Top 10 Customer Engagement Tools & Software in 2022

For a business to survive in today’s competitive world it has to put customer engagement at the top of its list of priorities. There are lots of ways you can keep customers engaged but if you want to deliver a seamless customer experience, it’s best to turn to one of the many customer engagement platforms, tools, or software.

With the right technology solutions on your side, you can better create and manage customer experiences, draw your customers closer to your brand, and deliver the ultimate customer experience. 

If you want to improve customer engagement, there are lots of tools you can use. However, choosing the right one is essential if you want to deliver what the customer expects.    

What Are Customer Engagement Tools?

Customer engagement tools help a business engage, acquire, support and ultimately keep their customers.

The focus of this type of digital customer collaboration solution is to improve communication and interaction with customers so that they feel their experience with your business is more personalized, relevant, and dynamic. 

The solutions available are almost as wide-ranging as the different interactions a business can have with its customers. Options include customer relationship management, customer feedback, customer service, live chat, and marketing automation software. 

10 Essential Tools and Software for Customer Engagement in 2022

If you want to connect with your customers in the best possible way, consider using one or more of the following customer engagement solutions. 

1. Customer Onboarding Tools

A good customer journey starts with an effective onboarding strategy. Good onboarding also happens to be an important milestone in customer engagement.

When your onboarding is good, it means your users are carefully guided from first contact to the eventual “Aha!” moment. There are lots of different tools you can use to help them reach that light bulb moment, such as emails, checklists, interactive walkthroughs, and video tutorials. 

With so many balls to juggle, customer onboarding tools can make light of the process.   

Recommended tool: eWebinar

eWebinar is a tool you can use to host video presentations, virtual training, and webinars, without actually having to be present. What happens is you record a session once and then upload it as a video and invite customers to watch it when they’re available. 

One of eWebinar’s more unique features is the live chat option. Attendees can interact and ask questions. Answers can be given in real-time or emailed afterward. 

2. Surveys

Surveys help businesses measure and track many different aspects but are most commonly used to measure the impact services and products have on the customer base. 

A feedback tool builds, creates, and distributes customer surveys and helps you understand how you might be able to improve your service or product, identify customers that are unhappy, and reduce customer churn. 

Surveys help improve customer engagement because:

• They help a business learn more about their customers’ needs
• They highlight customer complaints and issues.
• Sharing survey results with customers shows that you care about their opinions and provides a platform where they can engage.
• A feedback survey helps you gather customer feedback and gain a deeper insight into how they perceive your brand, services, and products. 

Recommended tool: SurveyMonkey

SurveyMonkey is one of the more popular online survey tools. It has wide-ranging features that include automated reports, permission controls, and tools for customization. 

It can be integrated with more than 100 plugins and apps, thereby streamlining and organizing customer data. 

3. Live Chats

For most businesses, their website is the most common engagement channel which makes live chat an important messaging platform. For many consumers, having their questions answered instantly is a worthwhile service. 

Live chat plays a crucial role in customer engagement because:

• Consumers can get an instant response, whether they’ve got support or sales concerns. 
• Live chat software allows the consumer to instantly connect with a support agent.
• Support agents are more effective because they can provide quicker and more effective solutions. 

Recommended tool: Hiver

Hiver’s live chat widget allows you to interact with your website visitors in real-time. The best part about it is that it works within Gmail. You can assign live chat messages to frontline agents, respond with custom-built chat templates and share chat transcripts with relevant team members without leaving your Gmail interface.

The widget can be customized to match your brand guidelines and the welcome message in the chatbox can also be tweaked based on the webpage the visitor is on. 

4. Chatbots

Chatbot support is something more and more businesses are coming to rely on. The most common use of chatbots is to automate customer support. 

Chatbots can improve customer engagement by providing immediate responses on a one-to-one basis. If a customer gets effective guidance, they are more likely to come back for more. 

Chatbots also enhance the user experience because they’re better able to handle emotional customers. If a customer feels their issues are being resolved as quickly as possible, they are going to feel happier. 

Recommended tool: ManyChat

ManyChat is a chatbot platform businesses can use to automate and combine SMS and Facebook Messenger. The ultimate goal is to engage the audience with Facebook’s marketing tools. Using a visual drag and drop system, users can connect messages and actions together. 

5. Email Marketing Tools

Emails are more reactive than proactive, but they still have a part to play in customer engagement. It is still the preferred method of communication for a large number of customers who contact a company’s customer support. 72% of customers still prefer to receive all business communication via email. 

Not only that, emails are also a very effective way for businesses to reach out to potential customers and leads. It becomes a particularly powerful engagement tool when the emails are personalized.

The reasons why emails are so effective when it comes to engaging customers are as follows:

• Emails can be made very personal and are an easy way for a business to deliver the most relevant content and offers to the consumer
• With an email campaign, a business can instantly distribute promotions and sales emails   

Recommended tool: Mailchimp

One of the more popular email marketing tools is Mailchimp. It’s easy to use thanks to the drag-and-drop email builder. Other features that make it user-friendly include autoresponders, simple analytics tracking, and the ability to segment contacts into groups. 

There are also many Mailchimp alternatives you can choose from.

6. Customer Analytics Tools

Analytics tools are very useful for getting an insight into what your customers might be looking for. These tools translate raw user behavior into insights that you can work with. In addition, they can generate reports so you can optimize your approach. 

If you combine customer analytics tools with an omnichannel contact center software it will provide support across various channels and allow you to track interactions in real-time. 

Customer analytics tools help to improve customer engagement by:

• Meeting your customers’ expectations. Based on the analytics reports, you can make sure your services meet their expectations.
• Proactively engaging customers. Analytics software gives you a clearer picture of the customer journey. Based on what you discover, you can help proactively and offer solutions that are personalized. 

Recommended tool: Google Analytics

Google Analytics is a very good entry-level tool you can use for tracking and monitoring overall website traffic. You’ll be able to find out where your visitors are coming from, what they choose to do, how long they stay, and when they leave. You can’t use it to follow individual users, but it does provide good aggregate customer data. 

7. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platforms

When you use a Customer Relationship Management Platform it allows a business to bring all its customer engagement strategies together and have them all in one place. 

CRM tools are the ultimate tool when it comes to customer engagement and can be used across a company, from sales teams to marketing teams and more.

Using a CRM tool, a business can find new customers, make them customers, and ultimately keep them. The most important feature of CRM is that it allows a business to combine various basic tools so that all employees can access customer data and have a platform they can use to reach them.  

Recommended tool: Zoho CRM

Zoho CRM is just one of a set of ZOHO tools available for businesses, all of which can be linked. However, the feature that makes this tool so exciting is the gamification UI. You can use Zoho CRM for the following:

• Email marketing
• Internal chat integration
• Social media integration
• Document storage
• Lead scoring
• Task management
• Mobile access
• Proposals and quotes

8. Social Media Channels

Social media is ingrained into our society and plays a vital role in the customer experience. Platforms are no longer just for ads and broadcasting news. Using social media, consumers can communicate with a company and there’s an opportunity to create a two-way conversation. 

Using social media, businesses can build communities, taking advantage of our need to share. The end result is content that people want to talk about and make comments on.

For B2B companies, the most commonly used social media channel is LinkedIn. For B2C companies, Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter tend to be the platform of choice. 

Social media channels help customer engagement by:

• Building a rapport with followers. It allows the customer to put a face to a name and reinforces a company’s image because you’re connecting on a personal level.
• Making your followers feel more special. You make them feel special by offering special promotions and deals.  

Recommended tool: Hootsuite

Hootsuite provides you with a social inbox that allows you to monitor and then respond to messages from a range of different networks. There is an option that makes setting permission levels possible and creating and assigning tasks quickly. 

9. Push Notifications

It’s a fine line to tread when you use push notifications as too many can become annoying and drive customers away. However, if you manage to be creative with your push notifications they can be very effective.

They allow you to stay in touch with your users, re-engage them, and offer an outstanding customer experience. You can use them to share information, promote sales, increase engagement, drive users to social networks, and provide customers with a unique experience. It’s also possible to track push notifications to check how they are performing.

The benefits of push notifications are as follows:

• Cost: There is no extra charge to the consumer for a push notification to a mobile phone.
• User control: Users can opt-in or out and have control over where and how they receive notifications.
• Risk reduction: They help reduce the risk of harassment and potential litigation.
• Engagement: Push notifications increase application engagement and improve retention rates.      

Recommended tool: Twilio

Twilio is a modern communication API that businesses can use to send SMS, WhatsApp, Video, Voice, email, and IoT. 

10. A/B Testing

A/B testing is also known as split testing and it’s a way of splitting an audience and testing a number of variations of a campaign or aspects of a customer journey. Take, for example, a piece of marketing content. You show version A to one half of your audience and version B to the other half. 

To run an A/B test, you need two different versions of one piece of content. There will be changes to one single variable. You then show these versions to two audiences of a similar size and analyze which performed better. 

You might choose to use A/B testing to see if moving a specific call-to-action button improves its click-through rate. On the other hand, you might want to find out if changing the color of the call-to-action button increases the click-through rate. 

Recommended tool: Optimizely

Optimizely is a tool you can use for experience optimization. It is primarily used for building and running A/B testing. It’s possible to create a variety of experiments for your web pages using various features that come with the service.

Options include custom templates, developer tools, custom targeting, a visual editor, APIs, and prioritizing audiences.  

Conclusion

Using one or more tools in this list you can identify customers you need to reach out to and when to plan that outreach. In addition, they will also help automate the process so that your customer engagement strategy is more efficient and effective.