Top 10 Customer Experience Management Software Solutions — June 2021
The best customer experience software along with features, benefits, recommendations, and more.
Customer experience is one of the biggest driving forces behind customer retention and loyalty. Measuring and improving customer experience, however, is difficult to achieve without the help of innovative tools that automate your processes and streamline the way you interact with and collect feedback from customers. This is where tools such as customer experience management solutions come to the rescue.
Customer experience management solutions (commonly abbreviated as CEM, CXM, or CX) perform a range of functions besides helping you collect and analyze customer feedback. Businesses use CEM solutions to gain real-time, actionable insights into their customers’ likes and dislikes to improve customer experience, retention rate and ultimately, the company’s bottom line.
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Vendors Reviewed
Our criteria: How we chose the best vendors
We take our research seriously and want to make sure we are presenting our readers with the very best solutions in a given software category. Here's how we select vendors to be in our buyer guides:
- Product: We want to have a deep understanding of a vendor's product before recommending it. This usually means getting a demo by a senior executive (their CEO, head of product, etc), and/or using the product ourselves to make sure it has a solid UI, intuitive workflows, and the features to make it a best in class offering.
- User feedback: We do our best to understand what users say when they experience this product. User input allows us to accomplish a more thorough due diligence of products, put new vendors on our radar, and generally make sure we are presenting the right products to our readers.
- Financial metrics: We are very much finance nerds and so use a product's retention rates, growth, profitability, and scale to understand whether or not it is truly best in class.
- Best for a use case: Sometimes the best solution is the cheapest, the best tool for international companies, or the best for startups. We try to include a diversity of solutions so that our readers can find the tool that is best for what they need.
Here's more detail if you want to read further on how we research vendors.
In this guide you'll find
- Best Customer Experience Software
- Benefits of Using a Customer Experience Management Solution
- Common Mistakes Made When Buying a Customer Experience Management Solution
- Pricing Models
- Key Features of a Customer Experience Management Software
- Demo Questions
- Implementing a Customer Experience Management Solution
- Customer Experience Management Solutions FAQs
- Final Advice
Featured in
Best Customer Experience Software
There are different types of CEM solutions, each with different selling features and price points. To help you with your selection process, we’ve handpicked the best CEM solutions available for businesses of all sizes.
Why we love it
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Zendesk is a well-known provider in this space. They combine customer support and experience management in one platform that's robust, scalable, and user-friendly.
Zendesk
Review
If you are looking for a holistic customer support and experience management tool, Zendesk is the right one for you. Being a renowned player in the industry, Zendesk is a customizable, scalable, and user-friendly cloud-based solution for businesses of all sizes.
Besides allowing you to receive and handle customer support tickets from multiple channels,
Zendesk offers a host of features for customer journey tracking, segmentation, feedback analytics, knowledge management, sentiment analysis, and more. Among Zendesk’s features are also integrated surveys to measure customer satisfaction and analytics dashboards to monitor your team’s performance and observe your service-level agreements (SLAs).
The ticketing portion, i.e. Zendesk Support, works hand in hand with other solutions within the Zendesk suite such as the knowledge base (Zendesk Guide), live chat (Zendesk Chat), and call center (Zendesk Talk). For more focus on customer experience, you can take advantage of Zendesk Sunshine, the company’s customizable CRM solution. Native to AWS, Zendesk Sunshine provides you with a 360-degree view of your customers by integrating with all of your business applications and collating your customer data, providing you with all the context you need to make informed business decisions.
Zendesk offers several plans that vary in price points and overall features. Visit Zendesk’s pricing page to find out which plan suits your business. You can sign up for a free trial or contact Zendesk’s team for a demo.
Zendesk
Customers
Mailchimp, Uber, Khan Academy
Zendesk
Stats
- 200,000+ customers
Best For
Any company looking for a leading CEM.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Clarabridge is a feature-rich CEM solution. Through social media analytics, customizable surveys, intent prediction capabilities and more, you can make informed decisions driven by the voice of the customer.
Clarabridge
Review
Clarabridge is a cloud-based CEM software that captures and transforms customer feedback into actionable insights, allowing businesses to plan and deploy performance-enhancing strategies driven by the voice of the customer.
The platform offers omnichannel support so you can improve customer engagement, collect customer feedback from different channels (e.g. email, surveys, voice recordings, agent notes, chat, social media, and more) then funnel it into a centralized location. You can then use its built-in text analytics and natural language processing (NPL) to gain a better understanding of your customers’ likes and dislikes.
Among Clarabridge’s features are customizable surveys, data categorization, social media analytics, sentiment analysis, emotion detection, and intent prediction. It also offers real-time alerts when data suggests anomalies in customer experience.
Clarabridge
Customers
Adobe, Electrolux, Fidelity Investments, Crate&Barrel, Expedia, TD Bank, LogMeIn, Frontier Airlines.
Clarabridge
Stats
Clarabridge
Pricing
Clarabridge’s pricing isn’t disclosed on their website. Contact their sales team to get a price quote according to your needs and operation size.
Best For
Medium to large organizations looking for a robust customer experience management (CEM) solution.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Genesys offers customer experience and contact center solutions to mid-sized and large businesses. Its omnichannel support combined with its AI-powered analytics facilitate customer engagement, feedback collection, and insights extraction.
Genesys
Review
Genesys automates customer support with its AI-powered chatbot, voicebot, and speech-enabled IVR, enabling customers to self-serve and significantly decreasing your ticket volume. It also offers features that enhance your team’s performance including agent coaching, support gamification, workforce management, resource management, and quality assurance.
Among Genesys’ features are Customer Journey Management and Predictive Web Engagement that allow you to make data-driven decisions to drive satisfaction rate and improve customer experience.
Genesys
Customers
AXA, BBVA, eFinancial, Ethiopian Airlines, Lenovo, Microsoft, PayPal, Quicken, Singapore Airlines, Swisscom, TechStyle, Ticketmaster, Vodafone, Vivo, Whirlpool.
Genesys
Stats
- 400% increase in digital sales
- 25% increase in agent productivity
- 100% ROI in < 3 months
Genesys
Pricing
Genesys has 3 pricing plans:
- Genesys Cloud 1: $75 per user per month
- Genesys Cloud 2: $110 per user per month
- Genesys Cloud 3: $140 per user per month
Besides the per-user-per-month pricing structure, Genesys also has a pay-by-the-hour pricing model for companies to pay only for the time used by logged in users, and a concurrent pricing model, which is best suited for companies with agents across multiple shifts and multiple peak times in a 24-hour period.
Best For
Medium to large sized companies looking for a customer experience management solution with contact center functionality.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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PickFu is easy to use; you can start creating and deploying polls right away from their website, no account or membership necessary.
PickFu
Review
PickFu is an online polling service that businesses of all kinds can use to collect consumer feedback. With over 10,000 diverse active respondents and over 40 respondent targeting criteria including gender identity, marital status, political affiliation, and traveling frequency, PickFu allows you to crowdsource hundreds of relevant opinions so you can make better-informed decisions.
PickFu
Customers
Thrasio, King, Intuit, Osmo, GoDaddy
PickFu
Stats
- 10,000 active respondents
- Over 40 respondent targeting criteria
PickFu
Pricing
You can start running polls with PickFu starting at $50, no membership required. That said, PickFu also offers membership plans for customers that want to run more than 3 polls a month. These plans are:
- Professional: For $79 a month, PickFu’s Professional plan enables you to run polls with up to 500 responses and 4 audience targeting criteria per poll.
- Team: For $299 a month, PickFu’s Team plan includes everything in the Professional plan, plus deeper discounts on the per-response rate, support for up to 4 user seats, a team dashboard for collaboration, shared prepaid credit, API integrations, and strategy sessions with a PickFu team member.
Best For
PickFu is used by companies large and small across different verticals.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Being a part of a comprehensive digital marketing suite that is the Adobe Marketing Cloud, AEM provides features for content creation, digital asset management, and form building.
Adobe Experience Manager
Review
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a cloud-native customer experience tool with a content and digital asset management-centric approach. Being a part of a comprehensive digital marketing suite that is the Adobe Marketing Cloud, AEM provides features for content creation, digital asset management, and form building.
Its AI-powered tools provide you with insights into the kind of content your customers like across all channels so you can continue delivering consistent and personalized experiences. Among the platform’s features are audience segmentation, customer profiles, identity control, location mapping, as well as data governance, ingestion, and more.
Adobe Experience Manager
Customers
The Home Depot, PGA, Lenovo, Briggs & Stratton, Philips, Helly Hansen, Walgreens Boots Alliance.
Adobe Experience Manager
Stats
Adobe Experience Manager
Pricing
AEM has a flexible licensing model with a price point that is dependent on the components and features you need. You may contact Adobe’s sales team for a demo and quote.
Best For
Medium to large organizations looking for a customer experience management (CEM) solution with content and asset management capabilities.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Leveraging AI, Acoustic Experience Analytics (formally IBM Tealeaf) helps businesses analyze and get to the root cause of customer behavior to improve customer retention and conversion rates.
Acoustic
Review
With advanced features such as Session Replay, Anomaly Detection, Struggle Analytics, Acoustic Experience Analytics helps you understand how customers interact with your sites or mobile apps and provides you with all the insights you need to create personalized marketing campaigns, guide your product and UX/UI design teams in prioritizing certain feature developments and updates as well as quickly diagnose and fix any problems that can cause negative user experiences such as technical glitches, design defects etc.
Acoustic’s platform also provides security features that’ll identify and alert you of any suspicious or potentially fraudulent online activities.
Acoustic
Customers
KDDI, Cuisinart, Republic Services, Banco Supervielle, National Theatre, USO, PayPal, Rakuten.
Acoustic
Stats
Acoustic
Pricing
Acoustic Experience Analytics’ pricing isn’t disclosed on their website. Contact their sales team to get a price quote according to your needs and operation size.
Best For
Medium to large companies looking for a solution that analyzes website and mobile app customer experience.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Qualtrics is all-encompassing experience suite; companies can use it to measure and improve customers, employees, product, and brand experience.
Qualtrics
Review
Owned by SAP, Qualtrics is a holistic CX platform that aims to enhance customer experience through data-driven actions. Its multi-channel support facilitates smooth customer engagement and allows you to perform closed-loop follow-ups.
With its robust survey tool, Qualtrics XM allows you to effortlessly collect customer feedback. Once feedback is gathered, it is automatically analyzed by Qualtrics’ intelligent features, namely Text IQ, Stats IQ, and Predict IQ to uncover customer sentiment and make accurate predictions about customer behavior. Tailored insights and suggested actions are automatically generated, allowing your team to focus on deploying strategies that improve customer satisfaction and foster long-term loyalty.
Besides its customer experience management solution, the company also offers products that help businesses manage employee, product, and brand experience.
Qualtrics
Customers
HP, Adidas, Under Armour, IBM, Samsung, Spotify, Hulu, Toyota, Philips, 3M, Sephora, CocaCola.
Qualtrics
Stats
- Qualtrics Customer XM has a 633% ROI
- Trusted by over 12,000 of the world's leading brands and 99 of the top 100 business schools
Qualtrics
Pricing
You can contact the Qualtrics sales team for a price quote, request a demo as well as a free trial.
Best For
Medium to large organizations looking for a robust customer experience management (CEM) solution.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Satmetrix allows you to bring your customers to the center of your decision-making and equips you with all the data you need to drive business performance.
Satmetrix
Review
Satmetrix facilitates customer engagement and feedback collection through its omnichannel support and customizable surveys. Once collected, structured and unstructured customer feedback is then run through the software’s text analytics feature which automatically highlights prevalent trends and patterns in customer sentiment and behavior, then recommends actions accordingly. Satmetrix also enables you to monitor comment volume and directly publish positive customer feedback on social media.
Satmetrix
Customers
Ritter, Citation, Virgin Money, Bobst, Ciox, Stokke, WillScot, Exchange Bank.
Satmetrix
Stats
Satmetrix
Pricing
Satmetrix’s pricing isn’t disclosed on their website. Contact their sales team to get a price quote according to your needs and operation size.
Best For
Medium to large companies.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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SAS Customer Intelligence 360 is a part of a full marketing suite, leveraging data intelligence to let digital marketers make actionable decisions.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360
Review
SAS is a popular online CEM solution that’s part of a comprehensive marketing suite. It lets digital marketers use data intelligence to drive conversion rates, improve customer experience, and foster loyalty. It offers multichannel support for data collection, contextualization, anonymous behavior capture, predictive analytics, and forecasting. It also allows users to create and maintain comprehensive customer profiles for seamless journey tracking and data-driven decision making.
Its dynamic content placements and digital asset management capabilities allow you to engage customers more effectively and personalize their experiences.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360
Customers
Honda, HSBC, Akbank, Conrad, ICA Banken, Office Depot, Harry & David.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360
Stats
91 of the top 100 companies on the 2019 Fortune 500 list use SAS.
SAS Customer Intelligence 360
Pricing
You can contact the SAS sales team for a price quote, request a demo as well as a free trial.
Best For
Medium to large organizations looking for a robust customer experience management (CEM) solution.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Zoho Corp is one of the leading providers of customer support, relationship and experience management tech. You can rely on their CRM Plus solution to deliver exceptional experiences to your customers and convert them into brand advocates.
Zoho CRM Plus
Review
Zoho Corp is one of the leading providers of ticketing, knowledge management, customer relationship management (CRM), and customer experience management (CEM) solutions.
Their CRM Plus solution is a unified customer engagement and experience platform that helps businesses provide their customers with exceptional experiences and convert them into brand advocates.
Through enhanced administration, multi-channel customer engagement, social media marketing, customizable NPS and CSAT surveys, detailed analytics, powerful AI, and intelligent chatbots, Zoho CRM plus allows you to gain a better understanding your customers, segment them, detect anomalies in their behavior, create efficient workflows, develop retention strategies, forecast revenue, and more.
Zoho CRM Plus
Customers
Agoda, Hotstar, Star Health Insurance, Bose, Air Panama, ZEE5.
Zoho CRM Plus
Stats
Zoho CRM Plus
Pricing
Zoho CRM Plus is a pay-as-you-go service (monthly or yearly). This means there are no long-term contracts. When billed annually, the platform costs $50 per user per month.
Best For
Businesses of all sizes looking for an integrated CRM and CEM solution.
Worth Checking Out:
Why we love it
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Aside from covering all the features you would expect from a CEM solution, Medallia can also integrate with enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems to link financial data with customer experiences and suggest improvements accordingly.
Medallia
Review
Medallia is easily one of the leading CEM solutions available with over 1 million active users monthly. With its intuitive, cloud-based interface, Medallia allows you to collect customer feedback from multiple channels and analyze it in real-time to detect patterns, uncover sentiment, and predict behavior.
Medallia’s text analytics feature employs artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning to automatically analyze textual feedback and turn it into useful insights while its action intelligence allows you to automate high-impact tasks such as risk detection and suggestion mining so you can identify at-risk customers, understand the drivers behind their behavior, and implement effective strategies that lead to their retention.
Medallia
Customers
PayPal, Lego, Comcast, Hilton, Samsung, Sephora, Wells Fargo.
Medallia
Stats
- 4.5B+ experiences processed per year
- 8T calculations in a single day
- 1M+ active users in a single month
Medallia
Pricing
Medallia’s pricing isn’t disclosed on their website. Contact their sales team to get a price quote according to your needs and operation size.
Best For
Medium to large organizations looking for a robust customer experience management (CEM) solution.
Worth Checking Out:
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Final Advice
Choosing a CEM solution can be a difficult process as the market is saturated with many offerings, but we’re confident you’ll make a good selection if you:
- Identify the needs of your business and select the right type of CEM software accordingly;
- Request a trial account to test the platform’s features first-hand and see if they cover all of your needs;
- Schedule demo sessions with different vendors to get all of your questions answered.
Top CEM Solutions
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