Customer satisfaction is one of the biggest driving factors for eCommerce business growth today. Happy and loyal customers can virtually skyrocket your sales and boost profitability—that explains why retaining 5% of your customers can increase your profits by 25-95%.
While discount coupons and exclusive offers are one way of nudging buyers to shop more, these strategies are not sustainable when scaling your eCommerce business.
However, consumer-focused Customer Experience (CX) can help you take your business to the next level and maximize customer retention.
Think of easily accessible support, personalized communication, and quick response time—all the critical pieces of the CX puzzle which help create customer delight. With customer experience software, you can easily implement your CX strategy, automate the time-consuming aspects of the process and unearth rich data to guide your decisions further.
This guide will walk you through all the reasons why you need CX software, along with eight options to help you choose the best one.
What is CX software?
At its core, customer experience defines how a business interacts with its customers. It factors a brand's customer relationship, customer service, and customer feedback to present a comprehensive picture of how a buyer perceives it.
A CX software analyzes customer interaction at every touchpoint and tracks their journey from start to finish. Such a software essentially helps you assess customer behavior, delivers personalized experiences, and identifies the possibility of churn
In fulfilling these specific goals, CX solutions differ from customer service software—which is dedicated to resolving buyer queries and offering support. CX software also sets itself apart from customer loyalty software that focuses only on rewarding loyal or repeat buyers.
Benefits of using CX software
Let’s look at some other benefits offered by customer experience softwares:
- Increased customer lifetime value (CLV): CX software helps build strong relationships with each buyer. This personal rapport can win you their loyalty, which translates to repeat and high-value purchases.
- Map out personalized customer journeys: CX solutions collect and combine a buyer’s feedback and preferences from all past purchases to personalize your communication with them. You can tailor your communication from the first contact and throughout their post-purchase experience.
- Minimize churn with better issue resolution: A good CX software identifies the possibility of customer churn through predictive analytics. It also helps your support team resolve buyer queries more efficiently and effectively.
- Improved customer engagement: Analytical CX teams create omnichannel experiences to interact with a buyer at every possible touchpoint. This proactive communication keeps your customers engaged and eager to buy.
The best CX software options for 2022
Grubhub relied on its well-defined CX strategy to streamline its operations in the backdrop of the 2020 pandemic. The food chain minimized its number of contacts per order and leveraged automated workflows to optimize its customer experience.
If you want to replicate Grubhub’s success for your business, here are eight of the best CX software that you can use. Let’s take a closer look at each one.
1. Zendesk
Zendesk is an end-to-end customer experience software equipped with unique features to offer support at every phase of your buyer journey. Its flexible and powerful messaging functionality offers conversational experiences and maximum connectivity. You can also use its AI-powered bots to add a dash of personalization for every context.
One of the most significant benefits of using Zendesk is its user-friendly agent workspace. It comes equipped with collaboration and intelligence tools for optimum productivity. On top of that, the unified customer view brings all the data for a buyer in a single dashboard.
With Zendesk’s robust reporting framework, you’ll also enjoy complete control over relevant analytics for your CX strategy.
While the tool does come with a host of benefits, you might find it challenging to integrate the Zendesk API into your setup. It also lacks extensive customization options for which you have to figure out some workarounds.
Pricing: Support at $19, Suite Team at $49, Suite Growth at $79, and Suite Pro at $99—all billed annually.
2. Blueprint
Blueprint is a conversational CRM solution that helps businesses tap into the power of messaging to boost customer engagement. The feature-packed tool lets you maintain conversations with your buyers, collect quality feedback, offer fast support, and predict customer churn.
You can integrate Blueprint into your Shopify store and create individual customer profiles to personalize all communication. Besides, one of the tool's biggest selling points is its intelligent cross-selling and replenishment flows. You can use these to maximize your customer lifetime value and reduce your acquisition expenditure.
Using Blueprint can eliminate all the guesswork in your CX strategy. The software will collect and analyze feedback to present actionable insights for improving your customer experience.
Pricing: Growth at $127/month, Performance at $320/month—all billed annually
3. Gorgias
Gorgias is a customer support platform primarily focused on centralizing customer interactions to upgrade your CX operations. Equipped with a customizable interface, the tool offers a key functionality of automated support and ticket management capabilities. You can also leverage its reporting feature to assess your performance and iterate your game plan.
A big plus point for Gorgias is the ease of integrating it with any other tool or platform. Given its focus on automation, the tool allows you to create template responses and deliver low-touch support for a quick resolution. This means you can effortlessly deal with bigger volumes of messages and emails at every touchpoint.
One of the few downsides of using Gorgias is that some integrations can be buggy and hamper performance. You might also miss out on some tickets because of the tool’s filtering.
Pricing: Basic at $60/month, Pro at $300/month, Advanced at $750/month—all billed annually
4. Talkdesk
Talkdesk offers automation-driven CX solutions to increase customer satisfaction and profitability for businesses like yours. The tool helps brands streamline their CX processes through features like self-service, omnichannel engagement, and analytics. You can use this contact center platform to establish internal communication channels and interact with your customers.
This cloud-native platform can beef up your CX framework with enterprise-class solutions—like intelligent routing, speech analytics, outbound engagement, and an intuitive interface. You can also expand Talkdesk’s functionality by integrating it with 60 pre-built integrations.
Alongside its pros, you might have to struggle with its slow processing of new requests and reports. The tool also crashes at times and can break your flow. The limited reporting filters are another major con.
Pricing: Essentials at $75/month, Elevate at $95/month, Elite at $125/month—all billed annually
5. Qualaroo
Qualaroo is a customer feedback software to collect meaningful insights for your CX strategy. The tool helps you source feedback for your website, products, and processes through multiple channels—including email surveys, exit-intent forms, and AI sentiment analysis. It consolidates dynamic insights to let you make data-backed decisions.
The Qualaroo Nudge™ technology is a one-of-a-kind feature that measures customer satisfaction and assesses buyer experience through relevant questions. This versatile platform also tells you about the areas of optimization for honing your customer experience from a buyer’s website visit.
With all the benefits Qualaroo offers, it also has some downsides—like the lack of an option to export data in different formats. It also has limited automation capabilities and doesn’t prove so productive for conversational surveys.
Pricing: Essentials at $80/Month, Premium at $160/Month—all billed annually
6. Picreel
Picreel is a pop-up management software with advanced targeting and automated control capabilities to improve your website customer experience. The software monitors user behavior and impressions on your website before triggering a compelling pop-up at the best time.
The tool fuels your conversion rate by engaging with your website visitors. It segments customers, sends personalized messages, and shares discount coupons, among other things. You can also A/B test different website elements and improve your performance through Picreel's detailed reports.
The only few issues you might face are related to occasional glitches in the dashboard and configuration challenges.
Pricing: Starter at $14/month, Basic at $52/month, Plus at $112/month, Pro at $299/month—all billed annually
7. NICE Satmetrix
NICE Satmetrix is a CX management software for collecting feedback, analyzing all the data, and closing the loop. It's also a Voice of the Customer (VOC) solution to deliver dynamic and seamless omnichannel experiences.
Satmetrix essentially sums up your customer feedback from all channels and leverages AI to produce high-value performance reports and bring tangible results. Its VOC functionality is crucial to improving your standard customer journey.
Even with all these pros, some users find Satmetrix’s interface cluttered. You might also face issues related to platform stability and go through a relatively steeper learning curve to be thorough with the tool.
Pricing: not disclosed
8. UserZoom
UserZoom is a UX research tool that helps design flawless digital experiences. The software encourages you to make customer-centric decisions, primarily for your website UX. You can perform wide-ranging research and collect all your insights on a single platform. The tool also lets you conduct surveys from its 120M-large participant list.
UserZoom is almost entirely centered around your website performance. Its suite of features—like click testing, live intercept, and usability testing—can work wonders for improving your customer experience.
A few cons like clunky UI features and lack of options to save an existing survey can downplay UserZoom’s utility.
Pricing: not disclosed
Use CX software to delight your customers
Designing and improving your customer experience goes a long way in driving sales and multiplying your profits. With CX software, you're better prepared to identify gaps in your existing customer journey, track critical KPIs, and iterate your strategy to provide an excellent shopping experience.
Looking to double down on conversational experiences for your buyers? Blueprint can boost your customer experience strategy with SMS marketing campaigns. Book a call to learn how!
