Customer engagement tools are the key to a profitable customer experience. Knowing how to engage with yours customers and provide a good experience is essential to make your brand stand out, and sell more.
Fortunately, you can count on several tools developed to help improve the communication with your target audience, and guide them through the buyer's journey..
What Are Customer Engagement Tools?
Customer engagement tools are software solutions that facilitate ongoing two-way interactions between companies and customers, which enable companies to gather feedback and insights from the target market and allow customers a means of communicating their needs and interests.
As an organization leverages the analytical features of these tools, they get access to insights about people’s likes and dislikes, browsing behaviors, and purchasing habits.
With this information, sellers can tailor their brand messaging and marketing materials to appeal to buyers. In doing so, companies take a customer-centric approach that leads to a more personalized buyer journey.
Ultimately, customer engagement tools help foster a stronger bond between companies and customers, enhancing the buyer experience and the company's performance and service levels.
Why Should You Invest in Customer Engagement Tools?
As competition intensifies, the only way to stand out in any niche is by leveraging the tools at hand. There are many benefits of customer engagement tools, as they can help your company do the following:
Boost Sales and Revenue
Do you know that 86% of customers will pay more to get a great customer experience? So, striving to deliver excellent customer service is a surefire way to increase your sales.
You can use customer engagement tools to target, nurture, and engage your leads across various online platforms. The more you can facilitate a smooth customer journey and enjoyable experience, the more likely it is people will complete purchases—and return for more.
Increase Customer Retention
Customer retention is five times cheaper than acquisition. If you don’t do enough to keep your existing customers, there’s a lot to lose.
Engagement tools can improve the relationship between your brand and customers, as they enable you to go beyond business transactions to understand people's emotional needs. In turn, that will encourage them to stick with your brand.
Acquire Loyal Brand Ambassadors
The great thing about brand loyalty is that it doesn’t stop with your existing customers. When people feel a connection with your brand, they talk to others about their experience. In doing so, they help amplify your brand message, performing word-of-mouth marketing to attract new customers.
Build Credible Brand Identity
You can use customer engagement tools to gather feedback and adjust your brand positioning in a way that speaks to your target audience's expectations. Besides, you can add customer reviews in your website, which strengthen your brand's authority and credibility.
Shorter Sales Cycles
As you invest in getting to know your customers, and their needs and interests, you can enhance your marketing funnel based on their behavior and preferences. Put simply: customer engagement tools allow you to make it easier for people to get what they want from you. With a more informed sales process, you can reduce sales cycles to close leads quickly.
12 Customer Engagement Tools to Consider for 2025
Now that you know how engagement tools can improve your relationships and grow your business, it’s time to narrow down your choices.
1. Live Chat
Customer engagement tools - live chat
Live chat is one of the best customer engagement tools because it enables companies to quickly resolve issues or answer queries in real-time. Instead of waiting hours or days for a response, people can use live chat to get instant answers. As customers prefer this medium over social media and email help, it's a no-brainer for customer service and sales teams.
Jivochat is an omnichannel messenger platform. Its live chat feature allows businesses to interact with existing customers and prospective buyers through many different channels in real-time. This platform includes a customizable 360° support system, and users can create message funnels, attend to support requests, trigger callbacks, and sync all communications directly into a CRM.
Key features:
- Live chat triggers
- Website visitor tracking
- Chat transfers and routing
- Multilingual
- CRM integrations
2. Chatbots
Customer engagement tools - chatbots
A chatbot is an artificial intelligence (AI) software capable of simulating conversations with human users, typically through written or spoken natural language on websites, mobile apps, or messaging applications.
The main advantages of chatbots for customer engagement are that chatbots can operate 24/7, without breaks or human errors. In fact, with machine learning at their core, chatbots continually learn from their customer service interactions, and therefore, they get more efficient and effective over time.
This continual learning paves the way for greater customer convenience and satisfaction and offers companies more upsell opportunities and higher conversion rates.
JivoChat offers chatbot services that help businesses reduce their support workload by 20% or more, and increase sales volume.
Key features:
- Chatbot widget
- Customizable workflows
- Automated routing
- Omnichannel configurations (chat, email etc)
- Knowledge base integration
- Multi-lingual
- Notifications
- Offline forms
- CRM integration
3. AI Agent
Customer engagement tools - AI agent
An AI agent is a system or a program powered by artificial intelligence that can perform tasks independently. It has multiple abilities, such as natural language processing, problem-solving, and decision-making.
They can interact with their environment, collect data, and use it to complete actions according to their goals. For example, you can use AI agents for customer support. The AI agent will talk with the customer to understand their issue, look for the best solution, and help the customer solve their demand.
With the JivoChat AI agent, you can solve up to 80% of conversations automatically, diminishing the response time on your company's communication channels, and simultaneously improving customer experience.
Our AI agent analyzes your database and the customer's previous interactions to provide personalized answers with the most effective solution to each case. It learns with every interaction and improves continuously.
Key features:
- Available 24/7
- Responds within 1-4 seconds
- Multi-lingual
- Personalized support
- Integrates with multiple channels
- Constantly learning and improving
4. Knowledge Bases
Customer engagement tools - Knowledge base
Source: Zendesk
Building a central repository or knowledge base is a large project, but definitely one worth undertaking if you want to improve customer satisfaction and engagement.
This type of customer engagement tool offers access to valuable information about your business, products, and services. People can peruse the content at their leisure and find quick answers to frequently asked questions whenever they need.
A great example of a knowledge base tool is Zendesk, which is a customer support solution built to help businesses serve their audience and improve customer relationships.
Key features:
- Simple search functionality
- Reporting that highlights knowledge base gaps
- Translate articles into 40+ different languages
5. Customer Surveys
Survey tools are an essential customer engagement tool to help you understand the needs and desires of your target audience.You can conduct surveys to collect feedback on what your customers—both new and returning—think about your brand.
Then, you can harness these insights to guide your decision-making and brand development processes. Over time, a well-defined feedback loop with surveys will help companies improve customer support and the buying experience.
Customer engagement tools - SurveyMonkey
Source: SurveyMonkey
SurveyMonkey is a popular survey service. You can choose from an array of customizable, easy-to-use survey templates and study the resulting data to increase engagement with existing buyers and new prospects alike.
Key features:
- Question bank to help overcome writer’s block
- Personalize the survey experience with "Survey Logic" and advanced branching
- Question skip logic
- Supports audio/images/video
- Question and answer piping
6. Collecting and Analyzing User Feedback
Customer engagement tools Usersnap
Source: Usersnap
Usersnap is a leading feedback management platform designed to streamline the process of collecting and analyzing user feedback. Whether you're gathering insights for website optimization or product development, Usersnap offers a range of features to enhance your feedback collection experience.
Key features:
- Customizable Feedback Forms
- Visual Feedback
- Feedback Collaboration
- Integrations with Jira or Azure DevOps and many other tools
Pricing: Usersnap offers a variety of pricing plans to suit different needs, starting from $69 per month for basic features. Premium plans with advanced functionalities are available at higher price points, with options for monthly or annual billing. Additionally, Usersnap offers a free trial period for new users to explore its features and determine the best fit for their feedback management needs.
7. Email Marketing
Customer engagement tools - Mailchimp
Source: Mailchimp
Email marketing is a powerful and effective engagement tool to reach out to your customers. When you tailor emails with casual, conversational language and personalization, you can drive engagement. People are more inclined to read emails that have a personal touch, and email is an effective way to cut through the noise of cluttered social media channels.
According to HubSpot's round-up of email marketing stats for 2020, 73% of millennials want to receive emails from businesses. Over that year, 78% of marketers recorded an increase in their email engagement.
With an email marketing tool like Mailchimp, you can foster stronger relationships with your followers through personalized newsletters and earn their trust before sending more promotional emails. With this connection, you can build up customer engagement in an organic, natural way.
Key features:
- A/B testing
- Auto-responders
- Drip campaigns
- Event-based automations
8. Social Networks
Customer engagement tools - LinkedIn
Source: LinkedIn
Social media began as a means of networking with people in local areas before spreading globally. Now, these platforms offer a vast selection of tools for marketing, sales, and customer engagement.
Businesses across all industries can't afford to ignore the immense potential of social media. With a clever strategy and smart use of these platforms, you can nurture an audience that will promote your brand and your mission.
The right social media platform depends on your business and your audience. For example, brands targeting Gen Z and young millennials may favor Snapchat, Instagram, and TikTok.
While an omnichannel approach is a good idea, small startups with limited resources may find greater returns by focusing on just one or two platforms. The rise of remote work has contributed to massive growth on LinkedIn in recent years, which presents excellent opportunities for building a professional network in the B2B space.
Key features:
- Two-way messaging
- Retargeting ads
9. Video Calls
Customer engagement tools - video call
Video call can be a valuable asset to present your product to customers and close deals. Mainly if you are selling a service or a product in the SaaS sector. With the video call, you can show the product in details and immediately answer any doubt the client may have.
With JivoChat, you can count on an easy-to-use video call app, available for Android and iOS. It also has a version for computers. Clients can request a video meeting through the live chat on your website. They don't have to install anything else to get in contact with you. All they need to do is leave their phone number so you can call them via video.
Key features:
- Audio and video conferencing
- Group live chat
- Video webinars
10. Push Notifications
Customer engagement tools - Pushbots
Source: PushBots
Push notification software helps brands engage users on mobile devices by sending instant messages directly to users.
These customer engagement solutions are used in marketing to communicate with users in multiple ways. For example, businesses can use this tool to:
- Provide information, like flight details or sports results
- Send news and weather updates
- Improve customer experience with promotional offers and order tracking updates
- Notify customers about newly published content
With tools like PushBots, you can send notifications directly to your customer's device home screen on any mobile platform. This tool integrates to communicate in your audience’s preferred language, and you can track the insights using the built-in analytics.
Key features:
- Campaign Segmentation
- Contextual Targeting
- Notification Scheduling
11. Loyalty Programs
Customer engagement tools - Loyalty programs
Source: Fivestars
Companies can run loyalty programs to reduce churn and retain more of their existing customers. Better yet, as people stay with your brand, you increase their lifetime value. Retention programs like Fivestars allow businesses to onboard new clients using loyalty programs and then offer unlimited promotions.
Key features:
- Tag members
- Segment email campaigns
- Personalize rewards
- Track referrals
12. Retargeting Ads
Customer engagement tools - Retargeting ads
Source: AdRoll
Retargeting is a form of advertising that enables a business to reconnect with people who have already interacted with their brand in some way. For example, the user may have visited the business's website or social media pages or interacted with blog content, video content, or a mobile app.
Nowadays, retargeting ads are a popular customer engagement tool that helps businesses re-engage with prospects because the chances of conversion on further interactions are up to 150% higher.
AdRoll is a leading remarketing solution with robust tracking tools and data analysis features. You can retarget customers using Google, Bing, or social media channels and apply strategies like customer segmentation and automation.
Key features:
- Audience and behavioral targeting
- Geotargeting
- Cross channel attribution
- Dynamic ad creatives
- Abandoned cart recovery
- Automated product recommendations
