Has the digitization of customer experiences been a blessing or a curse to your business?
If you answered “both,” you’re far from alone.
The digital transformation that’s taken over customer engagement and support seems to have created incredible opportunities and vexing complexities in almost equal measure. And even though we’re now well past the dawn of digitization, many teams’ daily struggle still consists of making sure they’re doing more seizing the former than succumbing to the latter.
Luckily, there are powerful solutions available to help you make sense of it all and deliver for your customers. And luckily, this guide to Customer Experience (CX) platforms will delve into the types of tools and varieties of platforms out there, helping guide your search for the right platform to revolutionize your business’s approach to engagement and service.
Ready to find the right CX software platform for your business? Let’s dig in.
Key Takeaways
- CX platforms are designed to engage customers. Regardless of what specific type of solution we’re actually talking about, CX platforms are built to deliver greater visibility, insights, and efficiency to help teams—whether they’re contact centers to sales departments—better engage their customers.
- The CX platform features you need to elevate experiences. Explore the must-have features of a CX platform, from interaction recording to AI-driven analytics.
- A broad topic means a broad variety of solutions. There’s no one clear definition of “CX platform.” We’ll look at the most common examples—and cover some of the best CX platforms out there in greater depth—so you can find what you need.
What Is a Customer Experience (CX) Platform?
In truth, the answer to this common question is “it depends.” Ask three different people—experts, even—what a CX platform is and you’ll likely get three different answers.
Of course, we can’t leave it at that. Generally speaking, a customer experience (CX) platform is a software solution that’s designed to help businesses improve the buying and support journeys of both prospects and customers across the businesses’ various touchpoints and channels.
Sometimes, CX platforms are also referred to as CX management (CXM) software, platforms, or solutions. There’s also very frequently overlap between so-called CX platforms and technology termed customer engagement (CEM) solutions, customer journey analytics platforms, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, as well as voice of the customer solutions, customer data platforms, contact center platforms, and more.
What CX Platforms Can Do
As you can see, a CX platform might mean different things to different people, even those in the know. So, to further your education, maybe it’s better to describe what it is a CX platform does:
Typically, a CX platform is a software solution that centralizes customer data from various sources, including CRM systems, marketing automation platforms, and interaction channels (e.g., phone, email, chat, social media). It acts as a central hub and a central source of data-driven intelligence, enabling businesses to gain a holistic, 360-degree view of the customer’s journey, or an aspect of it.
This unified view of customer interaction data empowers organizations to better understand consumer behavior, preferences, and needs across touchpoints—and it can help facilitate the creation of experiences that are more personalized, more consistent, and more likely to drive positive outcomes.
Of course, precisely how exactly a CXM platform does so varies from type to type, tool to tool. For instance:
- A CRM system will track and unify records of interactions to help teams manage relationships throughout the customer lifecycle.
- A contact center platform will help manage and enable direct customer communications across channels.
- A customer journey or interaction analytics platform may collect and analyze aspects of customer interactions to offer insights on how to improve key service or sales metrics.
Meanwhile, these different systems might interact with each other through integrations to provide even more comprehensive insights into and control over the customer experience.
The Benefits of a Customer Experience Platform
Even though they might ultimately do so in various ways, CX management platforms can play a critical role for today’s businesses, delivering an array of important benefits in customer service, marketing, sales, and beyond. For instance:
- Improved Visibility and Data-Driven Decision-Making: CX platforms all tend to start from the standpoint that “you can’t improve what you can’t measure.” By delivering insights into customer behavior and preferences, CX management platforms support improved decision-making backed by data.
- Improved Personalization and Customer Satisfaction: By informing and facilitating more personalized and seamless experiences with these insights, CX platforms help businesses keep up with and even exceed customers’ ever-changing expectations, leading to increased overall satisfaction.
- Increased Customer Loyalty and Revenue Retention: Satisfied customers are more likely to remain loyal customers, resulting in higher retention rates and reduced churn.
- Enhanced Brand Reputation and Advocacy: Positive customer experiences are critical to a strong brand reputation. But enhanced perception isn’t just its own reward: these satisfied customers are more likely to become vocal brand advocates who recommend your business to others and help foster further growth.
Features to Look for in a Customer Experience Platform
When selecting a CX platform, it all comes down to your business’s particular needs. However, every organization should be on the lookout for the following essential CX management features:
AI-Driven Analytics and Reporting
As we’ve covered, so much of the power of CX platforms lies in their ability to provide visibility into customer behavior and their interactions with your business. Robust analytics and reporting capabilities should not only provide these deep insights into customer behavior and the effectiveness of CX initiatives but also eliminate much of the difficulty involved. With the help of AI, machine learning, and predictive capabilities, leading CX platforms don’t just deliver insights—they help accelerate the time to impact.
Sentiment Analysis
Understanding customer sentiment is crucial for gauging the effectiveness of CX initiatives and identifying areas for improvement. CX platforms should be able to deliver sophisticated sentiment analysis—that is, insights that go beyond simple positive/negative classifications.
Look for a solution that leverages natural language processing to accurately detect more nuanced emotions, identify the drivers behind those feelings, and pinpoint specific interactions or channels where sentiment is strongest. This granular understanding allows businesses to proactively address negative experiences, capitalize on positive feedback, and tailor agent coaching to improve future interactions.
Personalization and Targeting
Personalization is no longer something that businesses can deliver under ideal circumstances—it’s something each customer expects, all the time and across virtually every touchpoint. Your choice of CX platform should empower your teams—especially frontline employees—to deliver tailored interactions, whether by providing the tools to segment audiences based on needs, offering easy access to customer histories, or fueling smarter marketing and sales strategies with insights based on what your customers really think.
Overall Ease of Use
A CX platform is only as effective as its adoption rate. That’s why finding a solution that your teams can use effectively—and even want to use—is absolutely paramount. Be sure that your CX management platform offers an intuitive interface, streamlined workflows, and readily accessible information for all users, regardless of their technical expertise.
By simplifying the process of accessing and analyzing CX data, businesses can empower their teams to make data-driven decisions and power continuous improvement.
Seamless Integrations and Other Business Systems
No customer interaction happens in a vacuum. Your CX platform—and your overall tech stack—should reflect that. Seamless integration with existing CRM, ERP, and other business systems is essential for a CX platform.
Ultimately, you should be after a platform that brings you closer to having a single source of truth on the customer journey. Choose a solution that breaks down siloes rather than creating new ones.
The Best CX Platforms for Every Need
Choosing the right CX platform can feel overwhelming with so many options available. Explore the solutions below to get a better sense of what leading platforms in different categories can deliver for your business.
1. Calabrio ONE: The Best CX Management Platform for Contact Centers
Calabrio ONE is a contact center workforce optimization software that unites workforce management, conversation intelligence, and AI-driven business intelligence solutions within one comprehensive suite.
Features
- Interaction Recording and Quality Management: Capture and automatically 100% of customer interactions to quickly identify issues and take action to improve experiences.
- Leading Workforce Management: Optimize staffing levels, create efficient schedules, and forecast call volumes to increase productivity and improve service quality.
- Trending Topics Tool: Leverage AI to automatically break customer conversations into a manageable list of the most common topics and pressing concerns.
- Agent Coaching and Performance Management: Get automated insights into agent performance, identify training needs, and personalize coaching.
- Real-Time Dashboards and Reporting: Monitor key metrics and track performance within intuitive dashboards. Leverage AI to improve self-service and empower users without technical expertise.
Pros and Key Differentiators
- Comprehensive Suite: Get a complete set of tools for managing contact center operations and optimizing both agent and customer experiences
- Deep Analytics: Leverage rich, automatically generated insights into agent performance, customer interactions, and overall customer service and sales effectiveness.
- Focus on Agent Empowerment: Calabrio ONE equips agents with the intuitive tools and easy access to insights they need to stay engaged and deliver improved outcomes.
- Solutions Built to Scale: The true-cloud platform scales alongside organizations and can be adapted to the needs of both small and large contact centers.
2. Genesys Cloud: A Leading Contact Center Solution
Genesys Cloud is a unified, all-in-one cloud contact center platform that streamlines customer interactions across multiple channels, offering features like omnichannel routing, workforce engagement management, and self-service options.
Features
- Omnichannel Routing: Route customer interactions to the most appropriate agent based on skills, availability, and context.
- Self-Service Options: Provide customers with convenient self-service options, such as IVR and chatbots.
- Open API and Integrations: Seamlessly integrate with other business systems and applications.
- Cloud-Based Platform: Offers scalability, flexibility, and easy deployment.
Pros and Key Differentiators
- Unified Platform: Combines all essential contact center functionalities into a single cloud-based solution.
- Emphasis on Developer Ecosystem: Genesys’s robust and open API is a significant differentiator, enabling deep customizations and integrations beyond pre-built connectors. This empowers businesses to build highly tailored solutions.
- Predictive Routing and AI: Genesys leverages AI and machine learning to optimize routing, going beyond basic skills-based routing to predict customer needs and agent suitability for improved matchmaking.
3. Qualtrics XM: Feedback and Survey Tools
Qualtrics XM is a CX platform solution focused on capturing and analyzing customer feedback through surveys, feedback forms, and other listening channels to uncover actionable insights that improve customer experiences.
Features
- Survey Design and Distribution: Create sophisticated surveys and distribute them across multiple channels.
- Real-Time Reporting and Analytics: Monitor customer feedback in real time and gain actionable insights.
- Text and Sentiment Analysis: Understand customer sentiment and identify key themes in open-ended feedback.
- Customer Journey Mapping: Visualize the customer journey and identify areas for improvement.
- Action Planning and Workflow: Create action plans based on customer feedback and track progress.
Pros and Key Differentiators
- Comprehensive Feedback Platform: Offers a wide range of tools for collecting, analyzing, and acting on customer feedback.
- Sophistication of Survey Design: Qualtrics excels in its survey building capabilities, allowing for complex logic, branching, and embedded data to create highly targeted and insightful surveys.
- Focus on Experience Management (XM): Qualtrics goes beyond just collecting feedback; it emphasizes the entire XM lifecycle, from design and data collection to analysis, action planning, and ongoing improvement.
- Advanced Text Analytics and AI: Qualtrics invests heavily in natural language processing and AI to analyze open-ended feedback, identifying trends, sentiment, and key drivers of customer behavior.
4. Salesforce: Robust CRM
Salesforce is a leading CRM platform that helps businesses manage customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle, offering features for contact management, sales automation, marketing automation, and customer support.
Features
- Complete Contact Management: Centralize customer data and track interactions across all touchpoints.
- Sales Automation: The platform’s bread-and-butter offering is the ability to automate sales processes, manage leads, and track opportunities.
- Marketing Automation: Users can also create and manage marketing campaigns, personalize communications, and monitor results over time.
- Centralized Customer Support: Provide customer support through multiple channels, manage cases, and measure customer satisfaction all in one platform.
- Extensive App Ecosystem: As one of the biggest names in CRM, a massive number of solutions are designed to plug into Salesforce’s solutions, giving users access to a wide range of pre-built apps and integrations.
Pros and Key Differentiators
- Extensive Customization and Platform: Salesforce’s strength lies in its highly customizable platform, allowing businesses to tailor the CRM to their specific workflows and processes, more so than many other off-the-shelf solutions.
- Vast AppExchange Ecosystem: The AppExchange provides a vast library of pre-built apps and integrations, extending Salesforce’s functionality and addressing niche business needs.
- Focus on Sales Performance: Salesforce has a long history of focusing on sales automation and effectiveness, providing robust tools for managing leads, opportunities, and sales forecasting.
- Community and Support: Salesforce boasts a large and active community of users and developers, providing ample resources and support.
5. Adobe: Wide-Ranging Leadership in Customer Data & Digital Experience Platforms
Adobe Experience Platform is the foundation for Adobe’s Experience Cloud, providing a comprehensive suite of services, including a Customer Data Platform (CDP), which enables businesses to unify customer data and deliver personalized digital experiences at scale.
Features
- Real-time Customer Profile: Unify customer data from any source—known and unknown—to create a persistent, real-time profile of each individual.
- Data Governance and Privacy: Control how customer data is collected, used, and shared, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations.
- Open and Extensible Architecture: Connect to existing systems and data sources with ease, leveraging open APIs and standards.
- Real-time Data Ingestion and Activation: Capture and process data in real time, enabling immediate personalization and action.
Pros and Key Differentiators
- Real-Time CDP at Scale: Adobe Experience Platform’s CDP is designed for large enterprises, handling massive volumes of data and delivering real-time personalization at scale.
- Deep Integration with the Adobe Experience Cloud: As the foundation of the Experience Cloud, the platform integrates with other Adobe products, like Analytics, Target, and Campaign, creating a unified ecosystem for digital experience management.
- Advanced Segmentation and Targeting: The platform allows for highly granular segmentation based on real-time behavior, predictive scores, and cross-channel interactions.
- Enhanced Customer Journey Orchestration: The platform facilitates the creation of personalized customer journeys across all touchpoints, helping businesses deliver consistent and relevant experiences across the customer lifecycle.
Learn More About Using Calabrio ONE for Your CX Needs
Navigating the world of CX platforms can be challenging but understanding the different types of solutions available is crucial for making a choice that helps push your organization forward. Whether you’re focused on optimizing your contact center, gathering customer feedback, or delivering personalized digital experiences, there’s a platform designed to meet your specific needs.
For businesses prioritizing contact center excellence, Calabrio ONE stands out as a leading solution—offering a comprehensive cloud-based suite of tools to enhance agent performance and elevate the customer experience.
If your focus is on building a contact center operation that delivers world-class customer service and sales experiences, book a demo today to learn more about how Calabrio ONE can help.
