Customer Experience Software

Customer experience (CX) software helps businesses understand and optimize the overall experience they offer. This includes customer sentiment and brand image. Understanding and managing customer experience can help boost sales and profitability. CX tools help achieve this by tracking every interaction throughout the customer lifecycle and providing actionable insights.

This guide will help you select the right customer experience management software for your business. Here is what we’ll cover:

• What is customer experience software?

• What are some common features of CX software?

• What are the benefits of customer experience software?

• What types of customer experience software are there?

• What are the trends in customer experience software?

• What is the cost of customer experience software?

• How do small and midsize businesses use customer experience software?

What is customer experience software?

Customer experience (CX) software helps businesses assess interactions throughout the customer lifecycle. These tools collect and process customer feedback to support real-time internal decision-making and improve overall CX strategy. Key CX software features include customer segmentation, feedback management, and sentiment analysis.

What are some common features of CX software?

• Customer feedback automation: Schedule automated customer feedback requests. Customer actions such as making a purchase, booking a service, or after requesting support trigger these requests.

• Case management: Flag negative feedback such as online reviews or social media posts and prioritize them for staff to address.

• Review management: Gain greater insight into your brand reputation and customer satisfaction. This feature allows users to post reviews across various platforms such as Google Business, Yelp, Facebook, etc.

• After-hours response: Ensure customers feel heard even during off-hours by setting up automated responses. This is useful for standard queries, reviews, comments, and other online posts targeted at/involving your business.

• Response templates: Use templates to speed up response time and ensure a standardized brand voice while responding to customer queries or grievances.

• Sentiment analysis: Understand the sentiment of customers toward your brand. Natural language processing (NLP), computational linguistics, and text analysis provide the insights.

What are the benefits of customer experience software?

• Deeper insights: CX software helps you gain a deeper understanding of your customers’ experience during their overall journey by collecting and organizing customer feedback. This gives you the opportunity to learn what’s working well and what isn't. You can then use this information to optimize your brand's CX.

• Faster resolution: These tools allow you to automate the grievance or query resolution process by setting up an automated workflow. Negative feedback, through social media, email, or any other touchpoint, triggers this workflow. These customer issues automatically go to your support team for timely intervention.

• Comprehensive view: CX tools provide a complete view of the customer journey by collating customer data. This CX data includes transactional, experiential, and operational data. It's collected across all touch points to help gain meaningful insights and boost customer satisfaction.

What types of customer experience software are there?

There are several types of customer experience tools. These tools can be industry specific or agnostic, and a part of a larger customer support software suite or sales and marketing tool. The two fundamental types of customer experience management software are:

• Customer experience software suite: These software bundles often include marketing, sales, CRM, customer lifecycle management, and campaign management tools. The tools included in the suite vary depending on the product. These suites cater to businesses with diverse needs who are looking to build an entire tech stack, rather than those who already have one.

• Standalone customer experience software solutions: These standalone tools are also known as plug-and-play or off-the-shelf solutions, and specifically cater to customer experience. These tools are better-suited for businesses with an existing tech stack and have a specific need to improve CX.

What are the trends in customer experience software?

• AI to improve customer service experience: Artificial intelligence can analyze customer data and offer insights. When collecting data from various customer touch points, it's possible to miss the bigger picture. Without this insight, the customer data you capture may only be the tip of the iceberg. AI can help you optimize customer experience by suggesting the best course of action.

• Blockchain to simplify loyalty rewards: Blockchain can improve loyalty programs and customer incentives. Instead of traditional reward systems that rely on coupons, codes, receipts, or cards, customers can receive the reward kr discount in a more convenient and streamlined way. For example, blockchain functionality can link a virtual token to an email. When a customer opens the email and clicks the link, the token is automatically credited to their account.

What is the cost of customer experience software?

Most products in the market are priced on a per-user, per-month basis and can be divided into three pricing tiers based on their starting price.

Price ranges*:

• $20 - $32

• $32 - $55

• $55+

*The pricing included is for the entry-level/lowest-priced offering found on vendor websites on July 28, 2021. These ranges correspond to the 25th, 75th, and 100th percentiles of pricing information gathered from vendor websites of sample products.

The above list summarizes pricing for the base plans of most products. An enterprise or premium product that is priced higher may include some additional features, such as customer segmentation or a knowledge base.

How do small and midsize businesses use customer experience software?

Customer experience management tools help businesses understand the impression their business leaves on customers throughout their journey. This helps businesses plan better strategies to improve their overall CX.

Businesses of different sizes have different approaches to CX management.

• Small businesses: Smaller businesses often choose channel or function-specific CX applications instead of full CX suites. For example, a small business may only need a tool to perform a text analysis function to monitor live chat or email interactions. Such specific tools help businesses understand and measure overall customer sentiment. Other small businesses might opt for a survey tool to gather feedback from customers by phone,  from emails, or through online self-service pages.

• Midsize businesses: Midsize businesses often look for customer experience tools that can monitor customer interactions in sales, marketing, and customer service. This provides insight into how customers are feeling about a business' product/service and can help identify internal inefficiencies that lead to poor CX.

Explore GetApp's Customer Focus resource hub to find out how to put your customers at the heart of your decision-making.

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Note: The applications selected in this article are examples to show a feature in context, and are not intended as endorsements or recommendations. They were obtained from sources believed to be reliable at the time of publication.