Customers are constantly pouring their hearts out to you through emails, phone calls, reviews, social media comments, and surveys. 

If you can analyze these at scale and extract insights like sentiment and key contact reasons, you can drastically improve their experience, earn long-term loyalty, and reduce churn. 

But historically, these insights are locked away in a black box for two key reasons:

1. Customer conversations are qualitative and informal, making it difficult to extract actionable data from them.
2. If you’re a mid-sized company, you probably have 1000s of conversations every day. It would be a huge undertaking to sit down and listen to or read through them all. 

Enter customer experience tools.

These solutions use powerful AI to automatically compile, analyze, and interpret customer conversations across all communication channels.

Then, they give you granular insights into what customers think about you and your products, so you can improve their experiences.

In this article, we’ll review 11 best customer experience tools for different purposes. 

Some of the tools, like SentiSum, are great at analyzing customer conversations and extracting actionable insights to improve CX, while others like SproutSocial are great for social media analytics and management. 

Let’s dig in.

11 Best Customer Experience Tools in 2024 - Summary

In a nutshell, here are the 11 customer experience tools we'll review in detail:

1. SentiSum 
2. Sprout Social
3. Hotjar
4. Birdeye
5. Qualtrics XM
6. CustomerGauge
7. Zendesk
8. Podium
9. Hubspot Service Hub
10. Smaply
11. SurveySparrow

Let's look at each.

1. SentiSum - Best for Holistically Improving Customer Experience on All VoC Channels

SentiSum's customer experience tool uses AI to analyze conversations across all channels at scale, including phone calls, emails, surveys, social media, support tickets, and more.

It then gives you granular, actionable insights like:

• Overall customer sentiment trends
• Key reasons for contact
• Sentiment for each reason of contact
• Increasing or decreasing issues or sentiment
• Areas of improvement in your product or service

For instance, Goutso, a D2C meal-kit delivery service company, uses SentiSum to centralize insights from 9 Voice of Customer channels in one place.

Now every team across the business can self-serve insights and make decisions that improve the customer's experience.

Joe Quinlivan, Head of Customer Care at Gousto, says:

Through using Sentisum we've significantly reduced the time it takes to unearth customer insights, and we now understand these at a much more granular level which allows us to quickly put actions in place to drive improvements.

In a nutshell, here's how SentiSum works:

1. SentiSum’s machine learning-based NLP technology processes and analyzes data from all your customer communication channels.

2. Granular tags are automatically applied to categorize each conversation’s customer sentiment, topic and keywords, priority, and more. The more data SentiSum processes, the more it learns and improves its accuracy.

3. The dashboard centralizes insights from all channels to provide easy access to key data and trends over time.

4. Our ChatGPT-like feature called Dig In does a quick root-cause analysis and summarizes the deeper issues affecting customers.

SentiSum is ideal for mid-market D2C and large enterprises that handle at least 3,000 support conversations per month. 

Let’s see how SentiSum stacks up in the five critical areas that make an effective CX tool.

Factor 1: It analyzes customer conversations from every VoC channel you use.

SentiSum provides a collective view of the customer journey by aggregating feedback from all your VoC channels.

• Multi-channel integration: SentiSum captures data from emails, chats, phone calls, surveys, and more so your team never misses a piece of critical customer feedback.
• Voice call analysis: While similar solutions only provide text analysis, SentiSum’s AI-powered software transcribes and analyzes every phone call to turn previously inaccessible data into valuable insights.
• Holistic view: You can quickly switch between feedback channels to get a quick and comprehensive understanding of customer interactions.

Factor 2: It populates quantitative, actionable insights and trends in a unified dashboard.

SentiSum allows your entire organization to make more informed business decisions with up-to-date customer trend data.

• Detailed sentiment analysis and topic trends: SentiSum helps you understand trends in customer sentiment and reasons for contact at a glance.
• Deep dive into topics: You can focus on specific issues to identify root causes of customer friction and make targeted improvements.‍
• Customizable dashboards: Tailor the dashboard to display the most relevant insights for different teams within your organization. See how SentiSum’s customer sentiment dashboards looks like below:

Factor 3: It evaluates how your agents are performing in real customer interactions.

Improved customer service starts with improved agent performance.

SentiSum helps you understand what your support team is doing well and what they can be doing differently based on analyses of their interactions.

• Agent performance metrics: SentiSum tracks metrics like average handle time and first call resolution rates. It also shows how customer sentiment changes during interactions to identify areas for agent improvement.
• Comprehensive interaction records: You can access detailed records of every customer interaction, including text, chat, and phone call transcriptions, with AI-generated summaries of each interaction.
• Recommendations for improvement: Performance insights will help you provide targeted feedback and training to your support agents.

Factor 4: It’s user-friendly and easy for anyone in your organization to learn.

SentiSum is easy for anyone to use, regardless of technical expertise.

• Intuitive interface: The user-friendly dashboard allows all team members to access and understand key insights quickly and easily.
• AI assistance: You can ask data-related questions to SentiSum’s AI assistant, Dig In, and receive quick, accurate answers.
• Quick setup: SentiSum can integrate into your existing set-up within minutes without extensive training or technical support (though our support team is standing by to help if you need it!).

Factor 5: It easily integrates with the programs you’re already using.

SentiSum integrates with your existing platforms with just one click to ensure a smooth workflow.

• Thousands of available integrations: SentiSum seamlessly connects with major helpdesks, communication tools, and feedback platforms like Zendesk, SurveyMonkey, and Trustpilot (see all integrations here).
• Secure and compliant: Our platform adheres to strict data security regulations to protect your customer data.
• Automated workflows: Set up prioritization and triage rules based on customer sentiment and urgency. Then, push these insights back to your helpdesk software to further streamline your team’s workflows.

With a CX tool like SentiSum, you can gain deep, actionable insights from your customer interactions to improve satisfaction, loyalty, and the overall customer experience.

2. Sprout Social - Best Social Media Analytics Tool

Sprout Social is a comprehensive social media management and monitoring platform for teams looking to optimize their CX efforts on social platforms.

Its robust cross-channel social listening features give you both qualitative and contextual analysis of different topics, hashtags, and keywords.

Key Features:

• Advanced analytics: With in-depth analyses of your social media performance, you can make data-driven decisions and understand the ROI of your efforts.
• Customizable reporting: SproutSocial’s reporting tools let you create tailored reports of the most relevant, actionable insights for different stakeholders.
• Team performance tracking: You can analyze individual and team performance with task management and response rate reports.

Sprout Social is excellent for businesses that use social media as a primary channel for customer service. 

However, for more comprehensive insights into customer interactions across all channels, including voice calls, a tool like SentiSum is a better choice.

3. Hotjar - Best Digital Experience Insights Platform

Hotjar is designed to help product teams better understand website user behavior and motivations so they can improve customer experience on your company website.

This leading digital experience insights platform offers hard data on what users do on your website or web app, why they do it, and how you can optimize their experience.

Key Features:

• Heatmaps: Visualize user behavior to identify areas for CX improvement.
• Session recordings: Capture and analyze user sessions to map the full CX, spot behavior trends, and fix bugs.
• Surveys and feedback widgets: Collect real-time feedback to understand user satisfaction and pinpoint areas for improvement quickly.

Hotjar’s visual insights and qualitative feedback on website user behavior is extremely granular and useful for improving the user experience on your website.

However, other tools like SentiSum analyze all customer touchpoints for a more holistic view of your brand interactions.

[Did you know Hotjar has used SentiSum to enhance its own customer feedback analysis? Read more about our work with Hotjar.]

4. Birdeye - Best Review Management Tool

Birdeye is a comprehensive customer experience review management software that can convert survey responses and customer reviews into actionable support tickets.

It offers helpful automations, integrations, and other tools to streamline feedback management in a unified platform.

Key Features:

• Centralized review and messaging inbox: Customer reviews and messages from multiple channels all come through to a single inbox for easier management.
• Automated surveys and alerts: You can send customer surveys via email, text, or messaging apps, and get automatic alerts for any new or updated support tickets.
• Competitive benchmarking: Compare your company against industry standards to identify areas for improvement.

While Birdeye is great for review management and competitive benchmarking, surveys aren’t the “end-all, be-all” of gauging customer experience.

A more comprehensive tool with sentiment analysis insights can help you cross-reference review data with trends from other customer experience channels over time for a more nuanced understanding of your CX.

5. Qualtrics XM - Best Platform for Contact Center Analytics

Qualtrics XM is a comprehensive customer experience management tool designed to give businesses a data-driven understanding of the buyer journey. 

This industry leader offers a holistic view of customer interactions and insights by integrating responses from various communication channels and data sources.

Key Features:

• Complete customer journey insights: Collect insights from customer interactions across 35 channels—including calls, chats, texts, social media posts, and surveys—in one place.
• Predictive intelligence: Qualtrics XM’s iQ engine offers predictive insights so your team can better anticipate customer needs and behaviors.
• AI-driven analytics: Built-in AI features automatically create after-call summaries, real-time prompts for agents, and useful visualizations of the entire customer journey so you can identify (and resolve) any areas of friction.

For contact centers and large customer support teams, Qualtrics’ detailed AI-powered analytics can give you top-notch training insights for your frontline CX teams.

However, the price tag may be too high for mid-sized or smaller companies.

While pricing information is not publicly available, many reviews note that the software is among the more expensive in this category.

6. CustomerGauge - Best Tool for B2B Customer Experience Management

CustomerGauge is a specialized B2B customer experience management platform for running and analyzing Net Promoter Score (NPS) programs. 

It links customer feedback directly to revenue metrics, helping reduce customer churn while encouraging upsells and referrals.

Key Features:

• Closed-loop feedback: CustomerGauge converts NPS feedback into actionable insights for sales and account teams, boosting customer retention and upsell opportunities.
• Revenue-linked analytics: The tool’s analytics can help you identify how customer sentiment impacts your bottom line and which high-value accounts you should prioritize.
• Customizable dashboards: You can visualize CX data and track account health with custom widgets, which helps you quickly address detractors and maximize engagement with promoters.

CustomerGauge excels in linking NPS data to revenue and managing B2B account relationships.

However, it’s not as suitable for B2C brands or those that want more comprehensive omnichannel analytics and insights.

7. Zendesk - Best Customer Support and Helpdesk Tool

Zendesk is renowned for its customer support and help desk ticketing functions.

The tool offers numerous built-in AI-powered features that help your team handle customer conversations efficiently across multiple platforms in a unified workspace.

Key Features:

• AI agents: Zendesk’s AI agents autonomously handle complex customer requests from start to finish, saving time and reducing costs.
• Omnichannel functionality: The unified agent workspace allows seamless customer support across multiple channels without switching systems.
• Agent performance tracking: The software’s AI-powered tools monitor service quality and provide insights into agent performance to ensure optimal staffing and minimal customer churn.

While Zendesk provides a powerful and flexible customer support system, it relies on a fixed (and somewhat rudimentary) rule-based natural language processing (NLP) for its automatic tagging and ticket analysis system.

Other CX analytics tools like SentiSum are powered by machine learning-based NLP, which learns from ongoing data inputs to evolve its tagging and categorization rules for the most accurate insights.

[Learn more about how SentiSum integrates with Zendesk to deliver more powerful customer experience insights.]

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11. SurveySparrow - Best Customer Survey Tool

SurveySparrow uses AI to transform traditional surveys into engaging, conversational experiences across 130+ languages. 

Since launching in 2017, it has evolved from a basic survey maker to a comprehensive experience management platform with robust features for improving the customer feedback collection process.

Key Features:

• Conversational surveys: You can create a variety of engaging, interactive surveys, including NPS and CSAT, that encourage responses and offer deep customer insights.
• Sentiment analysis: SurveySparrow analyzes customer feedback and survey responses to help you understand sentiment trends over time.
• Reputation and ticket management: While this platform’s primary product is survey creation and analysis tools, it also offers useful management solutions for online customer reviews and support tickets.

SurveySparrow is an exceptional customer listening solution with a lot of useful CX management features, including sentiment analysis.

While it does integrate with numerous tools and apps, you may not be able to bring every VoC channel you use into SurveySparrow.

8. Podium - Best Tool for Text-Based Customer Service

Podium is a leading messaging platform designed to enhance customer communication and feedback collection via text. 

With the ability to stay in constant contact with customers, Podium streamlines the process of resolving complaints and gathering reviews from multiple platforms.

Key Features:

• Omnichannel support: All customer communication and purchase history live in one place, so your team has all the necessary information at their fingertips before contacting a customer.
• Text marketing and payment processing: You can engage customers directly through text messages and simplify payment processes for a smoother customer experience.
• Online review collection: The tool centralizes reviews from various platforms to manage your online reputation effectively.

Although Podium excels in direct messaging and review management, other solutions provide a more comprehensive analysis of customer interactions across all channels.

9. Hubspot Service Hub - Best Integrated Customer Experience Platform

HubSpot’s Service Hub is an integrated customer experience platform that combines ticketing, customer service analytics, and knowledge base publishing tools. 

It connects to HubSpot’s native CRM, so your team has seamless access to customer data and can provide a better service experience.

Key Features:

• Workflow automation: Hubspot can automate repetitive tasks to make your processes more efficient and free up your team for customer interactions.
• Universal inbox: All communications channels are integrated into a single place, with contextual customer history information pulled from Hubspot CRM.
• Customer portal: Customers can use the self-service portal to easily track requests and access support resources.

While HubSpot Service Hub offers robust tools for managing customer interactions and feedback within an integrated CRM, you may not get the level of granular sentiment insights you need to make meaningful business decisions and improvements.

10. Smaply - Best Customer Journey Mapping Tool

Smaply is an advanced customer journey mapping tool that helps businesses build detailed journey maps, customer personas, and system maps. 

Trusted by companies like Dyson, Bayer, and Toyota, Smaply excels in visualizing customer touchpoints with various arc and lane tools.

It also has a multilingual interface, making it ideal for global teams.

Key Features:

• Detailed journey mapping: Create comprehensive journey maps with images, emotions, text, and communication channels to understand each customer touchpoint thoroughly.
• Multi-persona mapping: Build journey maps for multiple personas simultaneously to make informed decisions based on different customer types.
• Export options: Export projects to PDF, Excel, or HTML for easy sharing and analysis.

While Smaply’s journey mapping and persona creation features are excellent for informing an overall CX strategy, other tools like SentiSum offer more actionable insights for improvements based on real-time customer feedback.

11. SurveySparrow - Best Customer Survey Tool

SurveySparrow uses AI to transform traditional surveys into engaging, conversational experiences across 130+ languages. 

Since launching in 2017, it has evolved from a basic survey maker to a comprehensive experience management platform with robust features for improving the customer feedback collection process.

Key Features:

• Conversational surveys: You can create a variety of engaging, interactive surveys, including NPS and CSAT, that encourage responses and offer deep customer insights.
• Sentiment analysis: SurveySparrow analyzes customer feedback and survey responses to help you understand sentiment trends over time.
• Reputation and ticket management: While this platform’s primary product is survey creation and analysis tools, it also offers useful management solutions for online customer reviews and support tickets.

SurveySparrow is an exceptional customer listening solution with a lot of useful CX management features, including sentiment analysis.

While it does integrate with numerous tools and apps, you may not be able to bring every VoC channel you use into SurveySparrow.