Customer experience is, first and foremost, about what the customer feels through every part of the customer-supplier relationship – from desire through to support. Since it is so human-focused, it is less open to automation than other parts of modern business but, nonetheless, software solutions have a valuable role in helping an organization discover, monitor and improve the customer experience. We will look at five across the range – to illustrate that range of customer experience software. As always with software solutions, the right solution for a particular organization and situation depends much more on the needs and nature of the company than it does on the technical specification of the customer experience tools. Know what you need before you buy.
How customer experience software can support my CX efforts?
Broadly speaking, there are a few ways that customer experience management software can help:
- Managing interactions with customers. The core of these products is basically help desk facilitation, allowing the capture and management of customer issues. They will offer the customers self-service facilities and artificial Intelligence (AI) support to help them find information as well as the traditional call logging and ticket control features.
- Insight into how customers actually interact with your systems.
- Capturing customer complaints, comments and feedback, and generating and analyzing customer surveys.
- Building and disturbing information and marketing materials to customers.
Some examples of customer experience software
Of course, these divisions are neither exact nor absolute, some customer experience management solutions will cover more than one, or at least overlap into others. Some are best for large implementations, some better for small, others will scale well for growing (or shrinking) organizations. So, the examples we list here are not picked out as being the one to always go for; they are examples of the wide range of good software that is out there waiting for your assessment.
That said, here are 5 software products that might feature in your customer experience platform.
Freshworks
First, let’s say we could have picked any one of the leading ticketing/self-service/logging tools. Freshworks offer their service desk core product Freshdesk and link through to support, sales and marketing via their Freshworks 360 product. It offers ‘Omnichannel, Bots, and Self-service solutions for customer service’ as well as supporting conventional help desk operations. Freshworks now support large enterprises as well the smaller companies they started with, which demonstrates their commitment to scalability. And they still offer a free entry-level package and 21-day free trials.
A tightly targeted product that helps to discover how your users interact with your applications. It is an ‘AI-powered behavioral analytics product that helps marketers and application owners create a digital world customer can’t wait to use.’ Its central facility is in its ability to capture and replay every customer session so suppliers can see exactly any problems, misunderstandings, delays, and errors that the customer faces. It uses AI to detect anomalies – helping detect fraud and quickly address other issues that affect the customer experience – and generates struggle analytics helping understand why customers might abandon a transaction.
Medallia’s customer experience management cloud based solution is designed to capture the ‘voice of the customer’ through the capture of social, text, video, speech and online feedback from customers. It also supports survey creation and management. A tool, therefore, to help a supplier know what their customer thinks, or at least what they say they think.
Sprinklr focuses on the more proactive elements of customer experience management, helping organizations via five modules which can be taken separately or integrated to work together:
- Modern marketing – managing channels to get content to the right people at the right time.
- Modern advertising – personalizing advertisements across digital channels.
- Modern research – Listening to and learning from the market, customer, and competitive insights.
- Modern care – Increasing customer satisfaction and retention and reducing support costs.
- Modern engagement – Managing social media across 35 channels.
As the content – and pricing – implies, it is aimed rather more at larger enterprises that can support this range of proactive and reactive customer communication, but as a cloud-based solution does not bring any on-premise overheads.
Happy Signals IT experience
Happy Signals are a bit different from the other software companies we’ve listed – they built their business on the belief that a company should know how happy their staff are and maximize that happiness to deliver peak effectiveness. They’ve applied that now to helping companies understand how happy (or otherwise) the users of a service are. Their supporting product is called IT Experience and offers:
- Ready-made surveys and instantly visible feedback.
- Live Screens, to make target and performance data transparent to everyone.
- Real-time analytics to generate happiness scores and set experience targets.
Summary
Let me reiterate: these five software products are not the winners of some objective ‘who does things best’ exercise. Instead, they represent good, well-accepted, and successful products that illustrate the range of technology support available to organizations trying to improve their customer experience. They overlap with other tools and are all designed to interface with the purchaser’s existing procedures and technology. Which one – or ones – are right for any particular company or situation depends on many factors, and an analysis of requirements is needed and then that matched against what a tool can offer – and what you can afford in terms of price, disruption, and timescale. In other words, all the usual software-recommendation caveats apply – including the one about them changing all the time and so any list can go out of date quickly.
Caveats APPLY – including the one about them changing all the time and so any list can go out of date quickly.
