyable.
Below are some of the most relevant Hotjar features in terms of user experience:
- Visualize user behavior with heatmaps.
- Capture session recordings to spot trends and issues.
- Collect feedback with on-site surveys.
- Analyze conversion flows with funnels.
- Display feedback widgets for real-time user insights.
- Integrate seamlessly with tools like Google Analytics and Slack.
3. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a powerful tool for analyzing user behavior on web and mobile apps. It focuses on understanding conversion, engagement, and retention.
So, it uses the data it analyzes to identify early signs of customer churn and improve conversion rates by removing friction points.
Here’s what Mixpanel can do:
- Track user paths to conversions and identify friction points.
- Monitor in-app user behavior and engagement stages.
- Analyze retention rates to spot early signs of customer churn.
- Automate lead scoring and personalized messaging.
- Integrate with analytics tools like Hotjar for deeper insights.
4. Hubspot
If you’re looking for a platform rather than just one tool, HubSpot offers you a robust solution. This popular AI-powered customer platform is packed with tools for conversation management, customizable feedback surveys, and customer portals.
Businesses that use HubSpot become more effective at market research and analyzing feedback. Because it’s an omnichannel customer experience software, it enables you to deliver consistent and high-quality service across multiple customer interaction channels.
With HubSpot, you can:
- Manage conversations via email, live chat, Facebook Messenger, etc.
- Create customizable feedback surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES.
- Offer secure customer portals for self-service.
- Analyze feedback to understand customer needs.
- Integrate with CRM for deeper insights.
5. Qualtrics
Here’s another CX tool with AI power. Qualtrics uses predictive intelligence, machine learning, and natural language processing to collect feedback and generate actionable insights.
With this survey software, you get proactive recommendations to avoid mistakes and continuously improve your customers’ experiences.
It can do the following:
- Collect feedback via surveys, social media, and IoT.
- Use AI to predict potential issues before they arise.
- Provide actionable suggestions to improve customer experience.
- Identify patterns and trends in customer behavior.
- Integrate with various platforms for seamless data flow.
6. Talkwalker
Recently acquired by Hootsuite, Talkwalker is a social listening CX tool that can help you build stronger marketing strategies and drive loyalty and sales.
When you work with this consumer intelligence platform that monitors your brand on social media, you get a full picture of what consumers think about you. This AI-powered tool can even detect brand mentions in actual images and videos, not just by looking at their descriptive texts.
Some of its capabilities are:
- Monitor conversations from 30 social networks in 187 languages.
- Measure brand performance and build PR strategies.
- Compare performance against competitors and industry standards.
- Manage reputation and mitigate crises effectively.
7. Productboard
This one stands out from all the other options because it’s a platform for product roadmap planning. Still, the end goal of using Productboard is to gain feedback and insights that will show you which changes will have the biggest impact on user experience.
Here are some of Productboard’s main features that enable you to build the products your customers truly want:
- Centralize feedback from multiple sources.
- Build and manage product roadmaps.
- Prioritize features based on customer needs.
- Align your team around shared goals.
- Integrate with tools like Jira, Trello, and Slack.
8. Outfunnel
Outfunnel is a versatile tool that boosts marketing and sales through real-time visitor tracking and automated lead scoring. It provides valuable data on how customers behave on your website, helping you tailor your engagement strategies.
Here’s how you can use Outfunnel for user research:
- Track visitor activity in real-time.
- Automatically score leads based on behavior.
- Record detailed web visit histories.
- Set up personalized email campaigns triggered by visitor actions.
- Seamlessly integrate with CRM and marketing tools.
9. Podium
As a solid messaging platform, Podium makes staying in touch with customers and quickly solving their issues simple. It allows you to get feedback through text messages and manage your reviews easily, boosting overall customer satisfaction.
Here’s precisely what you can do with Podium:
- Send and receive text feedback from customers.
- Collect and manage reviews from different sites.
- Keep all communication and purchase history in one place.
- Share customer info with your team for better service.
- Offer support across multiple channels.
10. Adobe Experience Manager
Even though it’s focused on content, Adobe Experience Manager can significantly improve customer experience by guiding you to create the best possible content.
Want to produce the type of content your audience is looking for and excited to read, tailored to their specific needs? This tool will help you do that and make your customers’ interactions with the brand more enjoyable.
Use Adobe Experience Manager to:
- Create and manage content easily.
- Provide SEO recommendations to improve visibility.
- Personalize content for each customer.
- Enable team collaboration on content projects.
- Integrate with other Adobe Creative Cloud apps.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Ready to wow your customers with an improved experience? Check out these customer experience applications FAQs before you act:
What is a Customer Experience Platform?
A Customer Experience Platform (CXP) is software that integrates multiple tools and functionalities. It offers an all-in-one system for managing various CX activities such as customer data integration, feedback analysis, customer journey mapping, and more.
Platforms provide a holistic approach to managing the entire customer experience lifecycle.
What are the 3 Main Components of Customer Experience?
Understanding the following three key components of customer experience will help you deliver exceptional service and foster loyalty:
- Customer journey: Reflects the customers’ path from learning about a product to purchasing and using it.
- Touchpoints: Define the points where customers interact with your brand, such as online, in-store, or on social media.
- Quality of the experience: Ensures that every interaction is positive and meets customer expectations, contributing to overall satisfaction.
CX vs. CRM – What is the Difference?
Customer Experience (CX) uses customer feedback to guide improvements in the customer experience.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) covers a business’s entire process of interacting with customers across all touchpoints, focusing on data collection and operations that manage relationships efficiently.
Conclusion
Choosing the right customer experience tool can transform your business, leading to happier, more loyal customers.
Remember, the best tool will align with your goals, be easy to use, scalable, and integrate seamlessly with your existing systems.
Want to make impactful decisions easily and watch your customer satisfaction soar? Use Marvin, our smart AI research assistant, to centralize all your customer data, making it searchable and shareable across teams.
Create an account with Marvin today! Your team will appreciate the simplified workflows and actionable insights. Equally important, your customers will be happy, and so will your bottom line.
