Customer engagement has become a cornerstone of marketing and sales processes. As digital transformations bring more businesses online, potential customers have more places to divert their attention. Fighting for it, though customer engagement solutions, is a way to ensure that customers don’t switch sides by chance.

Customer engagement solutions can be many different pieces of software. From live chat integrations to video calls and data analytics, the options available are nearly limitless. Combining several customer engagement software solutions into a tech stack is the preferred method, however.

To help you create the best customer engagement solution stack, we’ve collected the greatest options available on the market and listed them out below.

Best customer engagement solutions

1. SnapCall - unique customer engagement solution

Features:

• Video calling integration available on any website, application, CRM, or platform.

• Advanced within-call features such as payment requests, watch together, input requests, and more.

• Free version available.

• Paid plans start from $16 per month per user.

SnapCall is a customer engagement solution that enables video calling capabilities on any website, platform, or application. They also easily integrate with most other popular customer engagement solutions such as Zendesk, LiveChat, Intercom, Kustomer, and many others.

While video calling (and soon-to-be live streaming) are the main features of SnapCall, the within-call capabilities are quite impressive as well. Participants can share screens with Picture-in-Picture mode, send payment requests through PayPal, request that others turn on cameras and microphones, and much more.

As such, SnapCall provides a completely unique service for digital businesses looking to improve the results of their customer interactions. Organizations can reduce the amount of written conversations they have with customers or reach them with calls and respond quicker than ever before.

On the pricing side, SnapCall has a basic plan that’s available for a single user that holds most of the advanced and basic features. Teams can start out with $16 per user per month, which enables some extra features as well.

All in all, SnapCall is a unique solution that enables businesses to revolutionize customer interactions. It’s something that nearly any business model can benefit from as long as they have the personnel to take advantage of video calls.

2. Zendesk - industry-leading customer engagement solution

Features:

• Live chat, CRM, and management platform in one.

• Split it into two products - one for sales and one for support.

• Free trial available.

• Cheapest plan (fewest features) $19 per agent per month.

Zendesk is an all-in-one customer engagement solution that gives numerous advanced capabilities to small and midsize businesses. They offer a consistent way to manage omnichannel customer interactions, which can include SMS, email, and chat.

They are one of the most widely used customer engagement platforms in the world as they not only provide a great starting package, but have numerous integrations available that can enhance the experience even further. For example, Zendesk has native integrations with the aforementioned SnapCall, which adds live calling functionalities to the interface.

Additionally, the base feature set can be utilized by both sales and support teams. Their software is impressively advanced. Zendesk has some of the best chatting, ticketing, and customer data management capabilities out of all customer engagement solutions.

Unfortunately, Zendesk doesn’t give you everything in one go. Features are separated out into two distinct products, one of which is intended for customer support and the other one for sales. So, if you need both, you’ll be paying twice. They can be worth the money, though, as Zendesk largely functions as an all-in-one solution.

In the end, Zendesk is one of the most popular digital engagement platforms in the world for good reason. The solution isn’t all that expensive (although it can scale quickly) and provides numerous powerful features while being extremely reliable.

3. LiveChat - flexible customer engagement and support platform

Features:

• Customer engagement platform dedicated to support teams

• Additional features for sales teams.

• Free trial available.

• Paid plans start from $20 per month per agent.

LiveChat is a customer support-focused platform that enables businesses to manage journeys and issues effectively. Following from its namesake, it largely revolves around providing live chatting functionality across multiple channels.

A strong point for the customer engagement solution is the capabilities for the management of multiple channels. Users can create a single system out of most of the popular points of customer interactions such as social media, messaging apps (both OS native and software like WhatsApp), email, and many others.

All of those can be combined into a single seamless system that allows customer support teams to engage with potential clients in an effective fashion. Additionally, LiveChat provides numerous other features that help businesses optimize their processes such as data analytics, customization, and even integrations with other platforms.

Finally, it’s one of the customer engagement solutions that give you everything in one package. Some features are gated behind more expensive plans, however, there’s no splitting of products (although the brand does own several other solutions).

LiveChat is a great choice, overall, for companies that need a customer support solution for engagement and ticket management. It provides all of the essential and some advanced features at a great price and can easily be upgraded even further with various integrations.

4. HubSpot - all-in-one customer engagement platform

Features:

• Extremely powerful and versatile platform.

• Can be used to manage almost all customer-facing channels.

• Some free features available.

• Separated into 5 distinct products.

• Paid plans starting from $45 per month (per agent or per 1000 contacts) with an exception for the CMS ($23 per month).

HubSpot is well known across many industries as they offer a customer engagement solutions package, run numerous training courses, and have a fairly well established blog. In this article, we’ll only go through the customer engagement platform.

As a customer engagement platform, HubSpot is separated into 5 distinct products, all of which have their unique features. Listing all of them would be nearly impossible, but the common trend among all of them is that HubSpot gives everything businesses of all sizes need to manage their customer journey.

You’ll be able to get live chat, team emails, ticketing (and associated automation), various integrations and much more. In general, HubSpot is known to provide some of the best tools and features for customer journey management in the entire industry.

Unfortunately, that does come at a hefty cost. Not only are the features separated into 5 different products, but the pricing itself is also about twice the starting cost of their competitors. As such, HubSpot is often best used by those companies that have no budgetary constraints.

5. Kustomer - AI-driven customer engagement platform

Features:

• Omnichannel support.

• Customer intent detection through artificial intelligence.

• Free trial available.

• Paid plans from $29 per agent per month.

Kustomer is another customer engagement solution that offers omnichannel support with various other integrations, all aimed at optimizing the user experience. Just like most other customer engagement platform providers, they provide a CRM-powered chat functionality that can gather data and information from various other sources.

One of their unique propositions is artificial intelligence and automated translation capabilities. Kustomer integrates these features into the chats of customer support agents allowing them to maintain a better rate of real-time engagement.

Additionally, some other features, such as a customizable search functionality within the interface, aids customer support agents in providing higher quality services. In general, Kustomer is focused on helping businesses provide top quality service.

Unlike their competitors, however, they do paygate most of the powerful features. If you buy the more expensive plans, many advanced features get unlocked such as API integrations, real-time dashboards, and single sign-on. So, upgrading to more expensive plans might be in the books for any business that’s quickly expanding.

So, Kustomer is an overall strong customer engagement platform that provides a multitude of features, some of which are gated behind more expensive plans. If a company can pay for the more expensive plan, then it’s definitely worth the money.

6. Intercom - customer engagement software for enterprises

Features:

• Automation bots.

• Collaborative inboxes for teams.

• 3 separate products - Support, Engage, Convert.

• Customized pricing. Starter plan available from $84 per month.

Intercom is, among other things, a customer engagement software solution that provides businesses a way to create real-time interaction with visitors, buyers, and all other clients. Their customer engagement software package is separated into 3 products.

“Support” is the primary package for customer engagement. The other two focus more on marketing and sales and, as such, are mostly extensions of the customer support foundation. With the “Support” package, you can get live chats, workload management, team inboxes, ticketing, and much more.

Additionally, you can get easily customizable chatbots that don’t require any coding knowledge to set up, which gives a lot more freedom to your customer support team. Finally, Intercom adds an easy-to-manage customer data platform to every package they provide.

As with most other solutions, Intercom provides numerous integrations with other applications, allowing you to manage every step of the customer journey within a single interface.

In general, Intercom is a powerful customer engagement software solution that provides numerous amazing features. Due to the pricing model, however, it’s much harder to gauge how much value businesses can get out of it. Yet, it remains a strong option within the customer engagement software space, so, if you can land a good deal, it’s definitely worth your time.