Best Customer Engagement Tools in 2025
In today’s fast-paced digital world, simply attracting visitors to your site isn’t enough. To truly thrive, you need to engage and nurture those visitors into loyal customers. To turn passive interactions into active, revenue-driving relationships, you need customer engagement tools.
But with so many options out there, how do you choose the right one for your business?
In this guide, we’ll cover everything you need to know about customer engagement tools. From why your business needs these solutions to how to choose the best one for your unique needs, plus an in-depth look at 8 top customer engagement platforms, you’ll have everything you need to drive success (and sales).
Need a tool that goes beyond customer engagement and streamlines every aspect of conversion rate optimization? Give Personizely a try — the first 14 days are on us!
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is the process of actively connecting with your customers to build lasting relationships. More than just answering questions or solving problems, it’s about creating exceptional customer experiences that make customers feel valued. Whether via email, social media platforms, live chat, or in-person, each touchpoint strengthens your brand’s connection with your audience.
For instance, a customer might engage with your brand by reading your blog, following your social media, or completing a survey. These key customer interactions shape the customer journey. Instead of pushing sales, you build trust by offering value through product updates, helpful emails, or casual social media exchanges. This approach fosters customer loyalty and encourages repeat business.
Effective engagement means understanding customer behavior, anticipating needs, and creating personalized experiences.
Types of customer engagement
Customer engagement comes in all shapes and forms, and its expressions can differ greatly depending on the type of business.
For instance, ecommerce businesses may focus more on website interactions and personalized email communications, while SaaS companies may emphasize in-app messaging or interactions through customer support teams.
Customer engagement takes many forms, from social media interactions to in-app messages
Regardless of the business type, they all share one key element—customer interactions across channels. To effectively engage customers at different stages of their buying journey, it’s crucial to understand the various types of interactions available:
- Social media interactions: Engaging customers through platforms like TikTok, Facebook, X, or Instagram. These interactions, such as comments, shares, and direct messages, offer a casual way to connect with your audience and build brand awareness.
- Email communications: Personalized emails, newsletters, and transactional messages are a direct line to your customers. Tailored content based on customer behavior makes these communications more relevant and impactful.
- Customer support interactions: Whether solving a problem, answering questions, or offering advice, customer support plays a huge role in building trust. Exceptional support turns frustrated customers into loyal ones.
- Website interactions: When customers browse your website—reading blogs, exploring product pages, or using live chat—they’re engaging with your brand. These moments are crucial for guiding them through the buying journey and ensuring a positive digital experience.
- Loyalty programs and rewards: Offering incentives like discounts, points, or exclusive deals to keep customers engaged and encourage repeat business. A well-crafted loyalty program strengthens customer loyalty and adds extra value.
- Community involvement: Building a sense of belonging through community forums, user groups, or events (like webinars). This creates a space for customers to connect with your brand and each other, fostering deeper engagement.
- In-app engagement: For digital products, this involves interactions within the app itself—prompting users, gathering feedback, or encouraging feature usage. These interactions help improve the user experience and encourage greater product adoption.
- Feedback and surveys: Actively seeking customer input through surveys, polls, or user feedback forms. These interactions provide valuable insights into customer satisfaction and needs while demonstrating that you value their opinions.
What is a customer engagement platform?
As we saw in the previous section, customer engagement spans many interactions across various communication channels—whether it’s social media, email, live chat, or customer support. Managing all of these touchpoints manually can quickly become overwhelming, and in today’s fast-paced digital world, it’s just not efficient.
This is where customer experience management tools come in. These tools are designed to help businesses manage and streamline all customer interactions, ensuring timely and relevant customer communication throughout the user journey.
A customer engagement platform is a suite of tools that allows businesses to manage, track, and optimize their customer interactions. By centralizing these processes, such platforms help ensure that every customer touchpoint is effectively handled, enhancing the overall customer experience.
6 types of customer engagement software
Depending on the specific needs of your business and the stages of the customer journey you’re focusing on, it’s possible to differentiate between several types of customer engagement solutions.
Depending on your business needs and processes, you might need one of the most popular types of customer engagement tools
Here’s a breakdown of the main categories:
- Customer engagement software for customer service teams: These are customer service tools like live chat, knowledge bases, helpdesk software, and AI chatbots designed to provide real-time support and resolve customer queries quickly. They’re essential tools for businesses looking to offer timely assistance and maintain high customer satisfaction.
- Customer engagement tools for social media interactions: Social media management platforms help businesses track, engage, and respond to customer comments and queries across various social platforms. These tools are key for effective social listening, managing customer communications and enhancing brand presence on social media.
- Customer feedback and survey tools: These tools allow businesses to collect user feedback, run surveys, and measure customer satisfaction. They provide valuable insights into customer experiences and help identify areas for improvement in products, services, and overall engagement.
- Automation and email marketing tools: These tools allow marketing teams to create and automate personalized email campaigns that engage customers throughout their buying journey. By targeting customers with relevant content, email marketing automation tools help nurture leads and strengthen customer relationships.
- Loyalty and rewards software: These tools help businesses reward customers for repeat purchases or engagement, fostering long-term loyalty. Loyalty programs incentivize customers to continue their relationship with the brand, strengthening retention and driving future sales.
The final category worth mentioning is omnichannel customer engagement software, which combines all of these features into one comprehensive suite. These platforms offer businesses a single platform to manage all customer interactions, giving a holistic view of customer behavior and enabling marketing teams to deliver consistent, personalized experiences across channels.
How do customer engagement tools work?
Customer engagement tools help businesses manage and automate interactions with their customer base across a wide range of touchpoints. Here's how they work:
- Data collection: These tools gather data from various channels like websites, social media, and support platforms. The data includes customer behaviors, preferences, and interactions, providing businesses with real-time insights into their customer base.
- Data segmentation: After collecting data, the tool segments customers based on behavior, demographics, and preferences. This enables businesses to tailor their marketing efforts and create personalized experiences for specific customer groups.
- Interaction management: Engagement tools automate responses and facilitate communication across channels, from personalized emails to live chat. This helps maintain continuous connections with customers, ensuring they receive timely and relevant content.
- Integration: These tools integrate with other systems, such as Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, to sync data across platforms. This makes it easier for businesses to consolidate their marketing efforts and provide consistent user experiences.
- AI-powered analytics: Using AI-powered analytics, these tools analyze customer interactions and behaviors to identify patterns. Businesses can use this advanced analytics to refine their strategies and optimize future engagement based on real-time insights.
The benefits of customer engagement software: Should you invest in customer engagement solutions?
If you're exploring customer engagement solutions, you're likely already aware of their potential. But let's delve into why investing in these tools is a strategic move, especially when backed by real-world data.
- Streamline conversations with customers: These tools centralize customer interactions across various channels, ensuring no conversation or query is missed.
- Increase efficiency of marketing and customer service teams: Automation features reduce the manual work involved in managing customer interactions, allowing teams to focus on higher-priority tasks.
- Boost customer retention rates: Engaged customers are more likely to be satisfied with their personalized customer experiences and stay loyal. Companies with strong omnichannel engagement retain an average of 89% of their customers. Additionally, companies report a retention increase of up to 30% after implementing AI-driven engagement tools.
- Improve feature adoption: Higher feature adoption rates are directly linked to better customer retention. Valuable tools that monitor and encourage feature usage can help users realize the full value of your product, leading to increased satisfaction and loyalty.
- Enhance customer lifetime value: Customer engagement software boosts LTV by personalizing interactions based on customer behavior, which increases repeat purchases and spending. In fact, personalized engagement can lead to a 5 to 8 times higher return on investment in marketing efforts.
- Gain real-time insights into user behavior: Real-time analytics offered by customer experience management tools enable businesses to track and analyze customer interactions, providing valuable insights that inform decision-making and strategy.
All in all, customer engagement software is essential for improving conversion rates and driving sales. By streamlining communication, personalizing experiences, and providing real-time insights, these essential tools help businesses retain customers, increase feature adoption, and enhance lifetime value. Ultimately, they create a more efficient path to higher conversions and increased revenue.
Key features of customer engagement software
The ideal set of features for customer engagement software really depends on your business needs. We'll dive into how to choose the best solution for your business later in the article. But there are certain functionalities universally recognized as essential for any great customer engagement tool. These advanced features help businesses improve customer engagement efforts and drive conversion rates.
Personalization
Personalization is a must for modern customer engagement. The ability to tailor communications based on customer data—whether it’s their browsing behavior, purchase history, or preferences—creates more relevant, meaningful experiences.
However, according to a study by Epsilon, 76% of consumers think negatively of the brands that include inaccurate personalized messages in their advertising and communications. So, your software needs to excel at creating personalized interactions to increase customer satisfaction and, therefore, conversion rates. Customers are more likely to convert when they feel a brand understands their needs and offers products or services that resonate with them.
Automation
Campaign automation is another key feature of customer engagement software. Automating repetitive tasks like email follow-ups, chat responses, or customer onboarding saves time and ensures consistency in communication.
Automation allows businesses to engage customers at the right time without manual effort, helping move customers through the sales funnel more efficiently, boosting conversion rates, and reducing the risk of losing leads.
Integration capabilities
Customer engagement software should easily integrate with your existing tools—whether it’s your CRM, eCommerce platform, or Google Analytics. Integration ensures that all your systems are working in harmony, allowing for a more seamless experience across all customer touchpoints.
With integrated data, businesses can easily access actionable insights from various platforms, optimizing customer engagement efforts and streamlining workflows.
Multichannel support
To truly engage customers across their journey, multichannel support is essential. Great customer engagement software allows businesses to interact with customers across a wide range of touchpoints—web, social media, email, and even in-store.
Multichannel engagement ensures a consistent and personalized experience, which is crucial for increasing conversion rates. Whether customers engage on your website or through social media, multichannel support ensures you’re meeting them where they are.
Analytics and reporting
Predictive analytics and reporting give businesses the tools to measure the effectiveness of their engagement efforts. Detailed insights into customer behavior, engagement, and satisfaction help inform strategy and identify areas for improvement. Understanding what’s working and what’s not allows businesses to refine their approach, optimize customer journeys, and ultimately increase conversion rates. By leveraging actionable insights, companies can make data-driven decisions that lead to better outcomes.
Customer segmentation
Advanced segmentation allows businesses to group customers based on behavior, demographics, or purchase history. By segmenting your audience, you can tailor campaigns to specific groups, ensuring relevance and increasing the likelihood of conversion. For example, sending targeted offers to high-value customers or engaging new visitors with personalized content can improve engagement and drive more sales.
Content management
While not a must-have but rather an additional feature, an effective customer engagement tool should also include content management capabilities, allowing businesses to create, manage, and distribute content across multiple channels. Whether it’s personalized emails, blogs, or social media posts, having a centralized system to manage content streamlines your efforts and ensures consistency.
How to choose the right customer engagement platform for your business?
Even with a list of must-have features, choosing the right customer engagement platform isn’t as simple as signing up for the first tool that checks all the boxes.
The market for customer engagement solutions is vast and continues to grow rapidly. In fact, the Customer Engagement Solutions Market size is estimated to reach USD 40.78 billion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 10.97%. So, there will definitely be at least a few options to choose from.
But even more importantly, just because a tool offers all the features you need, doesn’t mean it’s the best fit for your business. The software you choose must align with your workflows and support your specific goals.
Here’s a step-by-step process for choosing the right platform for your business:
- Identify your needs: Determine what specific goals you want to achieve with your customer engagement tools, such as increasing retention, improving conversion rates, or managing customer reviews more effectively.
- Evaluate the range of features: Refer to the key features discussed earlier and assess which platform offers the advanced features that meet your needs.
- Shortlist platforms: Create a list of customer engagement tools that offer the features you need. Review customer testimonials and product reviews to gauge how well each platform works for businesses like yours.
- Test the software: Take advantage of free trials or demos to test the tool’s capabilities. Ensure it suits your business's workflows and integrates well with your existing systems, especially for e-commerce businesses.
- Assess customer support and resources: Look for platforms that provide solid support and comprehensive onboarding resources to help your team get started quickly.
- Review pricing structure: Make sure the pricing structure fits within your business's budget. Some platforms offer flexible pricing based on usage, while others might have more limited features within lower-tier plans.
Key considerations when choosing a customer engagement platform
Here's a list of things to consider when choosing the software for your business.
Business size
Does the tool suit your business size? Some platforms are tailored for ecommerce businesses with extensive customer bases, while others offer limited features that may be better for small businesses or startups.
Your customer base
Consider whether the platform fits your customer base’s needs. Is your business focused on B2B or B2C? Does your audience engage more on social media, email, or in-app? Choose a platform that supports your preferred channels of communication.
Budget
What fits within your business’s pricing structure? Customer engagement tools vary significantly in cost, so find a solution that offers the best balance between the range of features you need and your budget.
Ease of use
How easy is the platform to use for your team? Opt for a solution with advanced features that is still user-friendly and doesn’t require extensive training or extreme technical knowledge to get started.
Integration
Can the platform integrate seamlessly with your current software stack, including CRM, ecommerce business systems, and other essential tools? Proper integration ensures a smooth experience across all customer engagement efforts.
Support and resources
Does the tool offer customer support and helpful resources for onboarding? Look for a platform with strong customer support and a well-developed knowledge base, as this can be essential for ensuring your team fully leverages the tool's capabilities.
To narrow down your options, consider asking the following:
- Does the tool support my business’s preferred channels (email, social media, website)?
- Can the tool integrate with my existing CRM and eCommerce platform?
- Is the pricing structure flexible as my business grows?
- Does the tool provide advanced features for future scalability?
- Are there customer reviews or testimonials from businesses similar to mine?
By answering these questions, you can ensure that the customer engagement platform you choose will be the right fit for your business, helping you optimize your customer interactions and achieve your goals more efficiently.
8 best customer engagement tools in 2025
If you’ve already reviewed our guide on how to choose the right customer engagement platform, you’re probably wondering where to begin your search. With so many options available, it can be challenging to know which tool will truly meet your business’s needs.
To help you get started, we’ve curated a shortlist of the best customer engagement tools of 2025.
In this section, we’ll dive into each tool’s standout features, pricing details, and how they help businesses leverage customer data platforms to enhance interactions.
Whether you're a small business or an enterprise, these tools are designed to streamline processes, improve customer relationships, and boost your bottom line!
1. Personizely
Personizely is an all-in-one conversion rate optimization suite designed to transform your e-commerce interactions into lasting customer relationships. With a stellar 5/5 Shopify rating and a 4.9/5 Capterra rating, Personizely is widely recognized by users for its powerful features and seamless integration with ecommerce platforms.
Specializing in customer engagement across various touchpoints, Personizely places a strong emphasis on optimizing the user experience right on your website. Whether you're aiming to capture leads, boost conversions, or enhance customer loyalty, Personizely equips your business with a comprehensive set of tools to deliver personalized, targeted experiences that drive results.
From customizable pop-ups and smart product recommendations to in-depth analytics, Personizely helps you engage customers and significantly improve your website's performance.
Personizely allows you to build effective, branded widgets that drive conversions
Key features of Personizely:
- Widgets for customer engagement: Customize and deploy a range of widgets such as newsletter popups, callout widgets, announcement bars, teaser offers, and multi-step widgets to engage customers and boost conversions. With a gallery of widget templates, you can get a head start and customize the ready-made widget to fit your needs.
- Customer feedback collection forms: Gather valuable insights with feedback forms to understand customer preferences, satisfaction levels, and reasons for cart abandonment, helping you improve the customer experience.
- Personalized product recommendations: Show tailored product recommendations based on customer behavior and preferences to increase browsing, inspire purchases, and boost average order value (AOV).
- Visual campaign editor: Create personalized campaigns with an intuitive visual editor that requires no coding. Design widgets, A/B test variations or full pages that match your brand and optimize for conversions.
- Advanced targeting: Use targeting to deliver personalized content based on customer behavior, location, demographics, and more, ensuring your messages are relevant and effective.
- Powerful A/B testing: Test various content, themes, URLs, or pricing strategies with A/B testing to discover the most effective combinations for driving conversions and improving engagement.
- Website personalization: Customize website content in real-time based on visitor data, using visitor identification and targeting to deliver relevant, personalized experiences that improve conversions.
- Analytics and reporting: Access detailed insights into campaign performance, tracking engagement rates, conversion metrics, and more, to optimize your site and marketing efforts.
- Seamless integrations: Integrate with major e-commerce platforms, email marketing tools, SMS tools, Google Analytics, and more, enabling smooth data syncing and better cross-platform marketing efficiency.
Pros and cons of Personizely:
Pros of Personizely | Cons of Personizely |
---|---|
✅ Easy-to-use, intuitive interface ✅ Robust A/B testing capabilities ✅ Visual builder that enables marketing teams to run campaigns without help from devs ✅ Detailed insights into performance ✅ A wide range of customizable widget templates ✅ Advanced website personalization functionality ✅ Seamless integration with popular tools ✅ Affordable all-in-one solution | ❌ The number of integrations is limited ❌ Focuses predominantly on website customer engagement ❌ No AI features |
💰 Pricing:
Personizely is one of the most affordable all-in-one conversion rate optimization suites. Depending on the number of monthly visitors, the prices start at:
- Essential: $31/month, billed annually
- Premium: $47/month, billed annually
- Business: $311/month, billed annually
There’s also a free 14-day trial period for you to give Personizely a try before you commit.
2. HubSpot
As one of the most well-established names in the customer engagement software world, HubSpot has continuously evolved to provide businesses with a powerful suite of tools.
Today, HubSpot offers a range of "Hubs," each focused on different aspects of business operations:
- Marketing Hub: Tools for email marketing, content management, and lead automation.
- Sales Hub: Streamlines sales processes with email tracking, pipeline management, and automation.
- Service Hub: Provides support tools like ticketing, live chat, and a knowledge base.
- CMS Hub: Manages personalized website content, landing pages, and blogs.
- Operations Hub: Automates tasks and syncs data across platforms.
All of these are separate products that can be purchased individually or integrated for a comprehensive solution. However, the cost can quickly add up as each hub has its own pricing.
Despite this, the robust features make HubSpot an appealing choice for businesses looking for an all-in-one customer engagement and management solution.
Key features of HubSpot:
- Omnichannel support: Engage with customers across email, live chat, social media, and phone all in one platform, ensuring seamless communication across channels.
- Live chat and chatbots: Provide real-time support and automated responses through live chat and chatbots, enhancing immediate customer interaction.
- CRM integration: HubSpot’s CRM integration tracks all customer interactions and provides a unified view of each customer, enabling personalized engagement.
- Email marketing automation: Automate personalized email campaigns to nurture leads and maintain ongoing engagement, saving time while reaching customers effectively.
- Customer feedback tools: Collect and analyze feedback from customers through surveys and forms to continuously improve engagement and satisfaction.
- Analytics and reporting: Gain insights into customer behavior and cross-channel campaign performance through detailed reports, helping to refine strategies for better engagement.
Pros and cons of HubSpot:
Pros of HubSpot | Cons of HubSpot |
---|---|
✅ All-in-one platform for managing customer interactions, improving team efficiency and customer satisfaction. ✅ Ability to create targeted experiences with each user thanks to CRM integration ✅ Time-saving automation ✅ Strong support and active community ✅ Scalability and flexible pricing | ❌ Advanced features can be expensive for smaller businesses ❌ Overwhelming to less tech-savvy people and smaller teams ❌ Essential tools are only available in higher-tier plans ❌ Some plans have storage caps |
💰 Pricing:
HubSpot offers a free version of its platform, but it comes with limited features that may not meet the needs of growing businesses. To unlock the full potential of the tool, you’ll need to pay for each "Hub" individually, and pricing can vary depending on the features you require. For example, the Service Hub pricing tiers are as follows:
- Service Hub Starter: Starts at €15 per month per seat, offering basic customer support features for smaller teams.
- Service Hub Professional: Starts at €90 per month per seat, providing more advanced features like automation and reporting.
- Service Hub Enterprise: Starts at €150 per month per seat, offering full-service tools and customizable options for large businesses.
For small teams or individuals looking for an affordable entry point, HubSpot also offers the Starter Customer Platform, which combines essential marketing, sales, service, content, and operations software. This plan starts at €15 per month per seat.
3. Intercom
Intercom has been a key player in the customer engagement space for years, trusted by over 25,000 global organizations, including industry giants like Atlassian, Amazon, and Microsoft. With over 500 million messages sent per month and interactions with more than 200 million people on average, Intercom has established itself as a leader in real-time customer communication.
Known for its powerful messaging platform, Intercom enables businesses to engage with customers seamlessly across multiple channels, enhancing support, sales, and marketing efforts. As an AI-first company, in recent years, Intercom has prioritized the incorporation of Artificial Intelligence into all of its products.
Key features of Intercom:
- AI-powered personalization: Intercom’s AI, Fin, learns your company’s products and knowledge base to generate accurate, context-specific answers in your brand’s tone. It adapts to each customer’s behavior, personalizing interactions to meet their specific needs, ensuring reliable and consistent support across channels.
- AI-powered insights and reporting: Access detailed reports with AI-driven insights, helping you refine strategies, optimize engagement, and boost performance.
- Omnichannel support: Engage customers across multiple platforms, including WhatsApp, Slack, SMS, and social media, delivering a seamless experience wherever they interact.
- Ticketing system: The ticketing system helps manage and prioritize customer inquiries, streamlining support processes and ensuring the timely resolution of issues.
- Campaign Automation: Easily build and automate campaigns and workflows with Intercom's no-code visual builder, saving time and improving efficiency for both customers and agents.
Pros and cons of Intercom:
Pros of Intercom | Cons of Intercom |
---|---|
✅ Scalable with flexible pricing and features ✅ Highly customizable ✅ Cutting-edge AI-powered workflows ✅ Robust reporting and analytics ✅ Easily integrates with other tools, enhancing your existing tech stack | ❌ The pricing can be prohibitive for small businesses, especially with advanced features ❌ Chatbot customization requires extensive technical knowledge ❌ Price based on seats ❌ Steep learning curve |
💰 Pricing:
Intercom offers three pricing tiers, allowing businesses to choose the plan that best fits their needs:
- Essential: $0.99 per Fin resolution, $29 per seat/month, billed annually.
- Advanced: $0.99 per Fin resolution, $85 per seat/month, billed annually.
- Expert: $0.99 per Fin resolution, $132 per seat/month, billed annually.
In addition, you can invest in add-ons like Proactive Support Plus and Copilot for enhanced functionality. A free 14-day trial is also available for businesses to test out the platform before committing.
4. Zendesk
With over 18 years in the customer service industry, Zendesk is trusted by more than 100,000 companies, including Airbnb and Shopify, to streamline customer support and engagement.
Much like Intercom, Zendesk has invested heavily in AI to enhance its customer engagement capabilities, offering businesses advanced AI-powered solutions that streamline customer service.
Whether it's ticket management, live chat, or self-service options, Zendesk Support Suite offers a comprehensive solution that scales with your business, making it ideal for both small teams and large enterprises.
Key features of Zendesk:
- AI and automation: Use AI and automation to handle routine inquiries, allowing your team to focus on more complex issues while ensuring no customer is left waiting.
- Messaging and live chat: Engage customers across channels with live chat and messaging, offering real-time assistance and driving better, more immediate resolutions.
- Help center: Provide customers with easy access to self-service resources, reducing the volume of direct inquiries and allowing customers to find answers on their own.
- Voice: Offer voice support with integrated phone systems, providing a seamless experience for customers who prefer to speak directly with a representative.
- Workforce management: Optimize team performance and scheduling with Zendesk’s workforce management tools, ensuring you have the right people available at the right time to handle customer inquiries.
Pros and cons of Zendesk:
Pros of Zendesk | Cons of Zendesk |
---|---|
✅ Robust AI and automation capabilities ✅ Comprehensive support options ✅ Scalable for businesses of all sizes ✅ Strong security and data protection | ❌ Pricing can be steep, especially with all the add-ons ❌ Steep learning curve ❌ Limited customization on lower-tier plans |
💰 Pricing:
Before committing to Zendesk, you get an opportunity to try the tool during the free 14-day trial period. After that, you need to choose the plan:
- Support Team: $19 per agent/month, billed annually.
- Suite Team: $55 per agent/month, billed annually.
- Suite Professional: $115 per agent/month, billed annually.
There’s also an option to buy add-ons like Copilor or Zendesk Quality Assurance, starting at $25 per agent/month, billed annually.
5. Sprout Social
Unlike traditional customer service tools focused on direct support, Sprout Social specializes in managing customer interactions across social media platforms like Facebook, X, TikTok, Threads, and Instagram. Since 2010, it has helped businesses track brand sentiment, engage with customers, and analyze social media performance.
With its powerful analytics and user-friendly interface, Sprout Social streamlines social media engagement, enabling businesses to connect with customers efficiently and improve their online presence.
Standout features of Sprout Social:
- Unified social media management: Centralizes all social media interactions into one platform for streamlined strategy and operations.
- Smart inbox: Automates message routing, prioritization, and enables faster responses with AI-enhanced agent replies.
- Social listening and performance insights: Monitor brand sentiment, track performance, and capture valuable insights to refine social media strategies.
- Publishing: Simplify scheduling and publishing across social platforms to streamline your content strategy.
- Integrations: Strong partnerships with platforms like Salesforce and seamless integrations with other social networks to unify customer touchpoints and maintain consistent user experiences.
Pros and cons of Sprout Social:
Pros of Sprout Social | Cons of Sprout Social |
---|---|
✅ Consolidates all social interactions across multiple platforms ✅ Seamless integrations with popular tools ✅ User-friendly interface ✅ Detailed analytics and performance metrics | ❌ Some social networks may not have as robust listening capabilities ❌ Doesn’t offer customer engagement features for channels outside of social media ❌ More advanced capabilities like analytics and reporting may require time to fully master ❌ Steep pricing |
💰 Pricing:
The platform offers a generous 30-day free trial period. After that, Sprout Social starts at $199 per seat per month for the standard plan, with advanced features available in higher-tier plans like Professional (starting at $299 per seat per month and Advanced (starting at $399 per seat per month).
6. Buffer
Buffer has been a key player in social media management for over 10 years, starting as a scheduling tool and evolving into a platform with a strong set of customer engagement features.
While it doesn’t offer as much omnichannel support as Sprout Social, Buffer shines in its simplicity and efficiency, making it ideal for businesses focused on social media engagement.
With a clean interface and automation capabilities, Buffer allows teams to manage interactions, track performance, and optimize social media efforts across multiple platforms.
Standout features of Buffer:
- Unified comment management: View all comments from recent posts in a single dashboard, prioritizing unanswered comments.
- Sentiment analysis: Prioritize comments based on sentiment labels to address urgent or sensitive issues first.
- AI-powered smart alerts: Get notified about important conversations, such as those with negative sentiment, questions, or mentions of purchases, using machine learning.
- Cross-platform engagement: Buffer supports multiple social platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and Threads, allowing for streamlined engagement across all channels.
- Comprehensive reporting: Gain valuable insights into social media engagement, helping you monitor and improve interactions with your audience.
Pros and cons of Buffer:
Pros of Buffer | Cons of Buffer |
---|---|
✅ Streamlines comment management and response times ✅ Sentiment analysis and performance insights give businesses a clearer view of customer sentiment ✅ Allows for a unified approach to social media management ✅ Customizable workflows ✅ Intuitive interface ✅ Affordable and offers a free plan | ❌ Has limitations when dealing with large data sets ❌ Some users report bugs and glitches ❌ Limited functionality compared to more comprehensive suites ❌ Limited customization ❌ Advanced features are available only for a fee |
💰 Pricing:
The best thing about Buffer is that it offers a free plan. And even if you need more advanced features, the pricing isn’t too steep when compared to other tools:
- Essentials: $5 per month per channel, when billed annually
- Team: $10 per month per channel, when billed annually
7. Braze
Braze is a comprehensive customer engagement platform widely favored by marketing teams across the globe, with a solid G2 rating of 4.5/5.
Known for its robust capabilities in personalized messaging and multichannel marketing, Braze allows businesses to create tailored, data-driven experiences across email, in-app messaging, push notifications, and more.
Its versatility and user-friendly interface make it an appealing choice for businesses looking to enhance customer engagement and build stronger, more personalized relationships.
Key features of Braze:
- Multichannel engagement: Connect with customers across various platforms, including email, SMS, push notifications, and in-app messaging.
- Canvas orchestration: Build and automate personalized customer journeys with an intuitive drag-and-drop tool.
- BrazeAI: Utilize AI to optimize engagement strategies, providing AI-powered recommendations to customers and data-driven insights that improve targeting and personalization for you.
- Experimentation: Run A/B tests and experiments at scale to refine engagement strategies, identify the most effective tactics, and drive better customer outcomes.
- Analytics and reporting: Access in-depth performance metrics to evaluate campaign success, measure engagement, and fine-tune strategies based on actionable insights.
Pros and cons of Braze:
Pros of Braze | Cons of Braze |
---|---|
✅ Fast campaign execution thanks to the visual builder ✅ Accurate AI-powered optimization of customer engagement ✅ Scalable experimentation ✅ Seamless interaction with numerous tools | ❌ Complex setup ❌ Limited pre-built templates ❌ Running large-scale experiments and campaigns, particularly with complex customer journeys, can be resource-intensive ❌ Analytics can be overwhelming and excessive ❌ Very expensive |
💰 Pricing:
Braze offers custom pricing based on your business’s needs, which means there’s no transparent, publicly available pricing on their website. To get an accurate quote, you’ll need to contact their sales team. According to online customer reviews, though, prices for Braze’s services typically start at around $30K annually.
8. Twilio
Twilio is a customer engagement platform that empowers businesses to build personalized, real-time communication experiences across channels like SMS, voice, email, and WhatsApp. Its key strength lies in its developer-first API approach, which lets companies embed communications directly into apps and workflows.
Twilio stands out for its flexibility, global reach, and ability to unify customer data and messaging into one programmable platform.
Key features of Twilio:
- Twilio Flex: A customizable engagement platform that allows businesses to integrate real-time data and AI into customer service and sales workflows.
- Multichannel communication: Seamlessly manage customer interactions across various channels like SMS, email, WhatsApp, and voice.
- Twilio Segment CPD: Aggregate first-party data from various sources into a single, dynamic customer profile, enabling personalized and context-aware interactions.
- Cross-channel engagement functionality: Track customer interactions across multiple touchpoints.
- Event-triggered journeys: Create automated journeys that respond to specific customer actions, delivering personalized content or actions in real-time to enhance engagement.
- API-driven customization: All of these features can be tailored and integrated into your existing systems through code, offering full flexibility and control to developers for building customized workflows.
Pros and cons of Twilio:
Pros of Twilio | Cons of Twilio |
---|---|
✅ Highly customizable and developer-friendly ✅ Cloud-based infrastructure is designed to scale with your business ✅ Multichannel support ✅ Reduces manual effort, streamlines workflows, and improves efficiency ✅ Allows for deep customer experience personalization | ❌ Requires extensive developer expertise to operate ❌ The pricing model can be difficult to understand and predict ❌ Limited out-of-the-box features ❌ No pre-built templates |
💰 Pricing:
Twilio offers a free trial period, allowing businesses to test out the platform and better understand the functionality they need before committing. However, Twilio’s pricing model can be quite confusing as many features are sold separately, which means costs can quickly add up depending on the services and usage. For example, Twilio Segment CDP starts at $120/month.
This modular pricing approach provides flexibility but requires careful management to avoid unexpected charges as your engagement needs grow.
Ready to power your customer engagement strategy?
At the heart of every successful business lies exceptional customer engagement. Whether it’s through personalized messaging, seamless interactions across channels, or real-time data insights, the right customer engagement tool can turn casual visitors into loyal customers and drive real results.
Since great customer engagement takes many forms and is unique to every business, choosing the right software that aligns with your specific needs is key to achieving the best outcomes. With Personizely, you get an all-in-one CRO suite that enhances every customer interaction, driving conversions and building lasting relationships.
Ready to see the difference? Start your free trial of Personizely today—no credit card required—and experience the power of seamless customer engagement for yourself!
Customer engagement tools FAQs
Customer engagement platforms are tools designed to help businesses interact with customers across various touchpoints—email, social media, websites, and more—improving relationships, driving conversions, and enhancing loyalty.