6 Best Customer Engagement Software for 2024

Customers are searching for top-notch experience—this has been confirmed by study after study (after study). Feeling valued, supported, and rewarded is just as important as product performance and pricing for 80% of customers.

So, how do you go about creating the kinds of experiences that really wow them? Customer engagement software is a great place to start.

In this Customerly guide, we’ll be helping you find the right customer engagement tool for your business by sharing our top picks in this category for all kinds of use cases and budgets.

Want to start building stronger business-customer relationships? Let’s dive in.

Customer engagement refers to any interaction between a customer and a business. It can also refer to the strong connection that these interactions help foster—when they’re executed well, at least.

Customer engagement software arms you with a suite of tools designed to make this process easier. There isn’t one, all-encompassing archetype to point to, though. All kinds of tools, software, and features have a home under the customer engagement umbrella.

Take Customerly, for example—we offer a whole suite of customer engagement tools ranging from marketing automation and funnel building to live chat and feedback analytics. 

The uniting factor? 

All our tools support you as you engage with customers at every stage of their journeys. But don’t just take our word for it—take a look at one of the businesses that work with us, Paymo, who made Customerly its primary tool to manage customer relationships.

In a rush? No worries—here’s the TLDR version of our top picks:

1. Customerly: Best Overall Customer Engagement Tool
2. Drift: Best for Conversational Engagement
3. Mixpanel: Best for Data-Driven Engagement
4. Productboard: Best for Co-Creating With Users
5. Customer.io: Best for Omnichannel Messaging
6. Zendesk: Best for Enterprise-Level Scalability

Let’s take a close look at each of these tools to see why they’ve made the cut.

Best Overall Customer Engagement Tool

Customerly is an all-in-one customer engagement tool that centralizes your engagement efforts in a single, intuitive dashboard.

As we mentioned in the intro, there are quite a few features under the hood—allowing you to manage and optimize customer service, customer satisfaction, and marketing automation with a single tool. From live chat and surveys to funnels and analytics dashboards, you can do it all with Customerly.

Plus, you can hit the ground running with pre-built templates for tons of engagement activities and funnels—including welcome emails, nurture campaigns, product onboarding flows, and more.

Key Features

• Funnels: Create complex, multichannel funnels using an intuitive visual editor.

• Segmentation: Tailor messaging based on user behavior, preferences, and demographics.

• Live Chat: Engage customers with an intelligent live chat tool that supports live chat triggers, canned responses, videos, and more.

• Surveys: Get into the minds of your customers with a range of pre-built surveys, polls, and feedback forms or build your own.

• Analytics: Track campaigns and customer data directly in your CRM.

Pricing

At Customerly, we believe every business should have access to a top-tier helpdesk tool. That’s why we offer a free-forever Basic plan with access to core features like shared inbox, help center, and live chat.

Beyond that, we have four paid plans—Essential ($7/month), Startup ($39+/month), Pro ($82+/month), and Enterprise ($249+/month). Plans are priced based on the number of interactions (chats, tickets, etc.) and teammates you need, but we have a handy calculator to help you build the perfect plan.

Still on the fence? Take Customerly on a test drive with a 14-day free trial.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• A comprehensive set of customer engagement tools.
• Affordable for large and small teams.
• Best-in-class live chat system.
• Free trial and free-forever plan.
• Powerful, no-code marketing funnels.

Cons

• Fewer integrations than other options.

Best for Conversational Engagement

Drift is a conversation-driven marketing and sales platform that helps you engage with leads and customers in real-time.

Drift is a pretty unique tool. It uses customizable triggers to initiate automated, AI-powered conversations. There are a lot of use cases for this—you can personalize messages tailored to your customers’ needs, capture leads, and chat with customers, all with this one tool.

Drift also integrates with a ton of popular business tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, and HubSpot.

Key Features

• Chatbot Builder: Create chatbots that exemplify your brand in minutes using a drag-and-drop editor.
• Lead Capture: Capture leads conversationally directly from your website.
• Live Chat: Engage with customers in real time using live chat.

Pricing

Drift is expensive.

Pricing starts at $2,500/month (billed as an upfront annual payment of $30,000) for the Premium plan. And that doesn’t even include features like A/B testing and AI-powered chatbots! 

You’ll need to contact sales for a quote for the Advanced and Enterprise plans.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Powerful conversational AI.
• Use cases spanning support, sales, and marketing.
• Lots of integrations.

Cons

• Steep learning curve.
• High costs.

Best for Data-Driven Engagement

Mixpanel is a little bit different from the tools we’ve mentioned so far. Rather than focusing on building relationships, it’s focused squarely on measuring relationships.

So, what measuring tools does it offer? Quite a few—you can use Mixpanel to track all kinds of user behavior and engagement metrics. As a result, you’re able to build dashboards for tracking customer journeys, measuring product adoption, analyzing A/B tests, and keeping an eye on conversions.

It’s a great tool for zeroing in on product improvements thanks to AI-assisted insights—no data science degree required.

Key Features

• Actionable Insights: Gain customer insights with AI-assisted analysis.
• Real-time Reports: Monitor user behavior and engagement in real time.
• A/B Testing: Test product changes quickly and easily.

Pricing

Mixpanel has a great free plan that supports basic tracking for 20,000 events monthly.

Beyond that, you have a ton of flexibility. You can build a plan that supports the amount of tracking you need for both of Mixpanel’s packages—Growth ($20+/month) and Enterprise ($833+/month).

Growth will be more than enough for most businesses.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Very easy to implement.
• Highly customizable reports and dashboards.
• Real-time AI-powered insights.

Cons

• Can get expensive at high traffic volumes.
• No retroactive data analysis.

Best for Co-Creating With Users

Productboard is a product management tool that’s great for product teams looking to co-create with their users.

You can use Productboard to centralize product feedback, prioritize features, and keep everyone informed with roadmaps (both external and internal versions). You can even customize your prioritization formulas based on impact and reach data you collect from real-world customer feedback.

Productboard is a great option for product teams that are looking to close the feedback loop and get users excited about what’s to come.

Key Features

• Product Roadmap: Create and share product roadmaps with internal and external stakeholders.
• Prioritization Dashboard: Prioritize features based on impact and reach data.
• Feedback Tracking: Collect customer feedback to inform product decisions.

Pricing

Productboard has three paid plans—Essentials ($20/user/month), Pro ($40/user/month), and Enterprise (custom).

Essentials is a decent starting point, but we’d recommend starting with Pro for access to a customer feedback repository.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Great collaboration features.
• Highly customizable workflows.
• Great feature prioritization system.

Cons

• Lacking deep analytics.
• Customization can be a technical process.

Best for Omnichannel Messaging

Customer.io is a messaging tool that helps tech-savvy marketers create and send data-driven messages. Whether it’s push notifications, modals, SMS messages, or emails, they’ve got you covered! There are also tools for boosting the efficacy of all of these channels—predictive segmentation, personalization, A/B testing, analytics, and more.

This is a great option if you’re looking to centralize your messaging campaigns through a powerful no-code tool.

Key Features

• Funnel Builder: Create personalized messaging funnels with automated triggers.
• Smart Segmentation: Automatically divide customers into segments based on data.
• Analytics & Insights: Measure the effectiveness of your messaging campaigns.

Pricing

Customer.io’s Essentials plan ($100/month) has pretty much everything you need to get started, including segmentation, analytics, and experimentation.

You’ll need to contact sales for a quote for both the Premium plan and Enterprise plan.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Powerful message targeting options.
• User-friendly UI
• Tons of options for experimentation and improvement.

Cons

• Entry-level plan may be too expensive for some businesses.
• Limited pre-built templates.

Best for Enterprise-Level Scalability

Zendesk is a service-first CRM software that puts a premium on customization, flexibility, and enterprise-level scalability.

The tool allows you to create a personalized support experience for customers through features like live chat, knowledge base software, ticketing systems, and more. Plus, you can gather feedback from your customers, group them by segments, and track performance with reporting.

Zendesk is a great option for enterprise-level customer service thanks to a library of 1,200+ apps (and a pretty steep price tag).

Key Features

• Customer Support Suite: Create a personalized customer support experience with features like live chat, ticketing systems, and more.
• Analytics & Reporting: You can measure your performance and get insights with real-time reporting and analytics.
• Third-Party Integrations: Connect to 1,200+ third-party apps like Salesforce and Slack.

Pricing

Zendesk is cheaper than Drift, but it definitely isn’t a budget option.

The entry-level plan is Suite Team ($40/agent/month). If you go for this option, you’re only getting access to a single help center and basic versions of all of Zendesk’s core features.

Suite Growth ($79/user/month) and Suite Professional ($99/user/month) offer better features with fewer limitations, but you’re still not experiencing Zendesk at its most powerful. For that, you’ll need to upgrade to Suite Enterprise ($150/user/month)—this is where you’ll find advanced features like custom analytics and AI access.

Pros & Cons

Pros

• Industry-leading ticketing system.
• Comprehensive features.

Cons

• Limited automation potential on lower plans.
• Complex UI.

A great customer engagement software stack is the not-so-secret recipe for successful customer relationships. It provides you with a range of features to track, measure, and optimize your customer interactions.

At Customerly, we give businesses a range of powerful tools to do just that. With features spanning customer service, customer success, and marketing automation, you have no shortage of options for engaging our customers and earning long-term promoters.

Get started with a 14-day free trial and see the benefits first-hand.