The top 6 customer experience platforms of 2024

Customer experience platforms are the foundation for building strong, lasting relationships with your customers, enabling effortless communication and personalized support. Think of them as the bridge between your business and your customers, making every interaction smoother and more connected. In a market where 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better experience, customer satisfaction is your strongest currency.

Whether you’re leading a small team at a fast-growing startup or managing operations at a large enterprise, selecting the right platform can be the key to winning and keeping customer loyalty.

In this guide, we’ll explore the leading customer experience platforms, highlighting standout features that can elevate your customer interactions.

What is a customer experience platform?

A customer experience platform is a software solution designed to manage and enhance every interaction between a business and its customers across touchpoints and channels. It enables strong collaboration across teams, allowing businesses to deliver personalized, consistent experiences.

Understanding the customer experience offers a real-time health check on the status of your product or service Digging into customer service data unveils critical insights about your employees’ performance and operational efficiency levels, opening pathways to improve.

To be a true leader in customer service today, more is required than just speaking to your customers and analyzing data to achieve success. You need a modern customer service solution that allows you to make actionable changes based on learnings. The ideal solution will have collaboration tools, integrations, and AI capabilities to help your team do more with less and scale. 

While top-notch customer experiences are important for every business, several industries require a much more personalized form of customer service. These industries — including manufacturing, travel, professional services, financial services, and consumer services, and others — especially need to look for solutions that cater to both personalized, complex interactions and transactional ones.

The top 6 customer experience platforms of 2024

Front 

Front is a clear leader in the space with its modern customer service platform built for both simple and complex support requests. It’s made for fast-growing teams that differentiate on personal, high-quality relationships while keeping efficiency front and center. 

Teams using Front exceed industry benchmarks for customer satisfaction by 9%. 

With the Front platform, companies can:

• Ensure all messages are categorized correctly with required tagging 

• Automatically distribute the team’s workload with load balancing 

• Maintain a high standard for response times with reply time goals

• Better understand customer satisfaction with automatic CSAT surveys

And the results show (as seen in Front’s Support Report, which publicly showcases the team’s support metrics): the Front support team has achieved a 90-day average CSAT score of 98%.

Here are some features that put Front at the top of the list.

• Intuitive interface: There is often complexity and a steep learning curve associated with conventional customer experience tools, leading to ample time spent in onboarding and training. Front’s intuitive, inbox-like interface makes team implementation and adoption speedy, getting customer-facing teams to value faster. 

• Omnichannel support: Keep everything in one place — including email, SMS, social media, live chat, and WhatsApp. Look back on a complete view of past conversations to get up to speed on the context and resolve new inquiries as efficiently as possible.

• Robust, no-code workflows and integrations: Automate processes with no-code workflows and integrations that are simple to implement and update. No costly consultants required.

• Real-time collaboration: Handling an issue shouldn’t take 10 clicks or switching tools. Quickly collaborate behind the scenes for smooth resolution, every time.

• Do more in record time with AI. Answer inquiries instantly and boost team efficiency with AI. Front’s AI bot deflects simple inquiries while your team focuses on more complex ones. AI Answers sources from your Front Knowledge Base or other help center to serve up resolutions on demand.

• Robust analytics and insights: Enhance visibility with Front’s analytics and reporting features. Front users can gain insight into team and individual performance, measure key metrics, and identify areas of improvement. Make data-driven decisions on where to invest and improve.

• Knowledge base: Front’s knowledge base enables customers, teams, and partners to quickly and easily find all the information they need. Deflect FAQs and simpler questions, leaving the more complex conversations for your team to solve.

• Award-winning customer support: Front is known for its world-class support team [that consistently achieves nearly 100% CSAT!]. Other features like Front community and Front academy offer diverse opportunities to make sure teams get the most out of Front.

Front G2 rating: 4.7 / 5

Pricing starting at:

• Starter: $19/seat/mo

• Growth: $59/seat/mo

• Scale: $99/seat/mo

• Premier: $229/seat/mo

Zendesk

Zendesk provides an omnichannel customer service experience solution that utilizes the structure of a help desk ticketing system to enable businesses to efficiently track, prioritize, and address customer inquiries and issues. Zendesk powers self-service via a knowledge base and community forum, along with an AI chatbot to ensure customers can get the answers they need.

Zendesk is best suited for high-volume support environments where agents typically resolve simpler inquiries by themselves. When greater demands for collaboration and coordination are required, Zendesk may not offer the right functionality or be the right fit.

Core features:

• Integrations

• Ticket collaboration

• Knowledge base 

• Live chat

Zendesk G2 rating: 4.3 / 5

Pricing starting at: 

• Support team: $19/agent/month

• Suite team: $55/agent/month

• Suite growth: $89/agent/month

• Suite professional: $115/agent/month

Read: Front vs. Zendesk

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is part of the broader Freshworks umbrella, providing a customer experience that enables service teams to handle inquiries from various channels such as email, phone, chat, and social media. 

Freshdesk tickets are directed to groups versus individual agents, so all agents must work out of a shared queue. Freshdesk relies on integrations with Slack and switching to personal email for collaboration with internal teams and external vendors. There are also multiple ways to collaborate, which can lead to multiple conversations in separate parts of the application.

Core features:

• Custom ticket views 

• Email ticket routing 

• Knowledge base

• Time tracking

Freshdesk G2 rating: 4.4 / 5

Pricing starting at:

• Growth: $15/agent/month

• Pro: $49/agent/month

• Enterprise: $79/agent/month

Read: Front vs. Freshdesk

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is an omnichannel customer experience solution that allows businesses to handle customer inquiries across email, phone, chat, social media, and web forms. It provides essential functionalities like ticket routing, knowledge base creation, SLA management, and performance reporting. 

Because it’s part of the Zoho suite of business applications, it integrates with other Zoho products and third-party applications. 

Core features:

• Ticket management

• Self service 

• AI-powered assistant Zia

• Integrations with Zoho suite

Zoho Desk G2 rating: 4.4 / 5

Pricing starting at:

• Standard: $14/user/month

• Professional: $23/user/month

• Enterprise: $40/user/month

Help Scout 

The Help Scout customer experience solution features a shared inbox, live chat, help center, and proactive messages, all available natively on its platform. Help Scout provides 50+ integrations. 

In terms of analytics capabilities, Help Scout may fall behind other customer experience offerings. It offers standard dashboards for teams but it may not meet the needs of users seeking more comprehensive analytics functionality.

Core features:

• Email management

• Automations

• Help center 

• Messaging support

Help Scout G2 rating: 4.4 / 5

Pricing starting at:

• Standard: $20/user/month

• Plus: $40/user/month

• Pro: $65/user/month

Intercom

Intercom’s customer experience solution features synchronous, chat-based support. Intercom emphasizes a conversational approach to engaging with customers in real time, prioritizing interactive communication.

Intercom is investing heavily in its AI tool, Fin. Fin lets users summarize conversations, tailor responses to individual customers, and fill in ticket details automatically.

Core features:

• Fin AI

• Analytics and reporting

• Live chat

• Integrations

Intercom G2 rating: 4.5 / 5

Pricing:

• Essential: $39/seat/month

• Advanced: $99/seat/month

• Expert: $139/seat/month

Key features of a customer experience platform

Omnichannel support

Today, customers expect to be able to reach your business wherever they find it most convenient — whether that’s email, social media, or chat. Omnichannel support offerings ensure businesses can centralize information and make it easy to manage.

Front is a leader in this category with its omnichannel inbox that consolidates messages across all communication channels, including WhatsApp, email, SMS, social media, and live chat.

Customer service data management 

Customer service data management involves collecting, organizing, and utilizing data related to customer interactions, feedback, preferences, and behavior. A customer experience platform integrates various sources of customer data to provide a holistic view of the customer journey, enabling businesses to boost customer satisfaction and drive better business outcomes. 

Customization and integration capabilities 

Customization capabilities allow businesses to tailor customer experience platforms to their specific workflows, processes, and branding requirements. This ensures the platform aligns with the business’s objectives and delivers maximum value.

Integration capabilities are critical because they facilitate the flow of data between the customer experience platform and other analytical tools or business intelligence systems. For example, integrating a customer experience platform with a CRM system allows sales and customer service teams to access relevant customer information and history in real time, leading to faster issue resolution and informed decision-making. Integrating with marketing automation tools enables personalized messaging and targeted campaigns based on customer data and insights.

Front customer sennder, a digital freight forwarder, created a 360-degree view of customer data and communication by using Front’s integrations with Salesforce, Asana, Slack, and Aircall. Now, teammates can see all data from these systems in one place and no longer need to manage multiple tools to find the information they need.

Scalability and vendor support

Teams should ensure the customer experience platform can scale with their business and that the vendor provides reliable support. This includes dedicated onboarding and expert guidance on new feature additions to maximize the value of the platform.

Front customer Culture Amp, an employee experience platform, notes how supported their team felt throughout the journey of learning and implementing Front. Chris Schwass, Director of Customer Revenue Operations, says that the support the team received was exceptional, making the implementation smooth and simple for administrators. He adds, “I felt like [the Front team] always had my back. And every time I asked a question, I felt really heard. I really felt like this is a team I can work with and these are people I can trust from the start.” 

Choosing the right partner

Excellent customer experiences matter more today than ever. By focusing on delivering exceptional service, businesses can increase customer lifetime value, drive revenue growth, and improve profitability.

Front’s customer experience platform offers a comprehensive solution for organizations looking to differentiate themselves through superior customer service. By partnering with Front, businesses can unlock the tools they need to delight customers, stay competitive, and drive sustainable growth.

See what Front can do for your team.