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Customer Engagement Software Pricing Guide

January 24th, 2023 36 min read

Customer Engagement Software can help you improve your customer interactions and support performance. These tools enable you to leverage customer data to boost engagement. There are many things you can do with these tools. Here’s a brief summary of the capabilities you can expect: 

  • Optimize customer interactions and campaigns with personalized messaging
  • Improve the customer experience with content tailored to your audience 
  • Provide resources for current and potential customers to explore your brand
  • Track customer journeys across all your channels 
  • Personalized communications with customers through email, chat, or video
  • Native or third-party CRM and data ingestion

Not every customer engagement tool will have all of these features and capabilities. If a product solves some of your pain points well you can always complement it with others. In this guide, we go over some important pricing aspects for customer engagement software. We’ll also explore software with free features and Top Rated products on TrustRadius that can help you improve business outcomes.        

For more information on customer engagement platforms, see our definitional piece below:

Customer Engagement Pricing Overview

CEP pricing can vary a lot. It will depend on platform capabilities, feature set, selected billing cycle, and the number of users or logins. Free trials that last between 7 and 21 days are available from most vendors so you can verify if their features match your needs. Paid plans can be as low as $10 to $15 dollars per user a month or run into the thousands for customized premium plans. 

Many vendors provide transparent pricing for either their basic plans or their more expensive premium plans. Others will offer starting prices for plans that are geared toward smaller companies. Enterprises that want more capabilities will almost always have to contact sales teams for pricing. No matter what your needs are, your goal should be to improve customer interactions while boosting customer retention and brand loyalty. 

You can read more insights on enterprise customer engagement software and strategies in our post below.

The table below provides examples of some of the features you might expect from basic and premium pricing plans offered by most customer engagement software platforms.

Standard Customer Engagement FeaturesPremium Customer Engagement Features
Centralized data storage
Basic campaign management
Reporting and analytics
Chatbots and live chat
Cross-channel messaging and content management
Support ticketing
Email tracking
Customer journey tracking
Help centers
Automated customer support
API integrations
Customer loyalty programs
Campaign automation
Omnichannel support capabilities 
Advanced content and messaging personalization
Advanced analytics and tracking 
Customer relationship management
Call center support
Sentiment analysis
User segmentation
Consulting and managed services 
24/7 customer service

Free Tools for Customer Engagement

There are free plans available for those who want to test different capabilities or can’t invest heavily in customer engagement. These tools may not have all the features for customer outreach and interaction, but you can combine them with other products in your tech stack. The following products offer free features that you can use to help improve your customer interactions. The scores reflect overall feedback from reviewers, including for paid versions that are not considered in this section.     

Free Software for Customer EngagementtrScoreFree Features
Totango8.2/10
Workflow automation
Customer journey templates
Customer journey tracking
Email campaigns
Account health scores
Freshdesk8.5/10
Knowledge base
Email and social ticketing
Ticketing trends
Collaborative workflows
Data centralization
Freshchat8.7/10
Chatbot
Access for up to 100 agents
100 campaign contacts
Chat analytics
Inbox views for customer conversations
Shopify and WordPress integrations
Zoho CRM8.3/10Contact and account data
Email campaigns
Visitor tracking

Totango

Designed for customer success teams, Totango offers a free plan that covers up to 100 accounts. This plan can track customer journeys, including mapping, orchestration, and optimization. Automated workflows can help you save time. You can also execute email campaigns and gauge account health scores to identify churn risks.

You can see more details for free features and paid plans on the vendor site here

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a Help Desk tool that includes some features that are important for customer engagement. The Community plan offers a few free features that can help you with customer support. These include centralized customer data, knowledge base creation, and ticketing. You can also track ticketing trends and collaborate with teammates to identify bottlenecks in your support workflow.

To complement Freshdesk, users can also integrate free features from Freshchat. This Live Chat software comes with a chatbot that enables customer self-service and helps agents answer questions. Analytics can also track important metrics from bot interactions. eCommerce users in particular will appreciate the WordPress and Shopify integrations.  

For a full feature list for the free plan as well as paid plans, you can check out the vendor page here.

Zoho CRM

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a key component of customer engagement. After all, it’s hard to engage and retain customers if you can’t keep track of their account data or interaction history with your brand. The free version of Zoho CRM  lets you ingest, store, and export customer data. You can also conduct email campaigns using customer lists and keep track of visitors. If your tool doesn’t have native CRM features, this software is an effective and inexpensive solution.   

Top Rated Customer Engagement Pricing in 2022

In this section, we take a look at pricing policies for Top Rated Customer Engagement Platforms on TrustRadius. Some of these vendors do not provide upfront pricing. Despite this, buyers can still get a good idea about available features for each platform.  

Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager is a CMS software with headless capabilities focusing on cross-channel customer experience optimization. This tool helps you unify brand messaging across multiple touchpoints through content personalization. Managed service providers can also use Adobe to manage websites for their customers.

Like all Adobe products, Experience Manager only offers customized pricing plans. This means you’ll have to contact their sales team for an exact quote. 

Here are some of the customer engagement features available on the platform:

  • Cross-channel headless content delivery
  • Auto-scaling
  • Cloud-based native architecture
  • Self-service Cloud Manager
  • Audience insights
  • Customer profiles with real-time updates
  • Personalized content and messaging based on customer behavior
  • Customer journey tracking

For a full breakdown of features, you can visit the vendor’s website

Bright Pattern Contact Center

Bright Pattern helps users set up a contact center to keep up with engagement and support across several touchpoints. They specialize in voice and video calls as well as cross-channel personalized messaging.  

Reviewers of the software on TrustRadius are evenly spread across small and medium-sized businesses and enterprise users. This is a good indicator that Bright Pattern has solutions for businesses of all sizes.

3 different paid plans are available, but you’ll have to contact the sales team for quotes and payment conditions. On their pricing page, the vendor does claim to have the lowest licensing and deployment costs in their industry. TrustRadius reviewers also found the product to have top value for the price in 2022. Here are the available features for each plan.

Voice SelectPro PackagePremium Package
Inbound and outbound voice calls
ACD
IVR
Callback
Personal routing
Customer journey tracking
Customer profiles
Customizable dashboards and reports
Surveys
APIs
90-day call recording
Voice Select Features
Omnichannel ACD
Omnichannel Desktop
Email
Text and SMS messaging
Web chat
MMS
Omnichannel dashboards
Cross-channel journey history and building
Voice Select and Pro features
Integrations with third-party messaging apps
LINE and Viber integrations

The bread and butter of the Bright Pattern feature set can be found in the Voice Select and Pro plans. 

Voice Select offers many features for voice and video calls. You also get surveys, API access, customer profiling, and journey tracking. You can set up a knowledge base to give customers a self-service option on your platform. Dashboards and reports can help you track metrics to gauge the quality of your interactions and behavior on your channels.

Pro enables messaging, email, and online chat capabilities. This plan also offers more omnichannel capabilities and enhanced customer journey insights.  

The Premium Package includes integrations with apps like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat. These integrations will help streamline and improve your customer interactions on social media.

Salesforce

When most people think of CRM tools, Salesforce is one of the first options that come to mind. 

Salesforce is used to track leads and predict future revenues. The software makes it easier for you to participate in brand-related customer conversations on social media. You can also track account progress using analytics, and manage your pipeline from one central location. 

The software has 4 different packages. The Essentials plan includes account and contact management, email integrations, and the Salesforce app for $25. With Professional, you also get lead registration, rules-based scoring of accounts, and collaborative forecasting for $75. At $150, Enterprise costs twice as much, adding workflow and approval automation. Unlimited doubles this price again in exchange for 24/7 support.

The table below shows a price and feature breakdown for key Salesforce features.      

Salesforce Pricing

Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a Help Desk Software tailored for customer service and direct engagement. As with the standard Salesforce CRM product, users can choose from 4 different plans. The prices remain the same for each package. A complete list of available features can be accessed on the vendor website here. Here are some feature highlights for each package.

Essentials costs $25 per month for each user. It allows you to manage the entire service lifecycle, with automated ticketing and case prioritization. Service requests are automatically routed to the appropriate agent. The service console helps streamline workflow and increase the productivity of your service reps. Agents can access a centralized knowledge base, including resources that speed up case resolution. CTI integrations are also available for live calls with customers.

With the Professional plan, you can also manage and track subscriptions and agreements. This costs an extra $50 per month per user.

Enterprise adds advanced API integrations like REST and SOAP for your developers to connect to external systems. This plan will set you back $150 each month for one user. It’s best suited for large companies and enterprises with a dedicated team of developers and complex integration needs. The same can be said about the Unlimited plan, with a price tag set at $300 a month per user. Features include a developer sandbox, access to managed services, and full-time customer support.   

Salesforce Service cloud pricing

Salesforce Experience Cloud

The Salesforce Experience Cloud platform has a greater focus on optimizing content to create more personalized user experiences. There are pricing plans for 4 different editions, as listed below:

  • Self-Service
  • Partner Relationship Management (PRM)
  • External Apps
  • Salesforce Content Management System

You can find a complete list of features for each edition by visiting the vendor page here

Self-Service functions as a knowledge base. It offers portals for account information, support communities, and help center resources. The platform enables users to create personalized experiences based on CRM data and third-party content. You can select two different editions, Customer Community and Customer Community Plus.

The Community plan includes digital experience management, templates for portals, and customer service. Knowledge base capabilities, case management, and workflow automation for customer presentations are available. This plan costs $2 for every login and $5 per member charged every month.         

Community Plus has monthly pricing of $6 per login or $15 per member. This includes customizable dashboards, delegated administration, role-based access, and advanced sharing capabilities.            

Salesforce experience cloud pricing 1

Partner Relationship Management enables sales for brokers, distributors, and resellers. This edition also includes CRM and branded personalization to optimize the customer experience. You can also manage compensation, customize workflows, and process claims. Analytics enables you to track KPIs and partner campaign performance.  

See the feature summary and pricing information below.  

Salesforce experience cloud pricing 1

External Apps allows you to create portals, apps, and sites for both customers and partners using low-code builders. At $15 per login and $35 for every member, this edition is a bit more expensive. It comes with the PRM edition, and also includes features from other editions, like digital experience and case management. Enhanced integrations and API  development capabilities enable greater customization. This helps you increase engagement and optimize the customer experience in a more personalized way. 

Salesforce experience cloud pricing 2

The Salesforce Content Management System is included with other Experience Cloud editions. Portals, forums, and sites can be built and used to distribute content through out-of-the-box integrations. You can also create templates with reusable content in several versions. Headless APIs also enable developers to extend content and functionality to where customers engage with your brand. This helps you to maintain a unified brand voice while optimizing the customer experience for each of your frontend channels.  

Salesforce experience cloud pricing 3

Twilio 

Twilio is a Top Rated customer engagement tool on TrustRadius. This software is highly scalable in the sense that it works well with both enterprises and smaller operations looking to grow. We went over features and use cases for Twilio products in our recent piece on customer engagement software for small businesses

Twilio’s pricing model is complex and varies depending on the product group, as displayed below. Free trials are available for most products.     

Twilio features

Prices for interactive channels depend mostly on usage by the minute. Programmable Voice has a pay-as-you-go structure with fixed pricing for local calls. International rates vary by destination. Volume discounts for calling, recording, and SIP connections automatically kick in once you reach certain usage levels. These vary between 100 thousand to over 100 million minutes per month. A calculator is available to estimate high volume costs for several calls per second. You can see all the details on the pricing page here

The Video pricing page also offers a helpful calculator. This lets you estimate pricing for P2P and group calling based on the number of rooms and participants, as well as minutes per room.

The Live streaming product is charged by the minute based on the number of speakers, content length, and audience impressions. Separate pricing is available for audio and video. 

Twilio SendGrid offers campaign plans for marketing campaigns and email API. Both packages have free and paid options. Campaign prices depend on monthly contacts and emails, while pricing for the email API varies based only on the number of emails you send per month. The amount you pay can be easily calculated by adjusting the quantities you need for each.

Twilio pricing

Features and pricing for both are listed in the table below. 

Marketing CampaignsFreeBasicAdvanced
Monthly Cost $0Starts at $15/moStarts at $60/mo




Features
Design and code editors
User segmentation
A/B testing and insights
3 testing credits for email
1 signup form
Ticketing support
1 teammate
Automation
Free features
10 testing credits for email
5 signup forms
Chat and ticket support
Basic features
60 testing credits for email
15 signup forms
Response times for ticket, chat, and phone support is guaranteed
1,000 teammates
Dedicated IP

Free features are fairly robust for both editions. You’re limited to 2,000 contacts and 6,000 emails per month. There are also no dedicated IPs or chat support. 

Email API PlansFreeEssentialsPro      Premier
Monthly Cost $0 Starts at $19.95/moStarts at $89.95/moCustom pricing


          Features
SMTP Replay, APIs, and Webhooks
Delivery optimization
Analytics
Dynamic templates
Ticketing support
Deliverability insights
Free features
Up to 100 thousand emails/mo
Response times for ticket, chat, and phone support is guaranteed
Up to 1.5 million emails /mo
Dynamic testing
Manage sub-users
2,500 email validations
Dedicated IP
SSO
Essentials features
5,000 email validations

The free email plan lets you send up to 100 emails per day along with the features listed above. Capacity increases significantly with the premium plans to up to 1.5 million or more with a customized plan.

Twilio Frontline integrates with CRMs to enrich customer conversations. The free plan offers only 5 seats. With the Team package, you get up to 1,000 seats for $20. Businesses with greater needs will have to upgrade to the Enterprise plan and contact the sales team for custom pricing

Twilio Segment uses customer profiles and data to personalize cross-channel customer journeys. This helps you get a crystal clear view of your target audience. The free version allows you to collect data from 2 different sources with up to 1,000 monthly users. For more feature information, visit the vendor page here.                               

Serverless is used to create and manage apps. It adopts a pay-as-you-go structure for all three plans, with free flow executions up to 1,000, and free invocations or requests up to 10,000. See the details below and on the vendor’s website.    

twilio pricing 2

Twilio also has plenty of connectivity solutions for customer interactions and team collaboration. Super SIM is a chip that allows you to connect to cellular networks worldwide. Prices go down as production traffic volume increases. Intro pricing is displayed below. A full list of data and SMS fees for eligible carriers can be found on the product page here.

twilio pricing 3

Programmable Wireless functions like a cell plan and offers similar introductory pricing to Super SIM, with higher SMS fees starting at $0.05. Data and SMS are classified by quota, data, and machine-to-machine SMS. The complete pricing table is available here.  

Narrowband is a low-power technology designed to cover a wide area network. A one-time fee of $3 is charged per SIM card, with monthly pricing starting at $2 for 2MB. Overage fees amount to 10 cents for every 100KB. Annual pricing starts at $10 per year.

Elastic SIP Trunking SIP trunking enables worldwide connectivity for VoIP infrastructure. This streamlines video communications and makes it easy to access customer histories. This includes unlimited capacity and instantaneous provisioning. Costs are route-based and charged by the minute for outbound calls. Inbound calls will also be charged by the minute. These costs depend on local or toll-free call origin, as seen in the table below. 

twilio call rates

Pay-as-you-go pricing is also available for local and toll-free numbers for $1.15 and $2.15 per month, respectively. 

Call concurrency is unlimited and secure trunking encryption is included for added security. You can also add emergency calling for $0.75 per month in addition to recording and storage for $0.0025 and $0.0005. Committed-use discounts are also available but require contact with the Twilio sales team. For more pricing details you can visit the vendor page here

The SMS service from Twilio offers both API and messaging. Local and toll-free numbers are available with different prices for text and picture messages. These prices can vary based on your carrier. Both plans include messaging services like queuing, formatting, delivery insights, and opt-out protection. 

Twilio message rates

Toll-free and clean local numbers are also available and come with a 120-day 7-point inspection and anti-spam features. High-volume shortcodes can be leased for $1000 per month. You can also migrate and manage your own lease for $500. Both of these options let you send 100 SMS per second or more with a customized package. You can use your own number with Twilio SMS for $0.50 per month, sending up to 3 messages per second. Complete pricing for SMS is available here.    

WhatsApp Business API allows you to communicate with customers using the popular messaging app. Rates are the same for both user and business-initiated messages and conversations and can be estimated on the vendor website. You get 1,000 free conversations to start. Final rates will depend both on the total number of messages and on the number of interactions you have with customers. The conversation rate is slightly higher if initiated by business accounts.     

Whatsapp business api

With the Conversations API, you can connect to SMS, conversational chat, or other messaging apps for $0.05 per active user and $0.25 per GB per month. Volume pricing is available from the vendor as shown below. For more than 20,000 users, you need to contact Twilio for a customized plan. You can access plan details here.  

Conversions api pricing

Twilio Segment is a key product for customer engagement. The free version is fairly limited. It lets you collect data from 2 different sources, send data wherever you want, and accept up to 1,000 monthly visitors. With Team, you pay $120 a month for 10x as many visitors from unlimited sources. You also get a warehouse destination. The Business plan offers custom pricing and will be more interesting for businesses looking to scale. This package provides a series of benefits. These include the orchestration of personalized journeys, omnichannel experience, data enrichment, and data quality. User volume is customized.           

Access full plan details on the vendor website here

Twilio segment pricing

Verify provides cross-channel user verification. Base pricing starts at $0.05 for every verification along with the other fees for channels you use it with. Volume pricing is customized. A full list of features can be accessed on the vendor site here.

Lookup API is used to identify and validate callers. A free version is available with basic formatting and validation. You can add Inbound caller identification for $0.01 per request and Line Type Intelligence for only $0.008 per request. To get pricing for SIM swap and call forwarding, you’ll need to contact the vendor. 

A free trial of Twilio Flex provides 5,000 active so you can prototype your call center, though you won’t have access to insights or a self-hosted UI. After that, you can pay an hourly rate of $1 per user that lets you scale for seasonal traffic and part-time reps, or a flat $150 monthly fee per user. 

Platform capabilities for Flex include: 

  • Cloud deployment for contact centers
  • Centralized interactions for email, SMS, voice, Facebook, WhatsApp, and WebChat
  • Cross-channel task management
  • Engagement workflow and intelligent routing
  • Google AI integration for relevant integration and recommended responses

Pricing information and more feature details are available on the vendor site

Finding the Right Customer Engagement Platform

To find the best tool for your business, you need to consider your customer support and interaction needs. Your customer engagement tools should leverage account data for personalized content and messaging. The ability to segment your audience and track the steps they take while interacting with your brand is useful for businesses of all sizes.           

TrustRadius lets you compare products with verified reviews to find the best solutions for your business. Visit our site today to find the best tools to help you engage with and support your customers. 

More Resources 

If you’re interested in learning more about customer engagement or related topics, check out these articles from TrustRadius.

Customer Engagement Strategies

Best Free CRM Software in 2021     

2022 B2B Buying Disconnect: The Age of the Self-Serve Buyer

2022 TrustRadius Techonomy Report: Martech Buying Hasn’t Stopped

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