Looking for customer engagement platforms? Check out these 13 options!

Still juggling point solutions? Modern customer engagement tools and platforms stitch every channel, data stream, and workflow together so you can move faster, personalize at scale, and prove ROI.

Let’s explore what tools are worth looking at in 2025, how they compare for different use cases, how they can meet changing customer behavior, and what to factor in when evaluating the best platforms for your business.

A customer engagement tool – or full-stack customer engagement platform – centralizes the channels, data, and automations that keep audiences engaged, informed, and happy.

This might sound like a piece of cake, but make no mistake: Meeting these consumer expectations has become a lot more complex in 2025. According to Sinch’s global survey The state of customer communications, customers worldwide want smooth interactions, highly personalized messages, and timely communications from businesses – on a mix of communication channels.

So, sending a marketing email like “Hi Joe! Here are our holiday deals for you!” and then calling it a day just won’t cut it anymore if you really want to create an outstanding customer experience. Here’s what a customer like Joe actually expects.

• He wants you to send him deals that are relevant to him specifically.
• Joe also expects you to know that you should message him in the evenings when he has time to browse through the offers.
• Even though he likes to get your newsletters via email, once he places an order, he prefers text message updates as push notifications about shipping and delivery status so he can check them on the go.
• And when he notices an issue with his order, he wants to talk to a human agent on the phone to fix the issue.

And it’s not just “Joe” who feels that way; it’s literally every customer on your contact list. For your business, this means that you need to reach the right customers with the right message at the right time. Providing these types of personalized customer interactions requires highly integrated customer engagement software with modern communication features from automation to omnichannel capabilities.

That calls for a detailed evaluation of what your customer engagement tools actually need to deliver for your business.

When you evaluate vendors and tools, look for these five non-negotiables.

Detailed data beyond open and click rates like time spent on a page, return visits, or points of abandoning the purchase process is key, not only to prove ROI, but also to quickly understand how to optimize campaigns and better meet customer expectations.

According to Sinch research, 97% of businesses in the U.S. are using or plan to use AI in customer communications this year, for good reason. Smooth automations allow you to set up timely journeys without extra head‑count. Engagement tools that you’re evaluating should offer you options like automating drip flows for marketing campaigns, and message scheduling.

It’s not helpful if you have a great customer relationship management (CRM) tool and an outstanding SMS marketing tool, but the two can’t talk to each other. That’ll mean loss of information and resources and a disjointed customer journey. The best customer engagement platforms should offer easy integration for a full and easy data exchange.

Keep in mind that 36% of consumers want informational updates on more than one communication channel and channel preference varies by region, use case, or generation. At the same time, you don’t want to deal with multiple messaging tools or various inboxes that’ll create a lot of back and forth for your team. Look for tools that are already set up with omnichannel capabilities.

Relevance drives user engagement, but in 2025 that needs to go beyond a {{firstname}} customization. Look for tools that allow you to do a real deep dive into individual metrics like purchase history or time spent on product pages to truly understand what your customers need.

When it comes to engaging customers, The state of customer communication survey shows that consumers do want personalization – but want brands to be very thoughtful and intentional with it.

Keeping users consistently engaged and meeting customer needs therefore takes tools with in-depth analytics and fine-tuned personalization features. Here are four platforms that fit that bill.

HubSpot shines for inbound-heavy marketing teams that want CRM, marketing automation and customer engagement in one user interface (UI). Smart content rules personalize emails, web and ads. With their automated workflows, you can nurture new and existing leads for lifecycle campaigns. HubSpot also provides an ever-growing marketplace and plugs straight into ERP, finance, and support tools.

Channel reach is mostly email, but you can expand to ads, social media, SMS, and WhatsApp via partners.

Sinch Engage gives mid‑market and small-business teams one workspace for SMS, WhatsApp, and RCS.

Think: A no-code journey builder that lets you launch campaigns in minutes and where you can automate flows and get insights from real-time analytics.

You can also count on deep integrations with Salesforce, HubSpot, Shopify, and the usual CRM or customer data platform (CDP) suspects to keep data flowing both ways. There’s even an email-to-text service, so your team can take advantage of business texting from services like Gmail or Outlook, without having to download or learn a new tool.

Personalization happens at segment or one-to‑one‑level, and you can manage everything from a centralized inbox.

And if this all sounds great on its own, it’s even more impressive when you put it all together like Family Quest. For the live-entertainment brand, customer outreach is critical to maintain and grow attendance, especially through a combination of email and SMS. With Sinch Engage, Family Quest found a tool that made it easy to integrate SMS into their HubSpot email flows to automate their outreach efforts while still keeping their campaigns highly personalized.

For e-commerce-first B2C companies, Klaviyo marries real-time behavioral data with templated journeys for abandoned carts, winbacks, and product launches. Integration is tight with Shopify, BigCommerce, and WooCommerce.

Advanced segmentation, predictive churn, SMS add-ons, and CDP-like profiles make personalization intuitive. AI subject‑ line and send‑time‑optimization round out the toolkit.

If you got a dime for each time email has been proclaimed dead, you’d be a millionaire by now. The truth is: In 2025, email isn’t only alive and well – people still love it. For a majority of consumers, it’s still the number one channel for interacting with businesses.

So, if you’re looking for an email-first solution – Sinch Mailjet is a great choice, especially when it comes to email marketing!

Need to build beautiful email campaigns at speed? Mailjet’s collaborative Email Editor, Brand Kit, AI-powered writing assistant, A/B testing tools, and landing page editor let marketers create high-converting emails without much effort.

Are you looking for advanced personalization? Then Mailjet offers features like liquid tags and segments to make your promos really stand out to each recipient.

And if you want to automate workflows, Mailjet comes with automation tools that cover drip campaigns, content creation, and event-driven flows.

Plus, if you want to go beyond email, there are API options that’ll allow you to add various connectors.

In 2025, customers expect informational messages like appointment reminders or order updates to be timely and interactive. 28% of global consumers get frustrated when they can’t reply to informational messages or reach out to support. But while you want to keep people in the loop, you don’t want to overdo it either. The one thing that annoys users the most is receiving too frequent communications.

This means that your customer support team has to keep a delicate balance between keeping customers up to date and overcommunicating.

So, let’s look at some tools that offer the speed and consistency that customers are looking for while making it easy for businesses to integrate them into their workflows.

Mailgun’s rock‑solid API offers automatic deliverability checks and granular logs. Event webhooks feed analytics dashboards or data lakes in real time.

Mailgun’s automation covers batching, scheduled sends, and templates. Integrations span CRMs, ERP, and practically any app via Zapier.

Personalization happens at send time via dynamic templates which cuts down significantly on resources. It’s an ideal tool for developer-first teams. Tech company SparkToro, for example, built its in-app comms on Mailgun and hasn’t touched the code in five years.

And if you’re looking to add other channels to keep your customers informed, Mailgun offers easy integration with SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, and voice.

For ERP-centric organizations, NetSuite’s built-in workflows push order, invoice, and inventory updates straight to email or SMS.

Deep integration is a given through a vast partner network, and analytics live inside the same dashboards finance already uses.

Personalization is driven by customer records. And with AI add-ons that recommend next best actions or cross‑sells and upsells, you can easily improve ROI.

Workato is the low-code glue that turns any business event into a customer update – think “payment received” in Stripe – triggering an SMS via Sinch Engage.

More than 1,000 connectors handle integration, recipes orchestrate automation, and AI classifiers enrich or route messages.

Omnichannel is possible, but reach depends on the channels you plug in.

Retailers are doubling down on conversational commerce: 96% already use it, from managing refunds to personalizing product recommendations. At the same time, sales teams struggle with overhead costs and integrating systems to deliver the smooth interactions that customers expect.

Here are some customer engagement platforms that’ll really help you drive sales without disrupting the user experience.

Shopify is the direct-to-consumer gold standard. Built-in flows for abandoned carts, product alerts, and post-purchase offers span email, SMS, and the Shop App.

The ecosystem of 8,000 apps adds chat, automated SMS, MMS, RCS, loyalty, AI merchandising, and more.

Integrations are point-and‑click while personalization lives in Shopify Audiences, and Shopify Magic AI suggests copy and segments.

BigCommerce suits larger catalogues, B2B, or headless builds. Their multistore front, native quote‑to‑cash and custom price lists help complex sellers.

Omnichannel capabilities exist with email and SMS via partners plus feed‑through to Amazon, Meta, and TikTok.

AI-driven product recommendations arrived in 2024 and continue to mature.

If WordPress powers your site, WooCommerce is the natural commerce layer. Extensions add automated emails, SMS via partners, WhatsApp carts, and AI chatbots.

Integrations extend to inventory, accounting, and fulfilment tools. Personalization comes through blocks, dynamic pricing, and recommendation plugins.

When it comes to customer support, consumers have high demands. That’s understandable. After all, we all want fast and qualified help when we have difficulties. And it really makes a difference! If you can be there when it counts, you’ll gain long-term customer loyalty. So how can you achieve customer satisfaction in 2025?

Consumers worldwide say they want to solve issues quickly with chatbots or on a messaging channel and not wait for hours for an agent on the phone. At the same time, they expect to talk to a human when they have complex problems. And they want the entire process to be quick and efficient. Having to repeat their issue over and over again? For 66% that’s both frustrating and a waste of time.

High-performing customer engagement platforms that cover various channels and enable automations are really a must for your support teams. Let’s look at some options!

Zoho Desk is a budget-friendly, multichannel ticketing platform. Email, social, chat, and phone live in one agent pane.

AI sentiment flags urgent tickets and macros automate replies, so your team can work more efficiently.

Integrations include Zoho CRM, Slack, and Shopify. With their partner network, you can also add omnichannel capabilities for SMS, RCS, WhatsApp, and more.

Personalization comes from contextual customer data, while AI assists with summaries and knowledge‑base suggestions.

Carrier-grade voice infrastructure, programmable interactive voice response, and the possibility of AI voice bots make Sinch Voice ideal for regulated or high-touch support. Sinch also runs and manages its own voice network (the largest private network in the U.S.), ensuring a 99.999% uptime, low latency, and quick problem resolution – so your phone support can be there for your customers in times of need.

Analytics cover call flows and sentiment, and integrations connect to unified communication or CRM tools, and dynamic prompts enable personalization. A cross-channel experience with SMS and email is also possible and Sinch’s voice solution also supports in-app calls.

Zendesk supports email, chat, social, voice, and in-app messaging in one suite. AI answer bots deflect common questions, workflows automate SLAs, and vast marketplace integrations extend reach. Personalization surfaces customer context next to every ticket.

While Zendesk is industry-agnostic, it’s especially strong in SaaS and retail.

To make it easier for you to evaluate the different customer engagement solutions, we’ve put together a feature comparison table. The check mark (✔︎)  indicates a built-in feature while the circle (o) means that it’s a limited functionality or only available through an add‑on.

Tool	Analytics	Automation	Integrations	Omnichannel	Personalization
Sinch Engage	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎
HubSpot	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	Email + SMS	✔︎
Mailjet	✔︎	✔︎	API	Email	✔︎
Klaviyo	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	Email + SMS	✔︎
Mailgun	✔︎	✔︎	API	o	o
NetSuite	✔︎	✔︎	Native	Email + SMS	✔︎
Workato	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	Depends	Depends
Shopify	✔︎	✔︎	Apps	Email + SMS + Push	✔︎
BigCommerce	✔︎	o	Apps	Email + SMS	✔︎
WooCommerce	✔︎	o	Extensions	Email + SMS + Chat	✔︎
Zoho Desk	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	Email + Chat + Voice	✔︎
Sinch Voice	✔︎	✔︎	API	Voice + SMS + Email	✔︎
Zendesk	✔︎	✔︎	✔︎	Email + Chat + Voice	✔︎

Before you make a final choice, here are some questions you should cover.

1. Can the platform grow with you? Check user limits, message volumes, and channel caps.
2. Will it plug into your existing stack out of the box? Avoid costly middleware or integration headaches down the line.
3. How strong are security and compliance controls? If your tool can’t meet security and compliance requirements, it shouldn’t even be considered.
4. Does it support multichannel orchestration? Customer expectations are clearly moving towards an omnichannel experience – make sure that your tool of choice can deliver that.
5. Is the onboarding easy? Depending on your capabilities or priorities, you might not have or want to invest in IT resources for setting up a customer engagement tool.
6. What about support? Will your solution partner leave you high-and-dry if there’s an issue, or can you count on reliable support and expertise?

Reach out to our team to talk specifics, or if you’re ready to jump right in, book a demo or try out our out-of-the-box customer engagement platform Sinch Engage for free.

What’s the difference between customer engagement tools and customer engagement platforms?

Technically, a tool usually masters one channel (like email). A platform bundles multiple tools so data, logic, and analytics stay connected. However, the terms are often used interchangeably, so you’ll find many solutions that are called “tools” and can handle multiple channels as well.

How much budget should I set aside?

Mid‑market teams typically spend 3 to 7% of marketing budget on engagement tech. Factor in license plus SMS or email send costs (if they’re not included in your solution).

Which metrics prove success?

Start with engagement (open, click, read), move to action (conversion, repeat purchase) and end with value (LTV, churn reduction).

Do I really need omnichannel?

Yes – 36 % of consumers expect businesses to send them relevant updates on more than one channel, and the number keeps climbing. The companies that don’t adopt now will lose out in the long run.

How quickly can I go live with Sinch Engage?

Sinch Engage was created for mid-market, small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and startups – with the speed and ease in mind that these companies need. That’s why customers launch their first multichannel journey in under two weeks thanks to pre‑built templates and native CRM connectors.