What Is Customer Experience? A Guide to CX Platforms, Tools, and KPIs

Great customer experience can turn one-time buyers into long-term customers, and the platform behind it plays a bigger role in that than many businesses realize. Whether you're leading your company's customer experience (CX) team or an IT leader vetting solutions, the landscape can be hard to navigate: which tools actually qualify as "CX platforms," which KPIs are worth tracking, and which category fits your needs.

If you want to keep customers happy, retain more of them over time, and ultimately deliver a better customer experience, here's what you should know.

What is customer experience?

Customer experience encompasses every step of a customer's relationship with a company, across every buying and support journey. That includes every interaction across every channel a brand uses (phone, chat, social, in-person), every employee a customer encounters, and every product touchpoint along the way.

A customer experience platform, then, is software that helps a business manage and improve that experience for prospects and customers. The tricky part: customer experience is broad enough that few platforms cover every touchpoint across the entire customer lifecycle. Most CX software specializes in a piece of it.

Customer experience vs. other types of platforms

Customer experience platforms, customer journey management platforms, customer engagement management (CEM) platforms, and customer relationship management (CRM) solutions overlap quite a bit in functionality. It's easy to use these labels interchangeably even when the fit isn't quite right.

If you're monitoring customer behavior, that can call for a different tool than if you're mapping a customer journey. Managing e-commerce CX looks different from managing CX inside a contact center. Most CX software is specialized in some way, so it helps to know where the lines are before you buy.

Customer experience software and solutions

When people search for customer experience software, they're usually looking for one of a few things: a platform to run CX operations day to day, a point solution for a specific channel, or a broader customer experience management solution that ties multiple functions together.

Here's roughly how those break down:

• Customer experience software typically refers to the operational tools that let teams manage conversations, tickets, or communications with customers, think contact center platforms, help desks, and messaging tools.

• Customer experience solutions is a wider umbrella that can include software plus the services, integrations, and support that come with it.

• Customer experience services usually points to the professional services side: implementation, consulting, and ongoing optimization support that vendors offer alongside their software.

• Customer experience management solutions tend to be platforms built specifically to unify data and insights across the customer journey, closer to a customer data or journey-mapping layer than a single-channel tool.

These categories can overlap and definitions vary by vendor, so the practical approach is to start from your use case (what are you trying to fix or improve?) rather than the label a vendor uses.

Types of CX platforms based on business need

Here are the most common categories of customer experience management software, organized by what they're built to do.

Contact center platforms

A contact center platform manages operations and communications for inbound support, proactive outbound service, outbound sales, and call centers. Teams managing these functions need software that lets agents and supervisors handle high volumes of phone calls, live chat, and social messages, often all in the same shift.

Dialpad Support is an example of this: agents can make calls, run video meetings, send SMS/MMS and team messages, and handle digital channels from one platform. That consolidation matters because it means agents and supervisors aren't toggling between separate systems just to pick up a call, log an activity, or ask a teammate a question.

A few things worth evaluating in a contact center platform:

• Scalability: Can you add or remove agents, call queues, and phone numbers without incurring extra professional services costs? ClassPass, for example, runs a small IT team supporting employees worldwide, and can add or remove users directly from a cloud-based admin screen as the business grows or fluctuates seasonally.

• AI-assisted coaching: Supervisors can't personally coach every conversation. Dialpad's AI Live Coach Cards can surface tailored talking points on an agent's screen when a tricky topic comes up, so newer agents can get the context they need without adding to a manager's workload.

• Omnichannel functionality: Call center software covers phone calls, but customers increasingly reach out over social messaging, WhatsApp, or other digital channels too. An omnichannel platform lets agents provide a consistent voice and digital experience, and syncs context across those channels so nothing gets lost in the handoff.

• Integrations: Most contact center teams rely on a CRM and help desk software alongside their communications platform. Dialpad's app marketplace connects with tools like Salesforce, Zendesk, Microsoft 365, and Zoho CRM, and several of these integrations embed dialing directly inside the platform itself.

• Analytics: A contact center analytics dashboard should give you missed and abandoned call data, volume patterns, and average speed to answer without needing to file a support ticket for a report.

• AI customer service agents: Many contact center solutions now offer AI customer service agents built into the same system your live agents use, so context can carry over cleanly when a conversation moves from AI to human.

CRMs

A CRM stores the details of your customer relationships: segmentation, past interactions, contact details, purchase history, and more. If you want to personalize customer experiences at any scale, this is usually where that context lives. Integrating your CRM with your contact center keeps that context available to agents in the moment, rather than in a separate tab they have to switch to mid-call.

Customer self-service platforms

Customer self-service platforms, including chatbots, AI agents, and IVR systems, let customers resolve simple requests like account lookups, order status, or store hours without waiting for a live agent.

Some of these tools are standalone, sold separately from a contact center or phone system. Others are built directly into the same platform agents use for calls and messaging, which can make it easier for context to carry over cleanly when a conversation escalates to a human.

Dialpad AI Agents are an example of the built-in kind, and can also take action inside connected systems, like booking an appointment or updating a record, rather than just answering a question.

Help desk or ticketing systems

For industries like IT and hospitality, a help desk or ticketing system helps assign incoming requests to specific agents, track which tickets are resolved versus still open, and identify where processes are breaking down over time.

Customer feedback management and voice-of-the-customer solutions

Gathering, and actually using, customer feedback is its own discipline. Where this used to mean survey slips at a register, most voice of the customer (VOC) programs today rely on more automated data collection. Beyond qualitative feedback, common metrics include:

• CSAT (customer satisfaction) scores

• NPS (net promoter score)

• CES (customer effort score)

• Churn rate

Customer experience KPIs and how to measure them

Picking the right customer experience KPIs matters as much as picking the right platform. A few of the most common CX KPIs, and what they're best used for:

• CSAT measures satisfaction with a specific interaction, useful for pinpointing where a particular touchpoint is falling short.

• NPS measures overall loyalty and likelihood to recommend, useful as a longer-term brand health signal rather than a per-interaction metric.

• CES (customer effort score) measures how much work a customer had to do to get their issue resolved, often a stronger predictor of churn than satisfaction alone.

• First contact resolution rate tracks how often an issue gets solved without a transfer or follow-up, a good proxy for whether agents have the context and tools they need.

• Average handle time and average speed to answer measure efficiency, but are worth pairing with a quality metric like CSAT so a business isn't optimizing for speed at the expense of the outcome.

One shortcoming worth naming directly: CSAT and NPS surveys typically get filled out by a small, self-selected slice of customers, often the most frustrated or most delighted, which can skew results. Some platforms aim to close that gap with text analytics that can help predict CSAT scores even when a customer doesn't complete a survey, an approach Dialpad's AI CSAT feature takes.

When it comes to customer experience management KPIs specifically (tracking CX performance at a program level rather than a single interaction), most teams choose to combine a few of the metrics above into a scorecard, rather than relying on any single number.

CX tools and platforms to consider

Beyond the core categories above, a few tool types show up repeatedly in CX tech stacks:

• CX automation platforms handle repetitive workflows (routing, tagging, follow-up messages) so agents can focus on interactions that need a human.

• Digital customer experience solutions extend CX consistency to web, chat, and mobile channels, not just voice.

• Sentiment analysis tools, like Dialpad's contact center sentiment analysis feature, flag when a conversation is trending negative in real time rather than after the fact.

• Post-call automation, such as Dialpad's post-call automation, can handle recaps, CRM updates, and follow-up tasks without manual data entry.

It's also worth considering how AI fits into customer experience more broadly, since many of the tools above rely on it to work well at scale.

4 questions to ask when evaluating a customer experience platform

1. What are your business goals?

Are you trying to increase customer retention, improve upsell and cross-sell rates, or reduce cost to serve? Every business weighs these differently, and that should shape which platform and which KPIs matter most.

2. Which channels does your customer journey cover?

What does your industry's or business's customer lifecycle actually look like? If customers rarely use social media to reach you but call frequently, prioritize the phone experience over the digital one, and vice versa.

3. How does the platform integrate with your other tools?

The more versatile a platform, the more separate tools a business can consolidate, which can add up to real cost savings for companies managing dozens of apps. At minimum, a contact center platform should integrate with the CRM and help desk software already in place, to cut down on manual data entry.

4. What's your budget?

Enterprise-focused platforms like Adobe Experience Platform and Qualtrics tend to sit at a higher price point, but there are cost-effective solutions across the spectrum. A structured evaluation, trial period, or proof of concept can surface gaps that a sales demo alone won't, particularly for niche industry requirements.

Examples of customer experience platforms

This isn't an exhaustive list, but it covers the categories above with real examples.

1. Dialpad: an omnichannel customer experience platform

Dialpad is a unified communications and contact center platform. Teams can make calls, run video meetings, send SMS/MMS and team messages, and handle customer communications across channels from one place, on desktop or mobile.

One distinction worth knowing: many "unified communications" platforms achieve that label through third-party partnerships, where a UCaaS provider white-labels or resells a separate CCaaS solution. That can result in a disjointed experience, with an inconsistent interface between the two systems. Dialpad's platform is built natively, so voice, video, and digital channels operate in the same system rather than stitched together after the fact.

Built-in AI: Dialpad Support includes AI-native features that can transcribe conversations in real time using natural language processing, run live sentiment analysis, track recurring topics through Custom Moments, and surface AI Live Coach Cards with tailored guidance when a tricky topic comes up on a call.

Self-service: Dialpad AI Agents can be built without code, and can search across help center content, PDFs, and past customer conversations to answer questions, rather than relying on a narrow, pre-scripted decision tree.

AI CSAT: Dialpad's AI CSAT feature can help predict CSAT scores using text analytics, which matters because most customers skip the survey entirely and the ones who respond tend to be at the extremes.

Analytics: Contact center analytics dashboards surface missed and abandoned calls, volume patterns, and average speed to answer without a support request.

2. Salesforce

Salesforce is a widely used CRM for tracking customer data, segments, and interaction history. It integrates with Dialpad to log activities automatically and embed a dialer directly inside the CRM.

3. Zendesk

Zendesk is a help desk and ticketing platform suited to support-focused CX. Its Dialpad integration logs calls, voicemails, and recordings back to customer profiles and embeds a dialer inside the platform.

4. Adobe Experience Platform

Adobe Experience Platform is built for mid-to-enterprise organizations that need to ingest, organize, and activate large volumes of customer data. Unlike the platforms above, it doesn't manage live communications directly. It's more of an insights layer that helps a business understand and act on the data those other systems generate.

5. Qualtrics

Qualtrics CustomerXM focuses on predictive analytics and real-time feedback capture across channels, with CRM integrations that can trigger actions in other tools based on what it finds.

Which customer experience platform is right for your business?

Most businesses end up using more than one type of CX platform, often integrated together, rather than a single tool that covers everything. Whether you need to manage high-volume communications, gather structured customer insights, or both, the categories above should narrow down where to start.

A cloud contact center can unify inbound and outbound CX workflows, along with the AI and analytics capabilities that support them, all on one platform.