12 Top Customer Messaging Platforms to Boost Your Business in 2024

Some businesses, especially small ones, might say engaging with customers is a time-consuming task. That’s why customer messaging platforms have emerged.

Please bear in mind that you can’t ignore your customers’ interactions and expect a boost in your sales. You just need to put your feet in your customers’ shoes. If you ask a question from a company or complain about one of their products and don’t get a good answer, you won’t buy anything else from that company.

Messaging platforms can help you manage all of your customers’ messages efficiently. Here is the list of the best customer messaging tools that will help you increase your engagement rates. 

What Are Customer Messaging Platforms?

You might ask what customer messaging platforms are and how they can impact your sales. Simply put, customer messaging tools are software solutions that help your business communicate directly with your customers.

These tools usually support SMS, email, social media, and chat apps so that you can interact with your customers wherever they are.

They streamline your communication, allowing your business to manage all customer interactions from a single interface.

So you can manage all communications from promotional offers via SMS to customer support queries from one platform. Of course, this is a big advantage. Now, let’s see how it can impact your business growth.

Segmentation & Personalization

Using customer messaging platforms, you can easily segment your customers into various groups. This means that you can talk to each group based on their favors, age, gender, and many other factors.

Of course, when your customers receive a personalized message, they feel more intimate and therefore, they will highly likely interact with you.

Efficient Customer Support

Don’t worry about spending time and effort on customer support. Using a good customer messaging app, you can have quick and efficient communication for resolving your customers’ issues. 

Higher Conversion Rates

When you use a messaging platform, you can send timely and relevant follow-ups. This will lead to higher conversion rates because your customers feel they’re important to you.

For example, when you send a special offer using SMS to a customer who abandoned their cart, he/she will be encouraged to get back to working with you.

Automation & Scheduling

Sending text messages at the right time has a significant impact on the CTR of your messages. Using a good messaging tool, you can automate and schedule your SMS campaigns. This will increase the ROI of your campaigns, leading to more sales.

Best Customer Support Apps

As said earlier, customer support is one of the purposes of customer messaging platforms. Lots of useful apps have been designed specifically for customer support. These apps will let you receive tickets from your customers and manage all of them using a single dashboard.

Here are some of the best customer support apps in 2024:

#1 Hiver

Hiver is an easy-to-use app to manage your team emails. In fact, you can use it instead of Gmail to manage shared inboxes, collaborators, conversation IDs, and many other factors that are important in a team conversation.

More than 10,000 businesses are using this customer messaging platform to manage their team communications. The good news is that you don’t need to install any app to use Hiver. You can use it on any browser.

Here are some important features offered by Hiver:

• Email-Based Support: Hiver allows you to manage customer support directly from your Gmail. This way, you can avoid switching between different platforms and save time.

• Shared Inboxes: It gives your team members access to shared inboxes. Therefore, all customer emails will be read and responded to soon.

• Automation: You can automate routine tasks to avoid repetition and save time. For example, customer ticket assignment will be much easier using Hiver. 

• Analytics: Using Hiver, you can gain insights into the performance of each team member. Hiver gives you detailed analytics about SLA, working hours, and customer satisfaction.

#2 Front

Front is another great customer support platform with lots of messaging features. It’s an all-in-one channel that supports email, SMS, live chat, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter and more.

Your cross-team collaboration and task assignment will be much easier using Front. Without Front, you need to use several apps without any integration, which means you will lose a lot of time.

Take a look at some features of Front to know it better:

• Unified Inbox: You can integrate all of your communication channels into one dashboard. Simply put, you can answer emails, SMSs, and social media chats, from your Front dashboard.

• Workflow Automation: Front has an efficient automation feature. It allows you to automate repetitive tasks, such as message routing and follow-ups.

• Collaboration Tools: Front simplifies collaboration among your team members. It allows your employees to discuss something without switching to other platforms.

• AI Chatbots: AI chatbots offered by Front can reduce the volume of work your employees need to do. Using this feature, you’ll save time and money and increase customer satisfaction.

#3 Messagely

Looking for another versatile customer support tool? You’ve come to the right place. Messagely is a great tool for real-time customer engagement and satisfaction.

This is also a web-based customer messaging platform so you can use it on any operating system.  It offers instant communication and automated responses through lots of features like:

• Live Chat: Apart from texting, Messagely allows you to have a live chat with your customers. This will definitely increase your customer satisfaction rates.

• Targeted Messages: It allows you to segment your customer to send hyper-relevant messages to each segment. 

• Scheduling: You can schedule your messages to be sent at the best time to get maximum exposure.

• Chatbots: Smart chatbots are also another feature offered by Messagely that allows you to reduce the time and effort you need to respond to many messages.

#4 Hubspot

If you need a more comprehensive platform for marketing, customer support, and communication, Hubspot Service Hub is your best choice.

It’s an AI-powered customer platform that lets you connect your marketing, sales, and customer service.

Here is a summary of features offered by this powerful customer messaging tool:

• Email marketing: Hubspot is a great tool for email campaigns with lots of features like open rate tracking, personalization, and click-through rate tracking.

• Content management system (CMS): Apart from communication, HubSpot allows you to manage your product pages and blogs. It also offers SEO tools to optimize your content.

• Social media management: You can also schedule and publish your posts on all social media platforms. Using Hubspot, you can monitor your mentions and track engagement.

• Ticketing System: It’s an all-in-one platform for managing the inquiries, complaints, and requests from your customers.

• Live Chat: It also offers real-time communication with customers. It has a great live chat feature for immediate assistance.

#5 Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk is a famous company that offers lots of applications, including a Google-like workspace. It has many cloud-based services like sheets, email, docs, etc.

It also offers great customer support features like:

• Ticketing System: Zoho offers a single dashboard for managing customer inquiries, complaints, and requests.

• Live Chat: You can have a live chat with your customers to offer quick responses and improve customer satisfaction.

• Email Support: It has an integrated email service that lets you respond to messages without switching to other platforms.

#6 Podium

Podium is great for local businesses that care about customer reviews. It helps you manage customer communications and gather feedback. Therefore, you can improve your customer service and boost your online reputation

Here are some features offered by Podium:

• Messaging: It offers two-way communication with your customers. Podium supports various content types, including text, voice, and video.

• Reviews: You manage online reviews and reputation.

• Webchat: Podium offers live chat with your customers to offer instant responses to their inquiries.

• Payments: It also has a feature for accepting payments within the platform.

• Automation: You can automate routine tasks, such as sending automated responses or assigning tickets.

• Team Collaboration: It offers features for teams to collaborate on customer inquiries and tasks.

#7 Helpshift

Helpshift is a customer support web app that offers in-app messaging and support. It’s the best option for businesses that need customer messaging within their mobile applications.

Here are key features offered by Helpshift:

• In-App Messaging: Helpshift provides customer support directly within your mobile app.

• AI-Powered Chatbots: It has chatbots that save you time and money when communicating with customers.

• Analytics and Reporting: It offers detailed reports of your interactions and the performance of your team members.

Communication & Engagement Platforms

Now, let’s introduce another type of customer messaging platforms. Here are the top tools that are mainly based on SMS rather than other means of communication.

#8 WP SMS

WP SMS is a great WordPress plugin specifically designed for SMS marketing campaigns. You can use it to segment your customers and personalize your text messages to get higher conversion rates.

Here are the key features of this customer text messaging platform:

• Bulk Messaging: WP SMS allows you to send mass messages to all of your customers. It’s great for reminders, SMS ads, and product updates.

• Scheduling: You can determine when to send text messages to ensure the majority of your customers interact with the message.

• 300+ Gateway: WP SMS supports more than 300 gateways so that you can communicate with all customers.

• Two-Way Messaging: It allows you to receive and send messages to your subscribers.

• Segmentation: You can divide your subscribers into various groups to send targeted messages.

#9 App0

App0 is a powerful tool for customer communication that uses AI to turn simple notifications into engaging conversations. Using App0, you can make your interactions more personalized and enjoyable and get higher engagement rates.

Key features of App0 include:

• Easy-to-use flow builder: App0 offers custom communication workflows without needing to code.

• Data-driven insights: It gathers customer data to give you insights so that you can improve engagement.

• Customizable user experiences: It offers pre-built templates or create your own.

• Cloud-Based: You can use it wherever you want because it’s cloud-based.

#10 MessageBird

MessageBird is another cloud-based platform that helps you connect with your customers worldwide. It was founded in 2011, and it soon gained popularity by offering communication services like SMS, voice, chat, and email.

Here are the key features offered by MessageBird:

• Reliable SMS API: It can send and receive text messages to everyone around the world.

• Detailed status updates: You can track your messages with status levels.

• Email: It also has a great email service.

• Efficient inbox: You can manage your interactions with your customers with a shared and efficient inbox.

• Targeted messaging: You can segment your customers and send different messages to them.

#11 Gorgias

If you have an online store and want to improve customer experience, Gorgias is your best choice.

You can do all of your customer interactions in one place. In other words, you can easily manage email, social media, live chat, voice, and SMS messages from a single dashboard.

Other features offered by Gorgias:

• Integrations: Gorgias can connect with popular e-commerce platforms.

• Automation: It offers automated responses to common questions.

• Reporting and analytics: It allows you to track support performance and revenue.

• Templates: Gorgias has pre-written responses that save you time.

• AI-powered features: You can use AI to tag tickets, and also translate, and summarize responses.

#12 Drift

Drift is a leading platform that helps your business connect with your customers. Using this tool, you can engage with your customers in a personalized way via chat and email.

Here are the key features offered by Drift:

• Customizable chat widgets: You can integrate live chat into your website or app.

• Personalized emails: It allows you to segment your audience and send targeted emails based on customer behavior.

• AI-powered chatbots: You can save time by using automated chatbot messages.

• Conversation history: Easily search and reference past conversations.

In the end, it’s good to take a look at the following table to compare these customer communication platforms in terms of their features:

Conclusion

Communicating with your customers is one of the most important tasks you have when running a business. It will be a time-consuming and laborious task if you don’t use the right tool.

We introduced the 12 best customer messaging platforms in 2024 to help you in this regard. Try to get familiar with the features of each one to be able to choose the best customer messaging platform for your business.

WP SMS is a WordPress plugin that will integrate your messaging tasks into your website’s dashboard. Using this platform, you can run SMS campaigns, segment your customers, and automate your messages. If you need more information about our plugin, don’t hesitate to contact us.

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