19 must-have CX tools for every business

Improving and enhancing the customer experience should be the goal of every business. 

Regardless of industry, a business that prioritizes the customer experience is setting itself up to earn more revenue and build its brand profile. 

That’s where customer experience (CX) tools come in. These tools enable your business to improve and monitor customer interactions effectively. 

They can help you take care of your customers while empowering employees to engage confidently with product and service users.

The customer journey can be complex and multi-faceted. However, with the right customer experience tools, you can find new ways to amaze those who build your bottom line.

CX tools are software a business can use to interact with its customers throughout their journey. They take various forms, from survey and feedback tools to analytics platforms and onboarding software. 

While CX tools can vary widely, they all aim to enhance your customer experience.

Customer experience tools are different. They may be broad in their CX capabilities or focus on a specific aspect of the customer experience. 

While they share the same goal of helping you serve your customers better, some are more suitable for certain businesses.

When selecting the right CX tool, consider your overarching objective and how you can achieve your business’s unique goals. 

Seeking deeper insights into analytics? Want to pinpoint the products that resonate most with your customers? Prioritize tools that emphasize web tracking and analytics rather than treating them as secondary features. 

Additionally, consider the size of your team. If you choose tools requiring extensive hands-on interaction and management, ensure your team can handle these demands. 

You can also opt for intuitive tools that require minimal ongoing interaction. Some tools are suitable for teams of all sizes, including small to mid-sized groups.

Deciding on the right customer experience tool or tools is challenging. It requires a deep knowledge of your team's processes and capabilities. You also need a clear vision of your business goals and aspirations. 

However, the right tools are well worth the investment. They can increase customer loyalty, convert more leads, and retain current customers. 

The tools outlined below can guide you through every customer experience stage, from onboarding to service.

Analyzing user behavior on your website can help you optimize the user experience. 

Web tracking and analytics tools can reveal how long users spend on each page of your site, how much time they spend on your site in general, and what pages attract the most traffic.

Google Analytics

One of the original web tracking and analytics tools, Google Analytics is still a standard for enhancing customer experience. 

Google Analytics offers the fascinating Behavior Flow tool. Its graphic shows how users move through your site and where they bounce off. 

It also features intuitive dashboards so you can see how well your optimization efforts are working and how user behavior is actively developing. 

Google Analytics is also free, making it an excellent choice for teams and organizations with little to no budget for web tracking.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a web analytics software for mobile and web applications. 

It improves the customer experience by analyzing retention analysis results to identify early signs of customer churn. This allows you to address customer experience issues before you experience any losses.

With Mixpanel, you can see users' paths to conversions, improve conversion rates, monitor in-app user behavior, and examine retention analytics to address groups with signs of churn. 

Mixpanel is free for up to 100,000 monthly tracked users, with more advanced features available with paid plans.

Google Marketing Platform

Google Marketing Platform, formerly Google Optimize, is a unified advertising and analytics platform that promises smarter marketing and enhanced results. 

Through Google Marketing Platform, you can analyze app and site analytics, drive better marketing results, and get a complete view of all your digital marketing campaigns. 

Access to Google Marketing Platform also connects you to Google's best-in-class customer support team. You’ll also receive educational benefits, such as free webinars and articles about supercharging your marketing content.

It effortlessly integrates with all other Google solutions, including Google Ad Manager and Google Cloud. 

Google Marketing Platform is free to use. Companies that want to invest in advertising can use Google's other web analytics solutions, including Google Ad Manager.

Outfunnel

Outfunnel’s web tracking is intuitive and detailed. Its real-time visitor feed allows you to see who's navigating your site. 

Outfunnel automatically records site visits, triggering the software to score visitors based on their website behavior. You can use these scores to set up and send personalized emails.

The detailed insights from Outfunnel can benefit every stage of the customer journey beyond onboarding and acquisition. 

You can use Outfunnel's analytics to stay in touch with customers over time, helping you measure the success of marketing campaigns and sales outreach efforts. 

Outfunnel is effective but expensive. Notably, there's no free plan. The Starter plan includes basic web tracking, and you need to upgrade to access email marketing and other advanced features.

Looking to better understand how customers interact with your products? 

Product experience insights tools can help you make informed decisions about optimizing your product. These tools can also empower your teams to rally around a common goal, working to improve the customer experience and your products and services.

Hotjar

Hotjar is a digital experience insights platform that empowers you to understand customer behavior with various intuitive features. 

Some features you can use to enhance customer experience include: 

• Heatmaps for visualizing user behavior

• A variety of survey templates for capturing product feedback from users

• An interactive feedback widget so customers can let you know what they love about your website and what they would change

Hotjar offers popular integrations to assist with automating workflows. This can complement your team's efficiency goals and save you time. 

While Hotjar offers a free plan, you need to sign up for one of the product's upgraded pricing models for the most comprehensive insights and analytics.

Productboard

If you're planning your next product launch or trying to refine an existing product, Productboard can assist. 

This product management platform consolidates customer feedback from multiple sources, builds roadmaps, and guides you in making data-backed decisions.

Productboard boasts a feedback management feature that harnesses the power of predictive AI and a helpful customer service team that can assist with training and implementation. 

While Productboard offers a 15-day free trial to see if the product is right for you, you need to sign up for a paid plan to get the most of the analytics and insights.

Maze

Maze is a product experience product that scales customer insights and conducts product research. It offers targeted reach campaigns, allowing you to send messages to specific participant databases, along with automated reporting and seamless integrations.

Maze is a popular method for tackling usability tests, validating concepts, and leveraging user feedback to improve products and services. 

You can try out Maze's free plan to get started. However, for the most in-depth insights, you need a paid plan starting at $75 per month.

Dovetail

Unlock the potential of customer insights and analyze data with Dovetail’s powerful software. 

Dovetail gives you the tools to analyze customer feedback, manage and share data, and build products that surpass expectations. 

A few benefits include: 

• The ability to store research in one place

• Access a wide variety of templates

• Integrations to many existing tools, including Slack and Notion

• A powerful knowledge center with articles and training that can help you optimize your products and services

Dovetail's industry experts regularly provide updates on everything from the latest customer service innovations to groundbreaking developments in AI technology.

Dovetail is user-friendly and supremely safe, with impeccable security and compliance features to put your mind at ease. 

Whether you're looking to improve the quality of your existing product or build something new and exciting, Dovetail can help. 

You can get started with Dovetail for free here.

One of the most vital stages in the customer journey is onboarding. 

Onboarding a customer is their first step into a product experience. It can pave the way for many more successful interactions or leave the customer with a bad taste in their mouth. 

Choose your customer onboarding software carefully and consider all the benefits and drawbacks before committing to any product.

Whatfix

Looking for digital adoption software that boasts exciting features like personalized user onboarding experiences? 

Whatfix improves the customer experience while offering insights to your team. It provides centralized training and resources to your team while offering customized packages that scale to your business's needs.

Whatfix's in-app messaging collects real-time user feedback. The bespoke dashboard's in-depth behavior analytics give helpful information about how customers interact with your product features. 

Whatfix can be pricey since packages are custom-built for each business, but there is a free trial so you and your team can see if it’s right for you.

Userpilot

Getting new customers up to speed on your products and services can be time-consuming and often frustrating for those customers. Many users don't have time to spend on the phone, while others can find themselves confused by guides and diagrams. 

Circumvent the stress of the onboarding process with Userpilot. This software easily onboards new users through personalized experiences and interactive walkthroughs. It also helps existing users discover and use new features.

Along the way, you can track customer progress, understand user behavior trends, and generate custom reports so you can refine and improve your products. 

Userpilot scales to your needs, and pricing depends on which specific features you add to your subscription package.

Walnut

Walnut is demo creation software designed to help customers understand and love your product from the outset. It’s ideal for remote teams and offers software demo insights that can be directly traced in your CRM. 

Additionally, Walnut can help you create product demos embedded directly on your website, empowering new users to discover the product independently. 

Walnut offers a full-funnel demo experience, and tailor-made plans are available upon request. 

Appcues

Appcues helps you launch onboarding experiences in minutes rather than days. 

With Appcues, you can create interactive in-app walkthroughs for new users, easily announce new features to existing users who have yet to try them, and run targeted in-app surveys. 

These intuitive features help you send the right message to the customers who need it rather than sending mass campaigns to customers who might not be interested in that information.

Appcues pricing depends on the number of monthly users on your subscription. The software's basic tools, including surveys and onboarding assistance, are available at all subscription levels.

Scribe

Most products have a learning curve. Customers who want to master these products often call company service teams, which can lead to hours spent educating those customers. 

Scribe anticipates this need, generating visual, step-by-step guides for any process. You can customize your product guides, add personalization before sharing them, and assist customers before they become frustrated with a new product or feature. 

Scribe's basic features are free. However, you must sign up for a paid plan to access the software's integrations or use other advanced features.

Great customer service should be at the forefront of every strategy and business decision. 

Serving your customers when they need assistance or have a question is a priority. However, it can be challenging, especially with product launches, sales and marketing campaigns to execute, and ongoing growth demands. 

These customer service tools can help you deliver excellent customer service every time.

Document360

Document360 is an AI-powered knowledge base for customers and teams. It offers a self-service customer portal where customers can educate themselves about your products.

This software also boasts a full suite of integrations, so you can connect it with your existing customer service tools. 

Document360 can handle the migration between your existing knowledge base platform to save your team time and resources. 

This customer service tool offers a free plan. For advanced features, you need the paid plan.

Intercom

Intercom can help you unify every aspect of the customer journey through digital engagement tools like an AI chatbot and live support agents. 

With Intercom, you can manage all your customer interactions in one place. This makes it easy to analyze issues and create a consistent user experience. 

It also relieves some of the pressure on your customer service agents by diversifying interaction methods and keeping customers satisfied. 

Intercom offers various pricing models, with plans split by goal. There’s also an all-in-one option for businesses that want to test the waters.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk handles customer interactions with ease, whether that’s customer conversions or ensuring support tickets arrive in the correct inbox. 

With Freshdesk, you can scale support experiences in one platform. A combination of live chat and chatbots instantly handles requests. Freshdesk empowers your customer service agents to move quickly and efficiently, tackling support tickets and optimizing workloads. 

This customer experience tool is free for up to 10 agents, with paid plans for larger teams.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a comprehensive customer experience platform that can scale to almost any business size. It’s one of the most popular tools on the market. 

The tool’s conversational support meets your customers where they are, whether through text messages or social media. Its unified contact center makes it easy for your team members to manage support tickets. Zendesk is powerful and thorough.

Zendesk might not be accessible for every team, though. As one of the biggest customer experience platforms, Zendesk is expensive. Pricing starts at around $49 per agent per month. 

Smaller businesses and start-ups might balk at the price, but it's worth considering for those who want to completely control the customer experience.

SuperOffice Service

SuperOffice Service is one platform designed to handle various customer service needs, from queries to product concerns. 

SuperOffice Service offers a mix of live support and automation and features a self-service portal where customers can learn about your products and services. 

Fully equipped with intuitive dashboards and detailed data insights, SuperOffice Service can assist in streamlining the customer service experience even as it guides you in improving your offerings.

Pricing is flexible, and you can mix and match features to suit the needs of your business.

HubSpot

An end-to-end CRM platform that easily integrates with HubSpot's other offerings, the software's customer service option provides features such as: 

• A self-serve knowledge base

• Advanced automation and reporting

• An integrated call center platform

• Partly automated customer service

With thorough insights and a detailed dashboard, you can turn the analytics you receive into actionable changes for your business, better supporting your customers at every stage of their journey.

Four elements comprise customer experience: Product, price, brand, and service. 

Most customers have to be satisfied with all four elements to have a successful experience with a company. 

For overall customer experience (CX), a happy customer indicates a positive CX and a negative CX produces unhappy or dissatisfied customers. 

Businesses should consider every aspect of the customer experience at all stages, from the initial outreach and onboarding to customer service interactions.

Customer experience (CX) aims to create positive customer experiences, while Customer relationship management (CRM) focuses on managing customer interactions. 

Both elements are important for creating unified customer service experiences within your organization.