Guide to Choosing a Customer Experience Platform in 2024

How important is customer experience, really?

Ask most business leaders and they’ll tell you customer experience (CX) is essential. Everyone and their mother knows that keeping your customers happy and investing in the relationship they have with your business will help you grow.

But customer feedback and insights are often the least accessible information in a business. 

Companies rarely have processes in place to regularly collect feedback. When they do, it’s usually scattered across multiple platforms, seen by only one or two teams, and rarely has a big impact.

Listening to the voice of the customer sounds appealing in theory. But how do you do that in the real world?

One of the easiest (and smartest) ways to start is by implementing a customer experience platform. 

What is a customer experience platform?

A customer experience platform is a set of tools designed to help a business manage and improve—you guessed it—the customer experience they provide. These tools typically include features such as customer data management, analytics and reporting, automation, and personalization. 

The purpose of a CX platform is to create a big-picture, comprehensive view of the customer journey.

Say a customer contacts your support team because they run into a problem. Another customer reaches out to your sales team to get a demo. A third customer sends you a LinkedIn message to ask about your pricing.

Typically, information about each customer would be stored only in the tool with which they interact.

A CX platform combines all of that.

Having a full view of customers across all touchpoints and from every channel means that you can better understand customer needs, preferences, and behaviors. Feedback from all of these sources is gathered in one place. It gives you a holistic view of your customers. 

With a modern CX platform you can now create more personalized customer experiences across the board, while also streamlining your customer feedback collection. 

The result? Actionable insights and learnings that help your business grow. 

Benefits of using a customer experience platform

CX platforms benefit your business in many ways. Their ultimate goal is to enable you to improve the customer experience. Improving your CX can result in:

• Better customer retention. 81% of customers make a second purchase after a great experience. 
• Increased lifetime value. 70% of consumers spend more with companies that offer seamless and personalized experiences. 
• Higher brand loyalty. 95% of customers report that customer experience is essential to brand loyalty.  

Improving your customer experience always pays off for your business. There’s one big question though: how do you know what to improve?

Most companies have a good gut feeling about the top issues customers care about, but it’s hard to quantify and prioritize those issues. That’s why a CX platform can make all the difference. 

A CX platform offers:

• Improved customer engagement. Having a 360-degree view of customers across all touchpoints means you can understand them better. You can tailor your interactions with them—across support, sales, and marketing—based on customer behaviors and preferences. 
• Personalization and targeting capabilities. It enables you to leverage customer data to provide personalized experiences. 
• Increased sales and revenue. Better targeting and customer engagement results in more sales. Real-time insights into customer preferences and trends makes it easier to identify opportunities for cross-selling, upselling, and personalized promotions.
• Streamlined customer journey mapping. Having one centralized place where all customer data is tracked makes it easier to identify gaps and see how the customer journey develops. 
• Centralized data management. Feeding all data into one platform creates a single source of truth for customer data, making it more accessible and enabling faster decision-making. 

Potential drawbacks of using a customer experience platform

Any time you’re adding a new tool to your tech stack, it’s important to keep in mind the potential drawbacks. Customer experience platforms bring a ton of benefits, but a few potential drawbacks or challenges to keep in mind include:

• Integration challenges. A CX platform is most powerful if it integrates with all of your data sources. If integrations aren’t available or you can’t connect to the right systems via API, a specific CX platform might not be ideal for you. 
• High costs. CX platforms—especially those targeted at enterprise organizations—can be expensive to implement and maintain, especially for small businesses with limited budgets. 
• Dependence on third-party providers. Some tools require customization to be set up for your company in the best way. That immediately makes you more dependent on the provider and reduces the flexibility you have to manage customer insights internally. 
• Data privacy. CX platforms collect and store sensitive customer data, making them vulnerable to security breaches and privacy concerns.

Again, remember that every new tool brings potential risks and drawbacks. The important point to keep in mind is that as you’re doing your due diligence and evaluating tools, to see how each tool stacks up against the others. 

The trick is to select a CX platform that works best for your situation. 

How to choose a customer experience platform

Choosing the right customer experience platform can feel daunting. There are so many options available in the market.

Use this quick guide to help in your decision-making process:

1. Identify business needs. Defining your business objectives and the goals you want to achieve is essential. If you want to improve customer satisfaction, focusing on a platform that offers great personalization and real-time analytics might be best.
2. Evaluate features. While most platforms have some features in common, prioritizing the features most important to you is a great starting point. 
3. Consider customization options. Going for a robust platform that can integrate with all the tools you currently use (such as your survey software or helpdesk) makes sense, but you might have additional needs to consider. For example, some tools might let you download the data to run your own analytics, while others might not. 
4. Evaluate vendor support and expertise. Reliable customer support is often essential in getting the most out of your investment. Some vendors will even offer a one-on-one onboarding experience until their system is up and running.

You probably don’t invest your money in the stock market without some thought and reflection. The same approach pays off when investing in new software. Be strategic and you’ll increase your odds of success!

6 Customer Experience platforms to consider in 2024

Lumoa

Lumoa is a feedback analytics tool with functionalities that expand into customer experience management, such as surveys, impact calculation, alert notifications, and task assignment.

While most businesses today use NPS, CSAT, and other numbers to assess how happy their customers are, they miss a way to tell what actions will move the numbers up or down. That’s exactly what Lumoa is for.

Lumoa’s customer experience platform helps you get from raw feedback to meaningful insights. | Source

Pros of Lumoa

• With 60+ integrations, Lumoa can pull customer feedback from everywhere, both text and speech, in multiple languages.
• Lumoa’s proprietary AI analyses all feedback and points you to the items that have the biggest impact on your KPIs. The nice touch is that you have full control on AI model and can adapt them to your needs.
• Lumoa does not charge by seat, so you can share feedback, insights, actions with all colleagues at no additional price.

Cons of Lumoa

• Survey capabilities may not meet the needs of complex research projects that require more advanced features such as branching and randomisation.
• Companies that process less than 300 pieces of open text feedback per month might not be getting the most value out of the solution.
• Lumoa provides support and customer success managers, but no in-house consulting unit that other more expensive solution can afford.

Price: Lumoa pricing page

Free Trial: Available with own-data and one-click integrations

Clarabridge

Clarabridge (recently acquired by Qualtrics and rebranded to XM Discover) is a customer experience management platform that helps businesses collect, analyze, and act on customer feedback. Its top features include sentiment analysis, text and speech analytics, personalized insights, real-time feedback, and machine learning.

Clarabridge/XM Discover allows for easy text and speech analytics | Source

Pros of Clarabridge

• Clarabridge was nominated a “leader” in The Forrester Wave.
• Having been around for quite some time, Clarabridge can leverage 150+ out-of-the-box industry models that can help you analyse customer feedback.
• Clarabridge offers advanced capabilities for text and speech analytics, making it possible for businesses to understand customer sentiment and identify trends.

Cons of Clarabridge

• While the industry-related topic models come from Clarabridge experience, they might not fit all needs and they can be rigid at times.
• Main focus is on feedback analysis, and features that are more typical of a customer experience platform might not be available.
• Since it is now part of the Qualtrics family, the brand and its capability are gradually being absorbed by the Qualtrics family of products.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Qualtrics

Qualtrics is a comprehensive customer experience management platform for collecting and analyzing customer feedback. Its features include survey creation, data analysis and reporting, customer journey mapping, and online reputation management.

Qualtrics offers a powerful survey creation and analysis tool | Source

Pros of Qualtrics

• Qualtrics is the market leader and has a strong reputation, particularly with enterprise companies. It is the safe choice.
• Surveys are Qualtrics’ bread and butter, and there is probably not a logic that Qualtrics surveys cannot manage.
• The breadth of features that Qualtrics offers makes it tick most boxes for most needs a business might have.

Cons of Qualtrics

• Being the market leader, Qualtrics does not come at a cheap price. The pricing structure (based on # of feedback, # of users, and features) can also be complex to understand.
• Its core focus is on collecting and analysing survey data, it was originally built for academic research, and as such analysing customer feedback from a variety of sources can be challenging.
• The product is complex, and for people who are not familiar with research practices, it might have a steep learning curve.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Create your 30 day free trial account

Aiwo

Aiwo specializes in customer contact intelligence. Analytics derived from customer contacts are used by the company to reduce costs, identify operational inefficiencies, and improve service for large B2C businesses. AIWO’s CX platform gathers data from multiple sources and integrates them into one platform to provide accurate insights into a business’s current situation.

Aiwo CX SaaS tool gives you an understanding from multiple angles. | Source

Pros of Aiwo

• Aiwo is one of the most affordable solutions in this group.
• The interface is user-friendly and that makes it easier for users to navigate the platform and get acquainted with it.
• Aiwo has a good presence in Finland, which makes it a good option for brands who process customer feedback in Finnish.

Cons of Aiwo

• Aiwo’s solution comes with little customisation, both in terms of dashboard and reporting, and in terms of topic models.
• It is a pure analytics solution, and as such it does not process KPIs scores (such as NPS, CSat, etc.), and does not evaluate the impact of different topics on said KPIs.
• Aiwo does not provide information on associated words, trends, type of customers, and this might limit the possibility to get insights that can translate into action.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Zenloop

Zenloop is a Customer Experience Management Platform that helps businesses turn customer insights into action. As a result of its evolution into an operating system, Zenloop has been able to address key issues associated with customer experience, including efficiency, analytics paralysis, and low ROI. Dissatisfied customers can be identified using real-time analysis and aggregated reports.

Zenloop UI shows NPS score and focuses on customer insights that can be translated into meaningful initiatives. | Source

Pros of Zenloop

• Zenloop’s core is on NPS, so it’s a good option for business interested in measuring NPS only.
• It provides value also for companies who process less than 200 pieces of feedback per month.
• On top of the NPS functionality, Zenloop provides automatic task assignment, which makes it an interesting option to drive action from insights.

Cons of Zenloop

• The breadth of features is quite limited, yet arguably the cost of Zenloop is not very different from other options on this list.
• While it provides analysis of open text feedback, Zenloop users might have to edit the topic models manually to ensure that it captures relevant and actionable feedback.
• Zenloop does not provide information on associated words, trends, type of customers, and more, that other solutions instead do provide.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Medallia

Medallia is a cloud-based customer experience management platform for analyzing customer feedback across multiple channels. Its primary features include survey creation, sentiment analysis, social listening, and AI-powered insights.

Medallia’s analytics can be viewed across the customer journey | Source

Pros of Medallia

• Medallia UI is visually appealing and gratifying.
• The breadth of feature is vast (including a mobile app to keep management in the loop) and it meets most of the needs a business might have when it comes to customer experience.
• A part from the solution, Medallia boasts a high quality in-house consultancy service that can help companies with their CX challenges.

Cons of Medallia

• The cost of the solution is on the high end of the spectrum.
• Obtaining insights from the analysis of open text feedback might result in a slow process, as it often needs input from an insight professional and some additional clicks that might hinder the efficiency.
• The use of Medallia is not always intuitive, and to make the most of it, users might have to go through extensive training.

Price: Consultation needed.

Free Trial: Not available.

Choosing the right customer experience platform for your business

Selecting the right CX platform depends on what you want to achieve.

Some CX platforms try to build solutions that work across many business areas, which makes it easy for you to centralize and simplify your tech stack. These tools can be great if you’re just getting started, but can cost a lot of time and effort to migrate to if you’re already using other tools.

If you’ve already invested in tools for managing customer interactions—like telephony, a helpdesk, and live chat software—you’re better off building on that foundation. Take a close look at more specialized customer experience platforms that shore up areas of opportunity, be it customer journey mapping or in-depth analytics.

Lumoa helps separate the signal from the noise to identify truly meaningful insights that will drive your business forward. Book a free demo with us today!