No matter what industry you operate in, you can’t tell customers what they want. And truer words have never been spoken. Businesses cannot tell customers what they should want or expect. A business should use social listening and other tools to discover what customers want and work hard to meet those expectations.
What Are Customer Experience (CX) Tools?
This is where customer experience or CX tools make all the difference. A customer experience tool collects data based on customer feedback. CX software is instrumental in helping businesses build a complete customer experience. This helps build customer loyalty and can improve customer retention.
This is where Podium comes in to help your business! Speed to lead is critical in today’s fast-paced market, and Podium offers an unparalleled advantage by ensuring businesses engage with leads within a couple of minutes—guaranteed. Podium’s conversational AI is outcome-driven – it doesn’t just respond to inbound leads it guides conversations toward a specific goal, such as a sale or booking. Unlike other AI systems that focus on providing correct responses, Podium aims to drive specific customer actions to grow your business.
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Essential Features of Any Great Customer Experience Tool
No two CX tools are the same. If you want a customer experience tool that works for your business, you need to search for a tool that features the following:
1. Content Management
CX tools come in various options, including digital customer experience tools and customer experience management tools. If you opt for a customer experience management platform (CEM), choose one that manages web content. CEM software can help you deliver a personalized customer experience by sending content to the web, social media, and mobile devices. CEM platforms also use A/B testing to indicate which content fares the best with existing and potential customers.
2. Marketing Personalization
A good CEM platform will also include the option to optimize your marketing strategy. Here, A/B testing comes into play again, as well as geotargeting and multivariate testing. Moreover, marketing optimization and automation also require AI technology, which some customer experience tools offer.
3. Workflow Management
Generally speaking, you want your customer experience optimization software to make your life easier. So, what you should look for is workflow optimization and management. This includes automatic support ticket creation, instant ticket acknowledgment, and fast problem resolution.
4. Easy Integration
You also need innovative CX tools that easily integrate with other platforms. Your employees should be able to get the hang of your chosen CX tools fast, and it should not take away from your current processes.
5. Inventory Options
If you sell products, a CX tool with an inventory management feature is a must-have. Inventory management does not just track how many products you have in stock. A good inventory management tool will tell you which products your customers have previously bought. And it will let you know about customer complaints and requests. Remember that for this feature to work effectively, the CX tool must integrate with your existing inventory management solution.
6. Reporting and Analysis Capabilities
Great CX tools come with the option of setting up a dashboard for analytics and reporting. These software solutions track VOC (voice of the customer) as well as consumer behavior. However, you do not only want analytics. You also want actionable insights that will help you identify customer churn and other issues.
Choose a customer experience tool that includes AI technology and machine learning so that you will always know when and how to respond to analytical data.
What Are The 4 E’s Of Customer Experience?
Customer experience tools like webchat exist to shape and improve a customer’s experience with a given business. Ideally, you want to use the perfect CX tool to meet the demands that stem from the 4 E’s of customer experience.
1. Ever Present
The number one E in the 4 E’s is ever present. If you are there whenever customers need your help, you have already achieved this E. If your customers have to follow up on their complaints or concerns more than once, you have not. Being ever present is non-negotiable if you want your business to appeal to modern consumers. But you can only be fully present for your customers if you understand how they feel.
Podium’s AI Employee guarantees your business engages with leads within a couple of minutes; during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between.
2. Empathy
If you have no empathy for a customer’s situation, you will not see the need to be there for them at all times. For instance, if a customer phones you in a panic because the wedding cake you promised her has not arrived, you must put yourself in their shoes. How would you feel or react if this happened to you? If you can visualize the fallout of not receiving a wedding cake on a wedding day, you have empathy. If you shrug it off and make a halfhearted promise to deliver the cake, you do not have it.
Empathy is the only factor that will empower your business and your staff to resolve customer issues.
3. Empower
Once empowered, you will do everything within your power to resolve a customer’s issue. You will either deliver the cake yourself or deliver two cakes on time (one for free) to make up for the frustration. Or you will offer the customer a substantial discount on her next order after explaining why the cake has not arrived yet.
Empowerment is not about pacifying customers, and neither is empathy. It means physically doing something to retain your customer by immediately rectifying the situation.
4. Energize
When you win a customer back and retain their business, you energize and recharge your team. This will help them continuously engage and communicate with customers to prevent and resolve issues. It is crucial to listen to your customers because their feedback will drive the 4 E’s.
The CX tool you choose can help you stick to the 4 E’s. This software is practical because it allows you to listen to customers, meaning you are present. It gives you the feedback you need so that you know when and how to be empathetic. And from there, it just helps you empower and energize your team to use all its features to retain and gain more customers.
CX vs. CRM
When you compare customer experience tool features, you will come across a lot of information related to both CX and CRM. These are both aspects of customer service, but they are not interchangeable.
CX focuses on creating a positive customer experience throughout a customer’s journey with a business. CRM systems are more technical and focus on managing or storing data. When you start looking for a CX tool, try to find something that combines the best of these concepts.
The 13 Best Customer Experience Tools of 2024
There are many options to choose from in 2024. The following customer experience tools have made the top of the list:
Podium’s direct messaging platform allows you to get the feedback you need via text. It provides unmatched customer experience and makes it easy for your business to resolve customer complaints faster. Podium is a leading messaging platform that will keep your business in contact with customers all the time. It also offers a hub for the reviews that your business gets, collecting them from several platforms.
Furthermore, you can save all the data you receive on a single platform. This includes communication history and purchase history. This allows your entire team to collaborate when providing excellent customer service because the information they need is in front of them. Try Podium today so your customers can enjoy an omnichannel service.
The only downside is that you may not have your customer’s permission to text them. However, with Podium, you can send emails to your customers asking them if you can use their phone numbers for communication. This is just another way that Podium improves the overall customer experience.
Transform your business with Podium’s AI Employee. Get a Demo Today.
2. Sprinklr
Sprinklr offers a powerful AI-driven CEM platform called Unified-CXM. It allows teams to sort customer messages using AI technology. Sprinklr also offers businesses social listening features and smart responses. Agents can use the AI Agent Assist option to help them provide the best response for each customer.
3. Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager will ensure your team can improve your business’s digital customer experience. This software consists of collaboration tools that you can use to deliver personalized content experiences to each customer. Its prime features include SEO recommendations that provide valuable content insights. The Experience Manager can also integrate with Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps.
4. HubSpot
HubSpot is a popular choice for digital marketers. It offers tools to spark and manage conversation. It also offers customizable feedback surveys that can help your business gather feedback. These surveys include NPS, CSAT, and CES formats. HubSpot also provides customer portals, which allow you to give your customers a measure of control over their service experience.
5. Genesys
Genesys has an intuitive and easy-to-use interface, so your team will not need extensive training. The Genesys Cloud platform strives to create empathetic customer experiences throughout each customer’s journey with your business. Genesys also offers speech analytics software. This type of software will help you analyze call content, which is another form of feedback.
6. Medallia
Medallia is a SaaS solution and is big on AI and machine learning. These technologies can help you analyze customer journeys to identify patterns. Moreover, you can use the Medallia Conversations feature to communicate with your clients in real-time via Facebook Messenger or even SMS.
7. Qualtrics
Qualtrics ups the game with predictive intelligence. This software also uses machine learning, AI, and NLP to identify improvement areas before they hurt your business. It also gives suggestions on how to avoid the same mistakes in the future. Furthermore, you can use Qualtrics listening tools to get customer feedback via social media, surveys, and IoT management.
8. Acoustic Experience Analytics (Tealeaf)
Tealeaf tracks clients’ interactions on your website. This gives you first-hand insight into how they use your site (or app) on their mobile phones. Tealeaf’s cxVerify option allows you to keep permanent customer records (which is good for when a dispute arises). The software can help you optimize your website and highlight issues for you to fix.
This customer experience solution also comes with a warning system informing you of major changes in customer behavior.
9. UserZoom
With UserZoom, you can perform UX studies. This will help you understand how to shape your product or page if you want to draw attention. The UserZoom software includes usability testing that will detect problems with digital products. You can also send out surveys to gather feedback from your customers.
10. ResponseTek
You can do a lot with ResponseTek, including sending out web and email surveys and even QR code surveys. ResponseTek will allow your team to analyze large amounts of open-ended responses. It also offers instant reporting that gives your business instant access to customer insights.
11. Satmetrix
Satmetrix combines customer feedback to give you an overview of the customer experience across omnichannel touch points. It offers personalized surveys that help you close the feedback loop fast. It also provides reports on customer complaints and negative sentiments to help you reduce customer churn.
12. Survicate
Survicate is another customer feedback solution that gives your business multiple options to run surveys. This software provides marketing insights and product feedback to help you improve your marketing and sales division. And it gives you the customer satisfaction data you need to determine retention rates and lifetime value.
13. Outfunnel
With Outfunnel, you can observe your visitor feed in real-time. Outfunnel records all website visits and offers automated lead scoring. Based on the data provided by the platform, you can create personalized emails as part of the customer experience process.
Future Trends in CX Tools
CX tool trends will explode in 2024 and beyond. These include collecting customer data and analyzing it for even better insights. CX tools will not only feature surveys for feedback collection but also offer more predictive analytics.
One part of business that is already booming, thanks to customer experience tools is contact centers. These centers typically suffer staff shortages, but AI is helping to overcome this. Self-service options and chatbots will be even more widely used in the future.
Hyper-personalization will be a big focus to ensure customer retention. And there will be an ever-increasing blurring of the lines between a physical customer experience and a digital one. All of these trends will combine to help businesses offer vastly improved customer service.
Podium’s AI Employee boosts lead conversion by 45% and it guarantees your business engages with leads within a couple of minutes; during peak hours, off hours, and every hour in between.
Create the Ultimate Customer Experience With Podium
Podium is an easy-to-use CX solution to help you grow your retail (or any other) business. Podium makes it a breeze to attract more customers and allows you to build a personalized experience for each of them using texting technology. With Podium, you will outrank your competition because it gets you the reviews you need to do that. Your business can connect to hundreds of customers at once, giving them even more reason to give your business a five-star review.
Beat your competition faster than ever with Podium’s AI Employee. Watch a demo today!
