The 10 Best Customer Service and Customer Engagement Platforms

Revised February 16, 2023
Revised September 29, 2021
Revised August 3, 2020
Revised March 6, 2019

The emergence and spread of the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) has dramatically changed the game for both B2B vendors and customers. Producers of a wide array of products—from vehicles to machine tools to jet engines to officer copiers—now have access to the kind of user and usage data that, not long ago, only SaaS software developers could capture.

For suppliers, that means a vast new stream of data that can be used for marketing, warranty, maintenance, and other purposes. But it also means a dramatic leap in customer expectations.

Professional customers (i.e., those in business/industrial firms, government agencies, non-profits, educational institutions, financial services, and healthcare) are well aware of the data they are providing to vendors, just through normal product usage. They don’t mind giving up their data—as long as that leads to better support and product development.

They also expect service and even vendor engagement options far beyond phone calls and email. The ten tools here enable vendors to extend their support offerings to social media, online knowledge bases, and web chat. Some go even further, empowering customers to collaborate with vendors, and with each other.

Customer Service Management Tools

1) HelpScout
Google Review Count: 344

Email-based help desk software with performance reporting and integrations to popular web chat and voicemail apps. Includes searchable knowledgebase of articles and documents.

Sample review: “These top customer support tools will help you grow…(check out) HelpScout for nurturing and improving relationships with customers.” — Marketing Insider Group

Pricing: free or $20/$40 per user per month

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group

2) Zendesk
Google Review Count: 168

Email-based help desk software with performance reporting and integrations to popular web chat and voicemail apps. Includes searchable knowledgebase of articles and documents. Zendesk expanded its product by acquiring live chat software provider Zopim in 2014.

Sample review: “Zendesk is all about bringing harmony to your help desk and is designed to streamline your customer support system with neat features like ticket views, triggers, and automations.” — AppStorm

Pricing: five levels from $5 to $199 per agent per month

Showcase reviews: AppStorm, Marketing Insider Group, StoreYa Blog

3) Groove
Google Review Count: 145

Simple help desk software with ticket management for teams, a knowledgebase, support widgets, live chat (through Olark), email integration, and reporting.

Sample review: “Like Zendesk, Groove is another helpdesk that helps you offer awesome support. If you are a smaller business (and are not a tech guru), then Groove might be a better option for you.” — StoreYa Blog

Pricing: free or $15 per agent per month

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group, StoreYa Blog

4) Desk.com
Google Review Count: 141

Multi-channel help desk software with ticketing, case management, self-service support, and reporting. Owned by Salesforce.com.

Pricing: $20/$60/$100 per agent per month

Showcase reviews: AppStorm

5) Freshdesk
Google Review Count: 114

Multi-channel customer support software incorporating IT help desk with ticketing, CRM, live chat, in-app chat and support for mobile apps, a self-service portal, and performance reporting.

Sample review: “Freshdesk is an efficient customer service management application that features a collaborative shared inbox, automatic ticket creation in your helpdesk and the ability to categorize, prioritize, and assign tickets to your team. This transparent approach to customer service makes sure that two agents are never working on the same issue at the same time and ensures tickets get solved quicker, thus increasing customer satisfaction.” — AppStorm

Pricing: free or four levels from $19 to $89 per agent per month

Showcase reviews: AppStorm

Customer Engagement Platforms

1) Ning
Google Review Count: 210

A social community builder tool; create a community site for your brand with features including likes and share, member categories, blogging and commenting, social sign-in (members can sign in through Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google), sharing to social media sites, content moderation, and privacy controls.

Sample review: “It probably won’t be the subject of a Hollywood blockbuster any time soon, but the Ning platform allows you to create your very own Facebook. The app helps you play Mark Zuckerberg for your own online community of other professionals, clients, and business owners in your field. In this online space you can share ideas and network without the cocktail hangover.” — Social Media Explorer

Pricing: $25/$49/$99 per month

Showcase reviews: Social Media Explorer

2) Intercom.io
Google Review Count: 185

Tools to acquire (website chat), engage (targeted emails and in-app messages), educate (knowledgebase), and resolve issues for (team chat customer support, email, social, help desk) customers.

Sample review: “Intercom.io allows you to send targeted personalized messages to users of your apps.  Be more social with your subscribers! The best tool I’ve found lately is Intercom; a sort of CRM tool for SaaS software companies that makes it easy to see user activity and communicate with…application users.” — RazorSocial

Pricing: $49/$98/$110 per month

Showcase reviews: Marketing Insider Group, RazorSocial, StoreYa Blog

3) MindTouch
Google Review Count: 120

MindTouch repackages user manuals, FAQ content, product documentation, sell sheets, engineering specs, and other existing content into bite-sized, semantically rich microcontent—much easier for customers to search and work with, and more search-engine-friendly as well.

Sample review: “The idea is to make customer support proactive and not reactive by ‘stopping customer problems before they occur,’ MindTouch says. The company calls it, nebulously, a ‘product experience platform.’ Here are some concrete facts about it: it’s in the cloud; it’s got a web-based, self-service help center component; it integrates with SAP, Salesforce and Zendesk; it alllows for collaborative authoring; and it uses HelpRank machine learning to get smarter. ” — ZDNet

Pricing: contact vendor for quote

Showcase reviews: ZDNet

4) WorkOutLoud
Google Review Count: 108

WorkOutLoud is a secure, private, collaboration platform that lets you essentially create a private social network for your customers. It includes tools for blogging, group collaboration, surveys, and other functions that help customers “connect, self-organize, collaborate, present challenges, and share solutions” to improve customer retention.

Sample review: “(WorkOutLoud) has produced a platform where a company’s customers can connect with other customers through a digital community. In addition, users can view and interact with an event calendar built by the host corporation…Cultivating brand loyalty through the platform will hopefully reduce customer turnover for the businesses using it…Besides fostering brand allegiance, WorkOutLoud can also be used to gather data about a company’s customers and how those customers are using the platform.” — TECHdotMN

Pricing: contact vendor for quote

Showcase reviews: TECHdotMN

5) Engage
Google Review Count: N/A

Engage is a personalized one-to-one messaging / web chat app for digital sales enablement. Unlike typical web chat tools, Engage lets site visitors browse real profiles of your people, choose who to engage with, re-engage with the same individual on return visits, and know they are having an authentic interaction with a real, identifiable person. While standard web chat tools can be effective on sites with a high volume of low-value transactions, Engage is designed for account-based marketing (ABM) and high-value, considered purchase environments.

Sample review: “The legacy live chat you see on websites hasn’t seen significant innovation in the last decade. The idea of being in a chat queue or speaking with someone you don’t know in a tiny chat box is outdated. Engage…enables organizations to put their customer-facing professionals on their website in an authentic way. Visitors and customers see pictures, names, and job titles, they do not have to wait in a chat queue, they get to choose who they speak with, and they can come back at any future point and start a chat again with the same person.” — FinancesOnline.com

Pricing: $9 per user per month

Showcase reviews: FinancesOnline.com

More Tools

Drift
Google Review Count: 140

A website chat tool that lets you use chatbots to answer common questions or escalate more complex inquiries to a human; book meetings; customize the experience for known prospects in an ABM environment; learn more about anonymous site visitors; create “conversational landing pages”: and integrate chat with sales and marketing email.

Pricing: free or $50/$500 per month

Engati
Google Review Count: 121

A chatbot platform that can help you manage customer support; automate online sales and marketing interactions with customers; streamline HR processes like hiring and onboarding; automate transactional and commerce inquiries; and provide 24X7 IT support to employees for resolving simple technical issues.

Pricing: free; $19/$50 per month; enterprise pricing by quote

ProProfs Chat
Google Review Count: 120

Online live chat software that allows businesses to offer instant support to their customers and engage with their website visitors. ProProfs Chat can help your support team resolve issues faster, and provide quick answers to queries about your products and services. Post-chat surveys enable you to track customer service performance.

Pricing: four levels from $8 (startups) to $149 (enterprise) per month

Freshchat
Google Review Count: 111

A “unified, contextual conversational engagement” tool for customer service and marketing, Freshchat is an AI-powered self-service tool that works with messaging (WhatsApp,  SMS, etc.), chatbots, in-app agents for customer engagement. Live customer service agents can interact with customers across channels from a single screen. Agents get complete, real-time customer context information. Can be used standalone or in conjunction with Freshdesk on the Neo platform.

Pricing: free or $15/$39/$69 per agent per month

Surfly
Google Review Count: 110

A real-time web sharing / co-browsing tool that enables remote collaboration by showing others what you see in your web browser. A website visitor’s session can be shared with anyone (for example, a company support representative) without the need to install software, or even make any changes to the website. Useful for service, support, various types of consulting, training, and inside sales.

Pricing: $19 or $30 per user per month; enterprise $652 per user per year

Tidio
Google Review Count: 97

A customer experience platform for engagement from top-of-the-funnel prospects through long-term loyal customers. Create sales chatbots to greet site visitors, answer common questions, and boost sales revenue. Automate repetitive answers for customer service and billing, and use a smart ticketing system to efficiently resolve more involved issues. Solve customer problems in real time, offer discounts, and make recommendations based on browsing history. Integrates with wide range of tools including Shopify, Zendesk, Mailchimp, and Pipedrive.

Pricing: free or $16/$33/$241 per month

Hiver
Google Review Count: 96

Hiver enhances your Gmail account by incorporating all the essential email ticketing features within an existing Gmail dashboard, enabling you to deliver customer service without ever leaving Gmail. Because it works on top of Gmail and is designed for simplicity, there’s no need to learn another separate solution and onboarding new customer service reps is accelerated. It also provides collaboration features and analytics for performance tracking.

Pricing: $15/$39/$59 per user per month

HubSpot Customer Service Hub
Google Review Count: 91

Customer service software that works without or without the broader HubSpot suite (marketing, sales, and CRM tools). Features include 1-to-1 conversations, help desk ticket management (assignment, routing, and escalation), feedback surveys, knowledge base, team collaboration, live chat and chat bots, and reporting.

Pricing: $50/$400/$1,200 per month

Acquire
Google Review Count: 85

Real-time customer support suite offering AI chatbots, live chat, no-download co-browsing, video and voice calling, customer profile management (for targeted outreach and support activity monitoring), and analytics to help improve customer support.

Pricing: $25/month (one agent); $300/month (team); enterprise pricing by quote

SherpaDesk
Google Review Count: 81

SherpaDesk is an all-in-one professional services automation (PSA) platform the incorporates help desk ticket management and routing, remote desktop sessions, time tracking and invoicing, project budgeting and tracking, and a customer engagement/support portal. It also provides customizable reporting, and integrations to accounting and CRM systems.

Pricing: free or $39 per agent per month

REVE Chat
Google Review Count: 80

Engage, support, and retain customers with co-browsing, video chat, and live chat. Interact with your customers in real time on your website or inside mobile apps for higher engagement. Support and engage your customers on messaging apps such as Facebook Messenger, Viber, Telegram & Skype with feature-rich conversations.

Pricing: $14/$23/$45 per agent per month

CrowdControlHQ
Google Review Count: 74

Social customer service software that provides a central hub for real-time messages, responses and team collaboration. It can improve the customer experience using automated alerts and intelligent workflows across multiple teams, locations, channels and accounts. Features include social brand monitoring, team collaboration, compliance, and reporting.

Pricing: $108/$330/$462 per month (per PAT Research)

Knowmax
Google Review Count: 67

Knowmax is an enterprise-grade, omnichannel knowledge management platform that makes it easier to find actionable information from within the ever-increasing volume of business content. It helps customer service reps get up to speed and answer questions more quickly, while improving self-service with more accurate chat bot interactions.

Pricing: contact vendor

Helpjuice
Google Review Count: 60

Easy-to-use knowledge base software that can reduce support costs by enabling your internal users and external customers to easily navigate to and find answers to their customer service questions. Features intelligent search with auto-complete, analytics to help users find the best answers quickly, and multi-author collaboration capabilities.

Pricing: $189/$369 per month

Opentute
Google Review Count: 44

An elearning / social learning network / community engagement platform enterprises can use for delivering internal (employee) or external (client) training online. Features include course creation, chat, notifications, and progress monitoring.

Pricing: free or $299/$749/$1,499 per month

Parlor
Google Review Count: 41

Parlor is a tool that connects product and customer teams. It captures user feedback directly in-app, tracks each user’s prioritized needs, and aggregates what’s learned into a single system of record to help align your teams. Parlor is a feedback system that enables you to take a discovery-driven approach to product management through user feedback, research, and roadmap validation.

Pricing: free or $500/$800 per month

Vox by telbee
Google Review Count: 25

Vox is a voice version of webchat tools. It lets any visitor to your site record voice messages for you online through their desktop or mobile browsers. You can reply by voice whenever it works for you. You can listen or read, as voice messages are automatically converted to text. Uses include lead generation, customer support, and gathering site visitor feedback.

Pricing: free or $12/$18 per user per month

Xeno
Google Review Count: 4

Xeno brings all of your leads, customers, partners, and team members together in one collaborative, customer-oriented workspace. It consolidates external communication channels (email addresses, chat interfaces, Facebook, Twitter, iOS, Android, SMS, etc.), and includes a “smart bot” to help automate sales and support interactions.

Pricing: free or $34/$94/$290 per month

Showcase Reviews

AppStorm
FinancesOnline.com
Marketing Insider Group
RazorSocial
Social Media Explorer
StoreYa Blog
TECHdotMN
ZDNet

This was the 43rd post in the Best Online Business Tools series.

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#9: The 14 Best Marketing Automation Tools
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#12: The Five Best Infographic Creation Tools and Services
#13: The 28 Best Influencer Marketing Tools
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#15: The 24 Best Visual Content Creation Tools
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#17: The 20 Best SEO Rank Tracker Tools
#18: The Six Best Screen Capture Tools
#19: The 15 Best Special-Purpose SEO Tools
#20: The Four Best Online Survey Tools
#21: The 26 Best All-in-One SEO Tool Suites
#22: The 32 Best Twitter Marketing Tools
#23: The 29 Best Web Analytics Tools
#24: The 24 Best Email Marketing Tools
#25: The 28 Best Web Design Tools
#26: The 29 Best Social Media Monitoring Tools
#27: The 17 Best Project Management Tools
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#31: The 11 Best Social Media Campaign Builders and Ad Monitoring Tools
#32: The 12 Best Landing Page and Form Builders for Conversion Rate Optimization
#33: The 17 Best Photo Editing Tools
#34: The Six Best Accounting and Finance Tools for Small Business
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#36: The 17 Best Social Media Management Tools
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#39: The Eight Best Social CRM Tools
#40: The Nine Best Reputation Management, RSS, and Social Search Tools
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#43: The 10 Best Customer Service and Customer Engagement Platforms