7 Customer Engagement Technologies to Improve CX in 2025

Think back to when buying something was a whole experience—when the guy at the corner shop knew your dog’s name and what you liked on your sandwiches.

Now zoom back to our world of endless scrolling and clicking, where that personal touch got lost somewhere between pop-up ads and generic email blasts.

Guess what? 2024 is shaking things up. We’ve got tech now that’s kind of like having that friendly shopkeeper in your phone. 

It’s like those shopkeepers of the past teamed up with the tech whizzes of today to make something awesome—a whole new way to talk to people who dig what you’re selling.

So, here’s the scoop: we’ll be giving you some actionable advice on how to increase your chances of repeat business (by strategically utilizing customer engagement tools).

Hang out with us as we walk you through the stuff that’s making customers feel like they just stepped into their favorite local shop, even if they’re half a world away.

What Is Customer Engagement Technology?

Customer engagement technology refers to digital tools that help businesses interact better with their customers. 

It builds stronger relationships with customers by keeping them actively involved with the business for a long time.

How so?

• These tools help businesses listen to their customers and respond to them in a meaningful way. 
• These tools help businesses make a customer’s experience more personal, and thus, more satisfying.

Some examples of customer engagement technology are:

Example of Customer Engagement Tool	Purpose
Intercom	Real-time customer engagement through chatbots and live chat.
Gleam	Boost customer participation with interactive contests and rewards.
Qualtrics	Enhance customer experience via feedback collection and analysis.
LeadsHook	Engage prospects with personalized marketing funnels and quizzes.

In summary, these tools help businesses keep in touch with their customers, understand their needs, and provide solutions quickly. They improve customer experience by adding value to every interaction —- consequently, increasing the customer’s loyalty to your brand.

But wait, what if your product ranks No.1 in the industry already? Do you still need customer engagement technology?

Yep.

Even the strongest of products/services needs a solid customer engagement technology kit.

This is because 2.64 billion people shop online. That’s 1 out of every 3 people (potentially a major portion of your target audience).

And when people shop online, it is difficult to connect with them on a personal level.

It’s because:

1. If you sell a physical product, online shoppers haven’t touched the product or experienced it in person to develop a strong opinion.
2. If you sell a service or a digital product, they’ll depend on previous customer reviews to ‘weigh’ the worth, no matter how convincing your product description is.
3. People may be wary of scams, fraud, or misinformation when interacting with strangers on the internet. This makes it harder to build trust and rapport.
4. They have super easy access to competitors and their attention span is pretty low.
5. Even if they like your product or decide to trust you because you rank No. 1, they WILL NOT buy again if your customer experience sucks. (According to PwC, 3 out of 10 people will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience 😬)

Customer engagement tools may not fully bypass the identified problems, but they will surely help a great deal in tackling.

Again —- how exactly?

Well, customer engagement software tackles these problems by ensuring your buyer is not alone or uncatered to at any point of the buying continuum.

It improves how consumers interact with your brand through all five phases of the buyer’s journey.

With that said, here’s a quick overview of the five basic phases of a generic buyer’s journey:

1. Awareness: This is where the buyer seeks solution to a problem. It’s during this stage that a consumer discovers your business.
2. Consideration: The second part of the presales process is when a customer compares multiple businesses. The consumer is deciding which product/service best meets their needs.
3. Decision: This is when a customer makes the purchase.
4. Retention: The fourth phase is where you keep a consumer’s attention by offering post-purchase perks, such as loyalty rewards.
5. Advocacy: The final stage of the buyer’s journey involves customers recommending your business to others. This phase is incredibly important as a bad experience can ruin your brand’s reputation.

Now, these are five very general stages.

If you wish to pick customer engagement technology that accurately meets the needs of your target market, you might want to read this in-depth post we wrote for you earlier: 13 Customer Engagement Models to Bulletproof Your Funnel.

Improve Experience, Not Engagement

Before we investigate the various customer engagement technology platforms; it’s worth understanding the difference between customer engagement and customer experience.

Many brands confuse these two terms, believing they are the same thing.

Customer experience is based on a consumer’s point of view and gets shaped by their interactions with a brand.

In comparison, engagement refers to the company’s communication with its clients, driving sales and increasing loyalty.

Therefore, engagement is from the business’s perspective.

Having more “engagement” doesn’t offer any benefits if you’re not making the consumer’s experience better.

It’s a belief that causes many companies to fall short as they associate high engagement with satisfaction.

They end up with low-commitment engagement from their audience (such as views, clicks, and visits)

On the contrary, effective customer engagement results in high-commitment outputs like:

• Purchase 
• Re-purchase
• Strong brand advocacy (shares, likes, positive reviews, and recommendations)

Here’s an example of how over-engaging can lead to a poor experience:

In 2015, Starbucks wanted to engage with their customers by introducing a campaign called #racetogether.

This was in response to the increase in race-related social media movements and the protests about police treatment of minority communities. Starbuck’s CEO – Howard Schultz – declared:

“We at Starbucks should be willing to talk about these issues in America, not to point fingers or to place blame, and not because we have answers, but because staying silent is not who we are.”

Unfortunately for Starbucks, this was an epic fail of social media proportions. For starters, all the visual promotion of the campaign featured white-skinned people only.

Next, many customers weren’t comfortable having this conversation with a stranger they just met to purchase coffee from.

Finally, in what was the biggest blow, social media accounts hijacked the hashtag, with many customers using it to ridicule Starbucks’ products and services.

Things got so out of hand that Corey duBrowa, the communications vice-president, deleted his Twitter account.

Customer engagement software may have pre-empted the company that this initiative was destined to fail, preventing this unexpected scenario from ever eventuating.

Top Customer Engagement Technologies

When you hear of a customer engagement tool, you’ll find it falls into one of these buckets:

• Content management
• Social media marketing
• Email marketing
• Lead capture
• Event marketing
• Conversion optimisation

These are six broad but widely known categories of customer engagement technology.

Since every buyer’s journey is different, you cannot stick to just one category. You’ll have to use tools from more than one category at a time. 

In fact, using a combination of tools from different categories is one of the best practices for implementing customer engagement technology. It can help you get your desired results much more easily.

How so? Well now, we’ll be getting to that…

Below, we’ll be looking at some of the most promising customer engagement tools that you can use either as standalone tools or in combination with one another. Again, if you opt for combos — they’ll serve as a power pack!

Let us show you how….

1. Semrush 

Best suited for: Awareness & Consideration stage

Semrush is a go-to tool to engage customers even before they know about you. 

Or more accurately, it is a tool that can effectively attract and engage potential leads, eventually initiating a relation between you and them.

But how does Semrush make it happen?

Well, Semrush’s got a powerhouse of keywords. Its keyword database offers a collection of over 25 billion keywords — and this is why more than 10 million digital marketers use this tool religiously.

Now, what do keywords have to do anything with attracting leads? The answer lies in the concept of SEO lead generation.

You can use this database to find the pool of words that your target audience googles frequently. 

Once you have those words, create genuinely helpful content. And when they google again, they’ll find their way to you!

That’s really a very precise and superficial description of how it actually plays out.

Let me take you deeper into the process.

SEMrush’s Magic Tool basically provides you with the following useful metrics:

• Intent 
• Keyword Difficulty
• Search Volume
• Top ranking results
• Triggered SERP features 

All of this data will tell you exactly what your target customers are searching for, which competitors are already ranking for those queries, and how much work do you need to put in to gain the same level of exposure. This makes it easier to decide the best target keywords for creating content that successfully engages your customers in the pre-purchase cycle.

Let’s have a look at this example:

You’re a cash home buying company in the US.

When Cash Home Buyer (seed keyword) is entered into the SEMrush Magic Tool, it shows a detailed report on search queries. The two most searched keywords are:

• Sell My House Fast — INFORMATIONAL intent 
• We Buy Houses — TRANSACTIONAL intent 

So, we know that the prospect is searching ‘Sell My House Fast’ at the start of the buyer journey (awareness stage) and ‘We Buy Houses’ later in their journey (consideration stage). 

You can use the first keyword to develop blog posts that empathizes with the prospect’s problem – winning the prospect’s trust and eventually leading them towards the consideration stage. 

Blog post ideas for Sell My House Fast using SEMrush Keyword Overview

SEMrush gives you detailed analytics to find blog post ideas for your seed keywords. Use these to explore exactly what your customer wants to know – and create content accordingly!

Alternatives:

1. Ahrefs
2. Keywords Everywhere
3. Google Search Console
4. Keyword Insights

2. Midjourney (and AI art generators)

Best suited for: Awareness & retention stage

Midjourney is popular these days for generating the most attention-grabbing media.

Think about those captivating visuals that make you pause while scrolling through the internet. This AI art generator is enabling anyone and everyone to effortlessly create such arresting content.

While the tool may not be perfect for all art forms just yet, it sure does allow you to actualize a wide range of your wildest ideas —- without needing to hire expensive, top-tier graphic designers or models.

Here’s an example of what Midjourney can produce:

Here’s another example…

Now, of course, the tool isn’t limited to generating aesthetic model images or cats in space. 

As a business owner, you could use the tool’s impressive image-generating capabilities for so much more!

Here are a few ideas:

• Product photography 
• Social media posts 
• Website banners and headers
• Advertisement visuals 
• Infographics
• Blog post illustrations
• Email marketing visuals

There are plenty examples available online for each of the above. But for a start, we highly recommend browsing these Midjourney product photography prompts and examples. It will give you an idea of what to expect and how to prompt Midjourney.

If you use this tool to create social media posts or infographics like those shown above, you’d be able to generate jazzy and eye-catching visual content much faster and at half the budget.

(Btw, Midjourney costs only $10/month!)

All in all, this will give you greater opportunity area to:

• Post more often → Increase brand visibility → Attract newer customers 

• Post content that deeply aligns with your customer’s needs → Continue to resonate with old customers → Turn them into strong brand advocates or trigger repeat purchases

It also empowers you to unleash the full potential of your creative team (graphic designers, marketers, brand builders, content creators, etc). Instead of engaging them in the mundane processes of Canva and Adobe, leverage their creativity in brainstorming fresh, business-aligned viral content ideas.

If you’re tight on budget, you can even take on the role yourself. All you need to have a solid understanding of what your customers want to see (you can learn this when you know how to collect data about your target audience) and a clear strategy to meet those needs.

A good knack for colors and aesthetics is a cherry on top!

We recommend beginning your Midjourney’s journey with this video on how to create any kind of Midjourney prompt for accurate results:

https://youtu.be/1Zked4DLPiQ?si=WMw4k3VLVFxPSKob

Alternatives:

• DALL-E 2
• Stable Diffusion
• RunwayML

3. LeadsHook 

Best suited for: Consideration & decision stage

Next in this list of best customer engagement tools is LeadsHook.

Although it can help retain customers in all stages, it’s most effective when used for customers in consideration and decision stages.

How so?

Well, when a potential customer is in consideration or decision stage, they are well-aware of their problem. They also have an idea of the solution they seek.

LeadsHook is the tool that can help you seal the deal with them.

Again – how so?

When you are ONE of the many options in your target customer’s eyes, LeadsHook helps you INSTANTLY stand out with an incredibly interactive element — that audiences are [reportedly] unable to resist.

It could be a test-your-IQ type of quiz, find-the-right-service type of quiz, a calculator, a price estimator, downloadable lead magnet, or an automated decision tree-based chat.

Once they interact with that element…

LeadsHook conveniently collects this data and segments it as per your set criteria.

The micro-segmentation of your audience and data organization — all of this happens in seconds.

And speedy processing means…

You can follow-up with your next touchpoint as soon as your lead is done interacting with the interactive element. 

In this way, you don’t leave them unattended long enough to drift off to competitors. They’re almost fully immersed in you — until they make a decision.

And the best part? LeadsHook operates on the mantra of matching the right buyer to the right product/service.

The initial interactive element you develop and the consequent segmentation – both of these intelligent processes filter out your traffic broadly into three categories:

1. Ideal customers 
2. People who might need your product/service
3. People who don’t need your product/service & will require lots of convincing before they buy

This makes it easier for you to invest your resources in the right pool of people. 

If you’ve got a big budget, divide it into those three. But if it’s limited, focus on the ideal ones only!

Now, of course, LeadsHook cannot foretell the nitty gritty of your business. The division of your traffic into those three groups largely depends on how much you know your business.

If you know it well, you’ll be able to extract full value from LeadsHook and outsmart your competitors pretty quickly and strategically.

But if you don’t have an understanding of who your target customer is and who isn’t, we recommend you begin your journey here:

🎯  The Ultimate Interactive Personalised Marketing Course

🎯 Create Personalised Interactive Customer Experiences in Under 1-Hour (Even If You Don’t Know Anything)

Alternatives

• Typeform
• Involve.me
• Interact

4. Alteryx

Best suited for: Consideration stage 

Alteryx is a predictive analytics platform — meaning it helps businesses forecast outcomes and trends, identify risks, and make data-driven decisions by analyzing past data.

Technically, this tool is beneficial for every stage of the buyer’s journey.

But if you do use it at every stage, it’ll be super expensive for you.

For that reason, we recommend utilizing it in the consideration stage. That’s because — out of all 5 stages of a buyer’s journey — this is the one with greatest chances of conversion. Your lead is warm enough.  

Now, how does it play out? How does Alteryx increase your chances of conversion?

Here’s how:

➡️  You can predict what type of content your target customers seek. Do they want their confusions cleared or do they want a thorough competitor comparison? Once you know, you can keep this content ready from them to land on.

➡️ You can track & analyze users’ behavior with your app or web. Once you know what’s more preferred, amplify and improve it. Target customers will gravitate towards you.

➡️ You can also predict what kind of improvements your target audience might want to see in future. This allows you to expand your business in the right direction.

These are only a few examples of how predictive analytics tools like Alteryx can help engage customers and deliver a better experience. 

By aligning your marketing efforts closer to what your customers expect, you can eventually become your target audience’s favorite option in the market!

Alternatives:

• KNIME
• Altair

5. Pushwoosh

Best suited for: Decision stage

As the name hints, Pushwoosh is a push notification tool. And it’s the best customer engagement tool for the decision stage.

When your customer is confused between option A and option B, you gotta keep reminding them why your business – let’s say option A — is the best option they have.

You cannot let them slip to option B.

The rulebook of marketing also says….

If you show up enough times in front of your prospect, they start considering you.

And if you show up more than 7 times, they buy from you!

Push notification tools basically utilizes this concept  to help make you successful sales.

Pushwoosh is a great choice in this aspect of customer engagement tools because it allows you to:

➡️ Segment your audience and send persuasive personalized messages.

➡️ Track the performance of your notifications in real-time. 

➡️ Reach your customers wherever they are. Mobiles, web, email, in-app, or wherever.

➡️ Automate campaigns by specific user actions.

➡️ A/B test your messages

All of these features ultimately help maximize customer engagement and conversion rates.

Plus, Pushwoosh is super easy to use. Unlike most other push notification tools, it doesn’t have a steep learning curve.

Alternatives:

• OneSignal
• Pusher Beams
• CleverTap

6. EmailOctopus

Best suited for: Decision & Advocacy stage

Before we tell you how an email marketing tool like EmailOctopus can help engage your customers, here are a few stats you need to review:

• 88% of email users check their inboxes multiple times a day.
• 59% of consumers say emails influence their purchase decisions.
• 52% consumers made a purchase directly from an email in 2023.
• 18% companies achieved email marketing ROI greater than $70 per $1 invested.
• Loyalty program emails have an open rate of about 55% and an average CTR of about 17 percent.

What does this all mean for you?

This means repeat business with your existing customers may only be an email away.

Pushing hot leads to click that buy button may also be just an email away.

Interactive, personalized emails are an effective touchpoint. They prompt the recipient to read the text — and if you’ve been creative with the copy and email structure — it may even successfully get their input. Thus, successfully engaging leads and customers alike.

EmailOctopus is a great choice when it comes to email marketing because it offers:

➡️ Advanced segmentation to target specific groups within the email list.

➡️ Automated email campaigns, such as drip campaigns & follow-up emails to maintain uninterrupted communication.

➡️ Detailed analytics to track open rates and click-through rates to effectively refine strategies.

➡️ Seamless integration of third-party applications to ensure streamlined workflow.

➡️ GDPR compliance to ensure data protection and privacy.

➡️ Amazon SES integration to ensure high deliverability rates.

What’s more, it offers customizable templates and a drag-and-drop editor that makes email creation super easy.

Alternatives:

• Mailchimp
• Sendinblue
• Constant Contact

Is There One Customer Engagement Platform to Rule Them All?

Not really…

But at a time, you may not need to use ALL of these tools. 

Most businesses only need 2-3 tools at a time, depending on their business goals.

For example, if you’re focusing on quick brand awareness —- you might only want to use SEMrush, Midjourney, and EmailOctopus.

But if you’re more interested in quick sales, you might want to use LeadsHook, Alteryx, and Pushwoosh.

If you’re interested in generating repeat business alone, you might want to use EmailOctopus and Pushwoosh only.

So, it’s going to be combinations.

But beware. Any customer engagement tool that claims to be offering the functionality of all of the above — they’re probably lying.

Condensing all of these functionalities in one place would mean either you’d have to pay heavy subscription fee for the tool every month (often, for features you don’t even use!) or if it’s affordable, it may be offering subpar performance in each domain.

Now, why would you pay for features you don’t actively use? Or why would you pay for a software that doesn’t come from field experts?

This is why we, at LeadsHook, never promise you anything we don’t know inside out. 

That said, if you’re looking to maximize customer engagement for prospects in consideration or decision stage, feel free to sign up for your free 14-day trial! 

Lead capture is our expertise and conversion is our game! 🙂 

You can design a quiz with the help of experts (all courses here) and give your customers an experience that truly makes them go woahhh!

And the best part is you only pay for the much you use 😉  

Here’s more about our impressions-based pricing: Low Pricing That Grows Only When You Do