
SurveyMonkey
SurveySparrow is a cloud-based customer experience solution that enables businesses of all sizes to create engaging feedback surveys. It comes with a centralized dashboard, which allows users to import contacts and organize them i...Read more
Millions of product reviews are written every day. Wonderflow is the simplest AI-based solution to analyze them and turn this extremely vast stream of customer feedback into winning decisions. Unified VoC analytics help B2C compa...Read more
Userlytics is a cloud-based remote user testing and research platform, which helps businesses gain insights into user's journey by recording screen of test participants as they interact with websites, web or mobile applications, p...Read more
SurveyMonkey Enterprise is a 360-degree feedback solution designed to help businesses in education, healthcare, IT and other sectors conduct surveys to collect feedback. The GDPR and HIPAA compliant platform enables teams to encry...Read more
Zonka Feedback offers feedback forms and customer satisfaction surveys in various formats, such as on a tablet or on a kiosk, designed for companies to gather and analyze the data. The solution can be utilized by hotels and other ...Read more
justLikeAPI is a single-point service for scraping reviews and other review-related data from some of the most complicated websites. Its users can save a lot of time and money by not having to deal with dozens of different review ...Read more
Startquestion is a professional survey software designed to help businesses of all sizes, freelancers, nonprofits, educational institutions and more create online questionnaires for researching employees, clients and community. Ke...Read more
SurveyLegend is a cloud-based survey solution for individuals and businesses of all sizes. The solution enables users to create mobile-friendly surveys, manage survey questionnaires, customize questions and track responses. S...Read more
Every time your customer engages with your company in any way, they're having a customer experience. This includes every touch point and interaction across the full customer life cycle: digital encounters, product experiences, interactions with employees, and even word of mouth chatter from other customers.
Research and advisory firm Gartner defines customer experience (CX) as "the customer's perceptions and related feelings caused by the one-off and cumulative effect of interactions with a supplier's employees, systems, channels, or products." (Full article available to Gartner clients.)
The question is: how much control do you have over those experiences? And—crucially—do you understand your customers' needs and preferences well enough to cater to them?
Every customer has their own mix of expectations, needs, and tolerance levels. Customers reward businesses that deliver on their preferences and will abandon those who don't. Given these high stakes, businesses are turning to CX software to better understand their customers and how to deliver the experiences they want.
In this Buyer's Guide, we'll help you understand the following:
What is customer experience software?
Common features of customer experience software
What type of buyer are you?
Benefits of customer experience software
Key considerations
Market trends to understand
Customer experience software is closely related to customer relationship management (CRM) software, as well as customer feedback and customer service solutions. Where CX software differs is its focus on leveraging customer insight to create actionable improvements in the customer journey. This CX transformation can happen at the individual or organizational levels.
At the individual level, CX software distinguishes individual customers from your amorphous group of “customers," defining them instead by their personal needs and preferences. In other words, it helps you define your customers as they want to be treated: as individuals.
CX software can track individual customer behavior and preferences, flag individual customers at risk of churning, leverage predictive analytics to anticipate behavior, and suggest more personalized experiences for a customer or segment of customers.
At the organizational level, CX software can track patterns at key touch points throughout the customer journey, identifying pain points or problem areas internally. This could include, for example, a comparison of customer satisfaction scores between service channels or departments. By identifying weak areas within the organization, CX professionals can work toward company procedure changes and improve the customer experience externally.
Net Promoter Score impact analysis in CloudCherry software (Source)
Customer experience software typically offers some or all of the following functionality:
Predictive analytics | Uses artificial intelligence, predictive modeling, or machine learning capabilities to provide deeper insights and/or suggested actions for how to improve the customer experience. |
Survey management | Allows users to design, schedule, and conduct surveys, polls, and questionnaires, as well as to collect and analyze survey data. |
Data analytics | Collects and presents data in order to analyze and report key findings on CX performance indicators. |
Text analytics | Extracts meaningful CX data from text-based interactions using natural language processing or sentiment analysis to automatically quantify and categorize text data. |
Multi-channel | A broad group of applications designed to monitor the performance of and/or communicate through various channels. This could email, live chat, social media, and more. |
Closed loop/ticketing | Tracks customer service interactions or flags customer issues and automates the issue resolution process. Creates tickets to assign agents to resolve customer issues. |
Journey mapping | Allows the user to visualize and customize customer journeys, or analyze customer satisfaction at specific touch points along the customer journey |
Different companies have different approaches to CX management. One of the most significant factors affecting a company's strategy is its size and organizational structure.
Enterprise businesses: Large institutions and multinational corporations are ideal candidates for the most robust and full-featured CX platforms, due in part to the complexity of their internal organizations and the scale of their customer bases. Full CX suites can monitor customer journey changes across the organization and facilitate personalized experiences for many customers simultaneously, but are fairly pricey compared to narrower software options.
Midsize corporations: Midsize businesses can usually get by with less comprehensive CX management tools, so long as they can clearly identify all business units that impact the customer experience. Many midsize companies are finding that a certain degree of cross-department cooperation is needed to support an improved CX. Management tools that monitor interactions by sales, marketing and service departments can quickly identify internal inefficiencies that lead to a poor CX.
Small businesses: Small businesses rarely need the comprehensive CX management suites used by enterprises. Instead, they often opt for channel-specific or function-specific applications. They might, for example, choose a text analytics tool to monitor their live chat and email interactions. Alternatively, they might choose a single survey tool to gather feedback from their customers on the phone, in follow-up emails or when browsing a self-service page online.
While we've covered some benefits of CX software in the sections above, here are some of the most notable ones:
Better understand customers' journeys: CX software can collect and organize customer feedback at specific points throughout the customer journey, providing insight into moments that are going well and moments that need improvement.
Close the loop on customer issues: Some CX solutions offer "closed-loop" case management functionality. This means that when customers provide negative survey feedback or raise an issue, the software automates the issue resolution process, usually by creating a support ticket so staff can act quickly.
Break down silos by consolidating customer data: Most CX software is built with integrations in mind so that departments across an organization can get a deep, unified look into the customer experience. This could include operational, transactional, attitudinal, or experiential customer data.
Personalize the customer experience: Some CX solutions offer predictive analytics capabilities that facilitate individually personalized experiences, based on past customer feedback or behavior.
Explore qualitative customer feedback in-depth: Some CX software offer text analytics tools that can quickly analyze open-ended, qualitative customer comments, such as from surveys, reviews, social media, emails, or chat logs. These tools will generally code and group comments by topic, theme, or sentiment, giving you a big picture view of qualitative data.
When purchasing new software, it’s always important to take note of a few things during the buying process:
As CX software fragments, know what you're looking for. The CX software market overlaps heavily with related software such as CRM, customer service, customer feedback, and customer engagement—this results in a fragmented landscape. According to Gartner, as the benefits of a customer-centric approach become more well known, some vendors from related software markets are branding their products as CX solutions, which may not have full-featured CX functionality (full content available to Gartner clients).
Businesses looking for a full-featured solution will be pleased with all that a CX suite has to offer. At the same time, CX is broad, as it encompasses any and all types of customer experiences. In this way, businesses that want to focus on a particular type of customer experience or that need a specific, narrow feature set should look at CX software as well the closest related market.