Virtual training

7 Best Customer Engagement Platforms for 2024

The CloudShare Team

Jun 13, 2024 - 4 min read

Customer engagement is a major contributor to the success of a software-as-a-service company — and not just during the sales and onboarding process. Engaged customers are not only more loyal to your business but they’re also willing to spend more and likelier to promote you to friends and colleagues. 

According to a survey by Wyzowl, 86 percent of people feel greater loyalty to a business with a customer engagement program that combines onboarding, enablement, and education. Engagement also improves retention, making customers significantly less likely to abandon their relationship with your business. Given that an increase in retention of just five percent can increase revenue by up to 95 percent, that’s a pretty big deal. 

So, with all that in mind, here’s what you can do to increase customer engagement in your training, marketing, and customer support:

• Collect and listen to customer feedback
• Consider using blended learning in your customer education or at least offer multiple modalities
• Connect and communicate with your customers in real-time 
• Use analytics to continually look for ways to improve your engagement efforts
• Equip your team with the right customer engagement tools.

Let’s talk about that last one. There’s no shortage of customer engagement platforms on the market, but they definitely aren’t all created equal. With that in mind, we’ve put together a few of our top picks — the solutions we regard as best-in-class.

Our top 7 digital customer engagement platforms

1. Pendo.io

Pendo bills itself as an all-in-one, AI-driven product experience platform. Built to integrate seamlessly with your existing infrastructure, it enables you to quickly build and deploy personalized in-app guides. One of the more compelling features offered by Pendo is the ability to replay videos showing how users have interacted with a product or guide. 

The tool also generates qualitative insights about your customers and products using built-in AI. 

2. Drip

It seems like every year, there’s news about how email is obsolete and will inevitably be replaced by another communication medium. Every year, that news is proven false. Email remains one of the best channels for customer outreach, particularly in verticals like eCommerce.

Drip is designed to streamline email marketing efforts through powerful automation and comprehensive integration. The solution also supports SMS marketing automation. While technically tailored for eCommerce users, most of Drip’s features can also be applied to SaaS. 

3. Zendesk

Zendesk has been one of the biggest names in customer support for years, with the company building a well-earned reputation for streamlining and simplifying the support process. Today, Zendesk features an integrated customer support ticketing system, knowledge bases, and live chat, along with a fully customizable support center, all tied together by artificial intelligence. It basically equips your team with everything they need to provide timely and well-informed responses to just about any customer query. 

4. Twilio

Although developed as a cloud communications platform, Twilio includes a ton of functionality designed to help businesses engage more effectively with their customers across multiple sales channels, including email, SMS, and voice calls. It comes with a powerful and versatile API that supports direct integration into existing apps or services, allowing a SaaS company to incorporate branded, real-time interactions into its user experience. Twilio also offers multiple forms of automation and features intelligent voice and chat assistants to lighten the load for your support team. 

5. Netcore

Netcore is another AI-driven platform designed to improve customer engagement through better product experiences and outreach. Developed with multi-channel marketing in mind, Netcore uses generative AI for intelligent customer insights, predictive analytics, and product analysis via image recognition. It also supports a huge range of different messaging channels, including voice, push notifications, in-app messages, email, and rich communication services. 

6. Userpilot

Userpilot combines an intuitive user interface with powerful analytics to help businesses improve onboarding, engagement, product adoption, support, and customer retention. The core idea of the solution is that it’s made to support businesses with a product-led growth strategy, gain a deeper understanding of and cultivate a deeper relationship with their customers. Contextual Microsurveys are a major selling point of the platform in that regard, allowing businesses to quickly collect highly specific feedback from their most engaged users.   

7. CloudShare

We’d be remiss not to include our own solution on this list — after all, there are few things more engaging than interactive, personalized experiences. And that’s precisely what CloudShare allows you to create. With just a few clicks, your team can spin up compelling product demos, onboarding programs, and training courses tailored to each specific customer’s needs. 

We also support fast integration with other platforms and solutions through the CloudShare Integrations Hub and comprehensive insights into customer behavior through some of the most advanced analytics tools currently on the market. 

Engage, connect, succeed

Whether you’re educating existing customers, trying to attract prospects or onboarding new customers, engagement is everything. And while it’s certainly important to have a good customer engagement strategy in place, the solutions you use to support that strategy matter just as much. We’ve given you a few great options to get you started — the rest is up to you.

In the meantime, we suggest taking the time to learn more about how to build a better product onboarding process.  You might also want to check out our guide on choosing the best sales enablement platform.