In the age of hyper-connectivity, customer engagement isn't optional, but standing out in a crowded digital landscape isn't easy.
The good news?
Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly evolving, offering powerful tools to captivate your audience and forge deeper connections.
Research shows that 54% of worldwide companies saw improved efficiency and cost reduction when they incorporated AI, and 15% of all customer service interactions were completely driven by AI.
Ready to unlock this potential? Buckle up, because we're diving into the top AI tools for customer engagement in 2024.
From predicting churn to crafting personalized experiences, these innovative solutions will help you build thriving relationships and leave your competitors in the dust.
What Are AI Customer Engagement Tools?
Customer engagement tools enable businesses to interact and deepen their relationship with customers. Artificial Intelligence empowers these tools to significantly enhance the customer experience. They use machine learning and data analysis to provide actionable insights, automate tasks, and streamline communication, helping businesses to:
Provide 24/7 customer support: AI-powered chatbots can answer customer questions and resolve simple issues around the clock.
Personalize interactions: AI can be used to tailor marketing messages, product recommendations, and other content to individual customers.
Predict customer behavior: AI can be used to identify customers who are at risk of churn and take steps to retain them.
In short, they change the way businesses engage with their customers. From chatbots for instant support to predictive analytics for personalized recommendations, these tools make interactions more adaptive and customer-focused, ultimately leading to increased customer loyalty and satisfaction.
Let’s take a look at the best AI customer engagement tools:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools
1. HubSpot CRM
Free CRM with powerful AI for lead scoring and email personalization.
HubSpot CRM is more than just a free contact management tool. With its predictive lead scoring system, it can analyze website activity, email engagement, and other data to identify your most promising leads. This way, you can focus your sales efforts on the most valuable prospects.
The dynamic lead scoring feature goes beyond static lead scoring by adjusting scores in real time based on new interactions. With HubSpot CRM, you can also personalize your outreach using email automation.
You can create dynamic email content that adapts to individual recipients based on their demographics, interests, and past behavior. This ensures that every email resonates with your target audience, which can boost open rates, click-throughs, and conversions.
Pricing: Offers a free basic plan and the paid plans start at $20/month.
2. Zoho CRM
Sales automation and omnichannel customer service platform.
Zoho CRM takes sales automation to the next level with Zia, its AI sales assistant. It proactively suggests leads, predicts deal closure rates, and even coaches your sales reps in real-time. Zia's intelligent workflows can automate repetitive tasks such as data entry, lead nurturing, and follow-up emails.
Zoho's omnichannel service goes beyond sales and offers personalized support across channels. Smart chatbots, powered by natural language processing (NLP), can answer common questions and deflect tickets. Additionally, sentiment analysis helps you understand customer emotions and prioritize urgent issues.
Pricing: The paid plans start at $20/month with a free trial of 15 days.
Helpdesk & Ticketing Systems
3. Zendesk
AI-powered chatbots and self-service options for faster customer support.
Zendesk provides businesses with a variety of AI-powered tools that can help them offer personalized and proactive customer service.
Among these tools is Answer Bot, a chatbot that uses AI to suggest relevant articles from the knowledge base based on keywords and context. The chatbot can also answer frequently asked questions, gather information, and even escalate complex issues to agents.
What's more, Zendesk's AI analyzes customer conversations to identify recurring problems and suggest improvements for the knowledge base and self-service options. This empowers customers to find answers on their own, which in turn reduces the support workload and enhances overall satisfaction.
Pricing: Zendesk’s complete suite plan starts at $69 per user/month and offers a free trial period.
4. Freshdesk
Streamlines helpdesk operations and empower customers' interactions with AI.
Freshdesk's AI assistant is designed to handle repetitive tasks in your helpdesk. It can automate ticket routing, assignment, and even basic issue resolution through its chatbot capabilities. The chatbot learns from past interactions and can escalate complex issues to the right agent, ensuring efficient problem-solving.
Freshdesk's AI search and recommendations can also empower your customers in the self-service knowledge base and community forum. The AI understands user intent and suggests relevant articles or discussions, which can deflect tickets and reduce support load.
Pricing: The complete customer service suite starts at $33/month, whereas individual plans like Freshdesk, Freshchat, and Freshcaller are free for up to 10 agents.
AI Chatbots & Live Chat Tools
5. Drift
Proactive engagement with powerful chatbots and live chat.
Drift goes beyond traditional live chat with AI-powered chatbots that proactively engage website visitors based on their behavior and intent.
Its proprietary Playbooks technology uses website behavior and visitor data to trigger targeted chatbot conversations at the right moment. Imagine, instead of generic greetings, your bot introduces itself by name, addressing the visitor's specific needs and pain points.
It uses natural language processing (NLP) to understand visitor intent and behavior. It qualifies leads automatically, asking insightful questions and gathering valuable information without feeling intrusive.
Pricing: There are annual paid plans available starting from the premium plans for small businesses at $2,500/month when billed annually. For higher plans, you need to contact their sales team.
6. Intercom
Chatbots and messaging for personalized customer engagement.
Intercom offers a comprehensive solution for omnichannel customer interactions, including AI-powered chatbots that answer common questions, deflect tickets, and qualify leads. Its Messenger platform unifies conversations across email, chat, SMS, and social media platforms, providing a seamless experience for customers.
Intercom's AI assistant uses sentiment analysis to understand customer emotions and prioritize urgent customer issues. It can also proactively suggest relevant knowledge-based articles based on the conversation context.
Pricing: The paid plans start at $39/month with a 14-day free trial.
Self-serve Knowledge Bases
7. Document360
AI Powered Knowledge management for smarter self-service.
With Document360, you can create a comprehensive knowledge base that surpasses traditional static documents. Eddy, the AI assistant, can understand the user's purpose and context to provide highly relevant results with reference articles.
Use "Ask Eddy" for AI-powered knowledge navigation: Click, type any query, follow tips for natural conversation, context, personalization, and creativity for tailored answers. Eddy will help you create content structure, suggest a title for the article, provide SEO meta description, and recommend tags.
Document360’s branding options will allow you to create a knowledge base that reflects your company's unique style. You can organise your knowledge base with flexible categories, subcategories, and articles. You get version history and rollback options for complete control of the content’s accuracy.
Pricing: There is a lifetime free plan with limited features, the paid plan starts at $199 per project/month. The higher plans are available only for an annual subscription.
8. Tettra
AI-powered knowledge management for easy resource access.
Tettra is a knowledge management system that is simple, smart, and connected. The tool makes it easy for everyone to get involved with our simple and intuitive page editor.
It offers open access by default but gives you the necessary permissions to ensure that only the right people have editing rights to the knowledge articles. Its AI assistant, KAI, empowers your team to easily find answers using plain language, increasing efficiency and decreasing strain on your subject matter experts.
If KAI cannot find the answer, KAI will assist in creating a question in Tettra's intuitive Q&A system and assign the query to a subject matter expert. The next time the question is asked, KAI will surface it, ensuring that your team has accurate, usable information.
Pricing: The paid plan starts at $5 per user/month and requires a minimum of 10 users to get started. They also offer a 30-day free trial.
Customer Feedback & Survey Tools
9. involve.me
Interactive feedback tool to engage & gather insights.
involve.me has emerged as a versatile platform, offering interactive tools for businesses. It goes beyond static surveys and enables businesses to create more engaging and interactive surveys, quizzes, forms, and landing pages focusing on customization and user experience. And all of this without depending on a developer!
The platform enables businesses to create surveys and send them across multiple channels, gather valuable customer feedback with a better response rate, and turn these into actionable business insights. Check some of their templates below:
Create Forms, Surveys, Quizzes
Start with a customizable template
Its AI-powered insights and appealing reports help in identifying trends, segmenting responses, and measuring sentiment. You can then use these insights to improve products, services, and customer experience. The involve.me team used their own feature - AI Insights to analyze more than 12.000 customer responses and generate a detailed report in less than 2 minutes.
Create your form with AI
Just paste your URL & click generate
Pricing: The paid plan starts at $49/month with a free trial period. Every plan of the involve.me covers all features, it’s the usage limitation that varies.
10. SurveySensum
Best for NPS & CSAT surveys.
SurveySensum is an AI-enabled customer feedback platform that empowers businesses to measure and take action on customer feedback. It is designed for B2B customer success teams, allowing them to create NPS (Net Promoter Score), CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score), and CES (Customer Effort Score) surveys for various touch points in the customer journey.
The AI features of SurveySensum include sentiment analysis and churn management. These features help businesses understand their customer base better by measuring crucial CX metrics such as CSAT, CES, and NPS.
Pricing: Free plan offers unlimited surveys while the paid plan starts at $99/month.
Email Marketing Tools
11. Mailchimp
All-in-one email marketing for beginners and beyond.
Mailchimp stands out with its user-friendly interface featuring a drag-and-drop builder for creating visually appealing email campaigns effortlessly, eliminating the need for coding skills.
The platform boasts an extensive template library, offering pre-designed templates or the option to craft custom designs. With robust list segmentation and targeting capabilities, businesses can send personalized emails based on audience interests, demographics, or behavior.
Mailchimp's key strengths lie in its marketing automation. It enables users to automate email workflows triggered by events like abandoned carts, website visits, or purchases, facilitating lead nurturing, and enhancing conversion rates.
Pricing: You get a limited free plan with basic features. The paid plan starts at $9/month.
12. Benchmark Email
A powerful and simple email marketing platform.
Benchmark Email, an affordable and user-friendly platform, stands out with unique AI-powered features. Smart Content, powered by OpenAI, dynamically personalizes email content based on recipient data, enhancing engagement.
The Smart Send feature boosts deliverability by removing unengaged subscribers, ensuring emails reach active recipients, and minimizing bounce rates. The platform also offers efficient list-building tools through forms, landing pages, and pop-ups.
With seamless eCommerce integrations, Benchmark simplifies product showcasing in emails through the eCommerce Block and Shopify integration, catering to businesses seeking comprehensive and effective email marketing solutions.
Pricing: You get a free plan that allows you to manage up to 500 contacts. The paid plan offers advanced features and starts at $15/month.
Social Media Management Tools
13. Buffer
For growing social media audiences organically.
Buffer is an excellent tool that can assist individuals, small businesses, and marketing teams in scheduling, publishing, and analyzing their social media content across various platforms. The platform's user-friendly interface and collaborative features make it a popular choice for anyone looking to manage their online presence effortlessly.
Its AI-powered features help you discover your most successful posts based on engagement and reach, giving you valuable insights into what resonates with your audience. You also get recommendations for optimizing your future posts, including suggesting relevant hashtags and emojis based on your content and audience.
Pricing: Offers a free plan that connects up to 3 accounts, paid plan starts at $6/month for 1 channel.
14. SocialBee
Drives your social media campaigns on co-pilot.
SocialBee is a comprehensive social media management and automation platform, tailored to meet the challenges faced by small businesses dealing with budget and time constraints. It offers a robust suite of features covering collaboration, content creation, scheduling, and analytics features.
SocialBee stands out with its AI-powered Copilot and post generator, empowering users to craft a holistic strategy—from planning to post creation. The AI ensures a steady stream of engaging posts, consistently tailored to the specific preferences of the target audience. SocialBee emerges as an essential tool for streamlined and effective social media management.
Pricing: Paid plan starts at $29/month and connects up to 5 social profiles.
Customer Success Tools
15. Gainsight
The complete customer success platform.
Gainsight is a leading customer success tool, focusing on delivering exceptional customer experiences. Tailored for businesses aiming to optimize customer success, Gainsight offers a robust suite of features.
It includes in-depth customer data analysis, engagement tracking, and proactive issue resolution. By providing comprehensive insights into customer behavior, Gainsight empowers businesses to enhance customer satisfaction and retention rates.
Pricing: No free plan and pricing is available on request.
16. ChurnZero
Predicts and prevents customer churn with AI.
ChurnZero is a specialized customer success tool that's tailor-made to tackle customer churn risks. It's designed to optimize customer experiences, with features that enable powerful data analysis and proactive issue resolution.
Its AI-powered churn prediction feature identifies customers at risk of churn. It has automated outreach and campaign capabilities that trigger personalized interventions to retain at-risk customers. ChurnZero also implements customer health scoring, allowing businesses to segment their customer base based on churn risk.
Pricing: No free plan and pricing is available on request.
In-app User Engagement Tools
17. Userpilot
AI-powered onboarding guru.
First impressions are crucial, and Userpilot can help you make them perfect. This tool uses AI to personalize user onboarding experiences with ease. It allows you to create interactive product tours tailored to individual user behavior.
It helps you guide your users with contextual messages at critical moments, and ensure they get the most out of your product right from the start. It's like having a friendly and AI-powered onboarding assistant by their side.
Pricing: The paid plan starts at $299/month and comes with a free trial period.
18. Whatfix
In-app support reinvented with AI.
Whatfix is an AI-powered tool that provides users with intuitive, in-app help when they need it the most. It helps in reducing the support burden, by keeping users engaged with your product, and ensuring they have the best possible experience.
The app offers relevant assistance based on user actions and browsing behavior, with smart search and knowledge base features for instant answers. Interactive walkthroughs and microlearning provide context-aware guidance for specific tasks, and digital adoption analytics allow you to track user engagement and measure the impact of in-app support.
Pricing: There are multiple plans tailored as per the business requirements. However, pricing is available upon request.
Reporting & Analytics Tools
19. Mixpanel
AI-powered advanced analytics that turn data into better decisions.
Mixpanel isn't just another analytics tool; it's an AI-powered microscope for understanding your users. Beyond basic data tracking, Mixpanel leverages AI to uncover hidden patterns, predict user behavior, and empower you to make data-driven decisions that boost engagement and growth.
It proactively flags unusual spikes or dips in user activity, potentially indicating issues or hidden opportunities. Its laser-focused analysis helps group active users based on specific characteristics or actions. And cohort analysis feature compares the behavior of different user groups, revealing valuable insights into user acquisition, retention, and engagement across distinct segments.
Pricing: There is a decent free plan, and the paid plan starts at $20/month.
20. Google Analytics
Provides a complete overview of your website.
Google Analytics empowers you to measure customer engagement on your sites and apps, providing insights into what works and what doesn't. Understand how users interact with your business and the impact of various channels through advanced reporting.
You can use Google's machine learning to discover predictive insights, like identifying potential purchasers or those at risk of churning when direct data is limited. Machine learning enhances measurement accuracy.
It also helps to analyze data swiftly and collaborate seamlessly with your team using an intuitive interface and shareable reports.
Pricing: The basic Google Analytics plan is free, offering a robust set of features for most website owners. Premium plans for enterprises with advanced functionalities are available (pricing on request).
Engage to Win: AI Powers Up Customer Connection
These innovative tools unlock the power of AI to truly understand your audience and build thriving relationships. Remember, AI isn't just a tech trend, it's a game-changer for customer engagement.
So, pick your tools that align with your needs, embrace the power of AI, and get ready to engage your customers like never before!
Author
Pratik Shinde is a Founder at Growthbuzz Media, a Content Creator at Make SaaS Better, and an SEO enthusiast. He helps fast-paced B2B SaaS startups acquire customers through organic marketing efforts. He likes reading philosophy, writing non-fiction, thoughtful walking, running, and traveling.
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