8 Best Digital Customer Experience Platforms (DXCP)
Prashanth Kancherla
Apr 10, 2024 | 13 mins read
The world has become increasingly digital, especially in recent years, reshaping the way we live, work and connect. This transformation has touched every aspect of our lives, from the way we communicate, shop to how we access information. It has deeply influenced consumer choices and needs as well. With most interactions occurring online, organizations must provide personalized experiences on digital channels to maintain customer satisfaction and keep them returning for more.
- 81% of businesses prioritize digital customer experience, recognizing its pivotal role in business success.
- 73% of customers prioritize their digital experience over price and product quality when making purchasing decisions.
- 39% of CEOs identify digital transformation as the primary responsibility for their CIOs.
As customers increasingly engage online, businesses must blend technology with human touchpoints to create cohesive digital customer experiences. These experiences drive engagement, retention, and revenue, setting businesses apart from competitors and fostering loyalty.
In this blog, we’ll take a look at the best digital CX platforms and how they enhance customer and digital experiences, leading to greater satisfaction and business growth.
In this article, we will explore:
- 1. What Are Digital CX Platforms?
- 2. Table of Best Digital CX Platforms
- 3. What Problems Do Digital CX Platforms Solve?
- 4. Difference Between Digital CX Platform and Digital Experience Platform
- 5. How to Choose the Ideal Digital CX Platform?
- 6. List of Top Digital Customer Experience Platforms (DCXP)
What Are Digital CX Platforms?
Digital CX platforms provide a unified technology suite enabling enterprises to deliver consistent, contextual, and optimized customer experiences across all digital touchpoints. At their core, these platforms connect front-end customer enterprise communication channels with back-end data and workflows.
The omnichannel communication layer allows conversations via different mediums like chat, video, voice, or asynchronous messaging across websites, mobile applications, messaging platforms, and Internet of Things (IoT) interfaces. This prevents siloed communications at the individual channel level.
The customer data platform uses profiles, interactions, preferences, and other behavioral data to build a holistic 360-degree customer view. Plus, the consolidated data powers core capabilities like personalization during engagements based on purchase history or channel preferences rather than one-size-fits-all responses.
If that wasn’t enough, the customer journey orchestration engine maps trigger across channels to appropriate responses using automated workflows for trivial requests or routing to live agents for complex queries. Smart routing logic also assigns the right agent based on customer value, past interactions, etc., bringing context to personalized conversations. AI and automation capabilities allow bots to handle high volumes of repetitive requests and assist agents with customer sentiment or intent analysis.
By consolidating these key elements of customer data, front-end delivery and back-end intelligence in one unified cloud platform, CX solutions fill a vital gap that piecemeal systems cannot address. They provide the digital backbone enabling context, consistency and customization across customer lifecycle.
Table of Best Digital CX Platforms
Before we get into the details of each platform, here is an overview of the eight best digital CX platforms:| S. No | Digital CX Platform | Best For |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ozonetel | Call Center Solutions |
| 2 | Freshdesk | Customer Support and Engagement |
| 3 | Qualtrics | Customer Feedback and Surveys |
| 4 | Zendesk | Help Desk and Ticketing |
| 5 | Medallia | Customer Experience Management |
| 6 | Zoho CRM Plus | Customer Relationship Management |
| 7 | Adobe Experience Manager | Content and Digital Experience |
| 8 | Podium | Website User Experience Analytics |
What Problems Do Digital CX Platforms Solve?
Digital CX platforms address companies’ critical pain points in orchestrating excellent customer experiences. Let’s get to know these pain points and how CX platforms help solve them:
Fragmented Experiences Across Channels
Customers today use multiple channels to interact with businesses – websites, mobile apps, social media, call centers, etc. Without an integrated platform, the experience gets fragmented as they move across touchpoints.
For example, context is lost when a support query on social media has to be repeated on a call without visibility to the agent. Or a personalized offer seen on the website is not reflected in the email communication. CX platforms provide the unifying fabric by orchestrating omnichannel journeys with persistent context and personalization.
This prevents disjointed experiences that frustrate customers. Channels like emerging messaging apps can also be seamlessly integrated under one umbrella.
Lack of Context and Personalization
Each customer interaction is unique, and applying a one-size-fits-all approach leads to inferior experiences. CX platforms ingest data from all available sources like CRM systems, billing history, web behavioral data, etc., to build unified customer profiles.
This consolidated information provides contextual insights like past purchases, preferred channels, or queries raised to enable personalized real-time responses across touchpoints instead of generic communications. The customer feels understood and catered to individually rather than just another account.
Operational Inefficiencies and Agent Churn
Without the right tools and information access, agents struggle with time-consuming manual processes like toggling between systems, repetitive information requests, etc., degrading customer experience and staff morale. Intuitive agent assist capabilities in CX platforms reduce effort and time per query resolution, driving productivity.
Automation takes over high-volume trivial transactions, freeing up agents to focus on complex issue resolution and building customer rapport. Reduced mundane work and information access empower agents, leading to lower churn.
Limited Analytics and Business Insights
Detailed analytics providing macro- and micro-level visibility, like customer satisfaction trends, channel preferences, journey drop-offs, emerging queries, etc., are vital to continually enhance CX. However, legacy systems have poor analytical abilities, leading to blind spots around customer pain points and needs.
Meanwhile, CX platforms have extensive analytical engines providing actionable insights to optimize experiences, improve conversion rates, and increase customer lifetime value.
High Costs of Multiple Point Solutions
Organizations often adopt multiple siloed point solutions from disconnected vendors for engagement
channels, analytics, automation, etc. Maintaining and integrating these disparate systems is expensive, resource-intensive, and poses security risks.
CX platforms offer a pre-integrated cloud suite spanning customer data, omnichannel delivery, automation, and analytics – all from a single vendor on pay-as-you-go models, avoiding heavy custom software costs.
Difference Between Digital CX Platform and Digital Experience Platform
Here’s a comparison between Digital Customer Experience Platform (DCXP) and Digital Experience Platform (DXP) to help you get a better idea:
| Feature | Digital Customer Experience Platform (DCXP) | Digital Experience Platform (DXP) |
|---|---|---|
| Scope and Focus | Emphasizes the customer’s journey and interactions with a company. | Encompasses a broader spectrum, including both customer and employee experiences. |
| Target Audience | Primarily designed for external customers or end-users. | Targets a wider audience, including both external customers and internal users (employees, partners). |
| Components and Capabilities | Includes customer journey mapping, personalization, analytics, and tools for enhancing the customer experience. | Encompasses a broader range of capabilities, including content management, collaboration, and integration with enterprise-level systems. |
| Integration | Often integrates with CRM systems, marketing automation tools, and solutions focused on external customer engagement. | Involves integration with a more extensive set of enterprise-level systems, such as ERP and HR systems. |
| Strategic Focus | Geared towards improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, and engagement. | Has a broader strategic focus on creating a unified and consistent digital experience across all channels. |
| Holistic Approach | Primarily addresses external customer interactions. | Takes a holistic approach, aiming to create a cohesive digital ecosystem for both external and internal stakeholders. |
| Operational Efficiency | Focuses on optimizing customer-facing processes. | Aims at improving overall operational efficiency by streamlining both customer and internal processes. |
How to Choose the Ideal Digital CX Platform?
Some key factors to look out for when choosing a digital CX platform are:
Define your CX goals and priorities
Before starting your evaluation process, clearly define the critical business goals you want to achieve with your CX platform. What specific issues do your customers face today that hampers their experience?
Some examples could be a lack of context while querying, fragmented journeys across channels, and a lack of personalization. Outline the user pain points you want to influence directly through your CX strategy, like improving first-call resolution or lowering repeat queries.
Consider capabilities for different channels
Determine the primary digital channels across website, mobile, and messaging apps your customers employ today for transactions and self-service interactions. The chosen CX platform must seamlessly engage customers across these environments with relevant contextual responses as they transition from one channel to another. Evaluate the platform’s consistency in capabilities across channels to manage conversations, retrieve customer history, enable payments, and schedule follow-ups.
Assess integration capabilities
Real-time access to an integrated view of customer data is vital for relevant cross-channel personalization, so evaluate the CX platform’s API support and integration ease. It should readily connect to your technology ecosystem, like CRM and database systems.
Review API libraries, prebuilt connectors, and extensibility options to plug into proprietary enterprise software if needed. Confirm if core platforms like Salesforce and SAP are supported out of the box. The alternative of consolidating the capabilities of existing solutions under one umbrella platform is also appealing from an integration perspective.
Consider scalability needs
While stabilizing the platform for the current CX workload, equally evaluate inherent scalability to accommodate spikes during seasonal promotions or new product launches. The infrastructure should
flex to manage extra concurrency through auto-scaling available channels, bandwidth, and server resources.
Also, review peak traffic performance metrics and SLAs around provisioning additional capacity when demanded. Check strategies for globally distributed deployment across regions if your customers and agents are geographically dispersed to localize data compliance.
Review analytics and customer data management
A robust analytical layer built into the CX platform backed by an intelligent customer data model and segmentation capabilities should be non-negotiable. While interfacing with your existing data warehouse, the platform should let you easily track CX metrics like customer satisfaction, query resolution rates, and channel preferences.
Evaluate segmentation features to define audience groups who can receive targeted campaigns. Review flexibility around data models for custom attributes and relationships. Also, confirm contractual commitments and vendor capabilities on data security, access controls, and privacy protection needs considering regulations like GDPR or CCPA if applicable. Independent audit reports provide further validation.
Evaluate ease of use and time to deploy
The success of your CX platform relies heavily on cross-functional user adoption. Review the administrator and agent interfaces for intuitive navigation, dashboards, and workflow configuration. Prebuilt templates and low-code environments for simple drag-and-drop journey building are useful for business teams. Evaluate the scope for customization aligned to your brand guidelines and terminology.
Relatedly, speed of implementation is equally vital so you realize ROI faster. Assess options for staged rollout if you plan to migrate multiple existing channel systems in phases onto this platform.
Account for security and compliance requirements
As your CX platform becomes the core customer-facing element across touchpoints, evaluating reliability, data security, and compliance standards is paramount beyond just functional capabilities. Being cloud-hosted alone is not enough – review the at-rest and in-transit data encryption deployed. Audit underlying infrastructure and policies around data security, access controls, and protection against threats.
Furthermore, evaluate compliance with regional regulations like GDPR, CCPA, or sector-specific mandates relevant to your domain and geography. Independent audit reports from renowned agencies are more credible than the vendor’s claims. Check contracts carefully for clarity on data ownership rights who exactly owns the data – you or the vendor? Both aspects critically impact platform choice.
List of Top Digital Customer Experience Platforms (DCXP)
Here we take a look at best digital customer experience platforms that offer a comprehensive set of features to manage customer experiences across various digital channels, including websites, social media, mobile apps, and more.
Ozonetel
Ozonetel offers a complete digital CX platform that can help you deliver superior experiences across digital touchpoints throughout the customer journey and accelerate business. Our key capabilities include omnichannel routing to maintain consistent experiences, customer data and insights for personalization, automation through chatbots, agent assist features, and integrated analytics around interactions.
Journey Studio: Ozonetel offers a drag-and-drop journey builder that allows you to design customer journeys as per your specific needs. The platform is embedded with AI and NLP capabilities, enabling intelligent and natural interactions with customers.
Deep Analysis: Ozonetel’s Analytics helps businesses effectively capture the ‘voice of the customer’ insights. It allows you to understand customer complaints and identify potential causes of business loss. . Analytics is a powerful tool for data-driven decision-making, allowing organizations to continuously optimize and enhance their digital customer experience strategies based on actionable insights.
Seamless Integration: Ozonetel’s solution can integrate with third-party systems, ensuring smooth and efficient workflows. This robust offering empowers a business to create personalized and effective customer journeys, enhancing customer satisfaction and loyalty.
WhatsApp Switchboard: With this tool, your field staff gains the ability to promptly respond to prospects or customers via WhatsApp directly from their mobile devices, regardless of location and time. This empowers them to deliver exceptional customer service and ensuring efficiency and effectiveness in converting prospects into customers.
Chat + Call functionality: Agents can seamlessly communicate with customers via chat and even share documents while still on a call. With this feature, businesses can enhance first call resolutions by swiftly addressing customer issues, guiding leads, and facilitating quick document exchange for faster sales closures.
Intuitive Bot Designer: With our no-code chatbot platform, you can easily create a chatbot using pre-built templates and modules. These templates cover a wide range of scenarios and industries, allowing you to choose one that best fits your needs. At the core of the Ozonetel bot designer lies its ability to understand user intent and initiate conversations effectively.
User Rating: 4.6/5
User Review: Ozonetel is really beneficial for managing large volumes of calls efficiently.
FreshDesk
Freshdesk is a Freshworks service that offers customer experience solutions to organizations. Support teams can collaborate by conducting talks within a ticket to provide consistent support. Automation can conduct simple tasks and answer queries via chatbots.
The Free plan has restricted capabilities but includes access to a knowledge base, ticket dispatching, and basic statistics. The Growth Plan includes ticket collision detection, SLA management, custom ticket displays, and help desk reporting. The Pro plan allows consumers to chart their journey while joining community forums. The Enterprise plan enables chatbots, skill-based routing, and workflow control.
Moreover, features of Freshdesk include:
- Omnichannel support
- Advanced Routing
- Ticket Management
- Integrations
- Self-service
- Reporting and Analytics
Zendesk
Zendesk, one of the most prominent customer experience software systems, is used by organizations, from start-ups to Fortune 500 companies. It allows you to create a help desk, call center, and live chat software to improve customer connections. From email, phone, and chat to social media, the platform integrates all channels customers connect with businesses today.
Zendesk’s all-encompassing platform allows you to build more meaningful, personalized, and effective client connections.
Zendesk’s all-encompassing platform allows you to build more meaningful, personalized, and effective client connections. Moreover, some key features of Zendesk include:
- Advanced bots
- Collaboration tools
- Workflow automation
- Omnichannel support
- Self-service
- Intelligent routing
User Rating: 4.3/5
User Review: Zendesk macros help us to save a lot of time for our agents and can manage tickets in a better way by queuing.
Qualtrics
Qualtrics is a text analytics and customer experience management platform that lets you collect input from any channel, including voice recordings, agent notes, chat logs, and social media. It can handle both structured and unstructured client data. It is an AI-powered tool that can capture interactions across any medium.
It ranks among the best solutions for social listening, media management, media analytics, speech analytics, surveys, media reporting tools, and text analytics. Also, it delivers advanced customer sentiment analysis and real-time email warnings when data indicates irregularities in the client experience.
A few more features of Qualtrics are:
- Real-time feedback
- Predictive analysis
- CRM integrations
- Ticketing systems
User Rating: 4.4/5
User Review: The platform gives more emphasis to the ease of survey design and also has multiple avenues through which you can distribute surveys.
Medallia
Medallia is a cloud-based customer experience platform that includes tools for data collecting, benchmarking, data integration, and customer recovery. Its interactive analytics, text analytics, and push reporting capabilities enable it to give extensive insights in real time. It also has features for sharing media and providing feedback via mobile.
It is appropriate for a wide range of industries, including financial services, retail, the public sector, telecom, and B2B businesses. It also enables you to collect input from virtually any device linked to the internet.
Moreover, the Medallia platform has AI tools that use machine learning to recognize trends and forecast client behavior. Businesses can construct dashboards that provide agents and supervisors real-time analytics on customer behavior and sentiment. Users can customize employee reports to account for certain jobs.
Some key features offered by Medallia include:
- Advanced Routing
- Omnichannel Support
- Integrations
- Ticket Management
- Reporting and Analytics
User Rating: 4.4/5
User Review: The insights we get from Medallia are so valuable and such a great compliment to our quantitative data.
Zoho CRM Plus
While Zoho provides a variety of customer relationship management (CRM) solutions, Zoho CRM Plus is a unified platform that enables businesses to deliver better customer experiences through organized administration, omnichannel engagement with customers, social media marketing, robust analytics, built-in AI, smart chatbots, and more. It offers free trials before becoming available at a monthly fee of $60 per user.
Furthermore, it provides additional customer experience elements such as:
- Omnichannel support
- Self-service
- Reporting and Analytics
- Advanced Routing
- Integrations
- Ticket Management
User Rating: 4.1/5
User Review: Zoho CRM is easy to use, has great integrations, and is available on the go.
Adobe Experience Manager
Adobe Experience Manager, part of Adobe Marketing Cloud, is a comprehensive digital marketing solution that enables you to build a powerful enterprise toolbox that includes web analytics, paid advertising management, and the ability to A/B test digital content. It is an open and expandable system that includes capabilities like Customer Location Mapping, Customer Data Platform, Data Governance, and so on.
Moreover, Adobe Audience Manager and Adobe Experience Platform work together to produce the Customer Data Platform. It also provides Identity Services and GDPR Services. Furthermore, its open architecture enables easy integration with your existing enterprise software platforms. It supports a wide range of platforms, including Windows, Mac, Linux, Android, and iPhone/iPad, and is ideal for teams of all sizes and industries.
User Rating: 4/5
User Review: This product truly captivated me with its effortlessly intuitive interface, transforming content creation and management into an enjoyable experience.
Podium
The Podium platform enables enterprises to handle consumer communication. It features text marketing, online review accumulation, live website chat, payment processing, and a unified agent inbox. Podium’s native connectors bring CRM data into the interface.
The entry-level package (Essentials, allows small enterprises to handle up to 1,000 contacts and a client database. The Standard plan includes unlimited contacts and personalized onboarding. Users can also receive customized reports, customer branding, and multimedia messages. The highest plan (Professional) includes lead routing, automation, and automated FAQ sites.
A few more features of Podium are:
- Advanced routing
- Self-service
- Integrations
- Reporting and Analytics
Conclusion
The digital landscape is teeming with a variety of Customer Experience (CX) platforms, each offering unique features and capabilities. The best platform for your business will depend on your specific needs, budget, and long-term goals.
Whether it’s data analytics, personalized customer journeys, or seamless integration capabilities, there’s a CX platform out there that can elevate your customer experience to new heights. Remember, the key to a successful digital strategy lies in choosing a platform that aligns with your business objectives and enhances your ability to connect with customers on a deeper level.
