6 customer activation tools to increase engagement, product adoption

To boost retention and build great customer relationships, you need active customers who experience the maximum value of your product at every stage of their journey. Customer activation is when customers complete the next milestone of their lifecycle with you—perhaps by using a key feature, confirming their account, or adding a team member to your platform. 

With the right customer activation tools, your users will remain engaged and loyal to your product or service.

In this article, we show you the best customer activation software to keep your customers happy and engaged—and increase their lifetime value.

Why do you need customer activation tools?

Customer activation matters because it helps users get more value out of your product and moves customers to the next stage in their journey. This, in turn, leads to a better retention rate, increased lifetime value, word-of-mouth recommendations, and more feedback—which you can use to keep improving your product.  

Activating your customers requires multiple steps. You need to:

• Get to know your customer persona, and understand how they use your product

• Map out their typical journey

• Nudge customers toward conversion actions at the right times

• Provide first-rate customer support to solve user problems quickly

• Remove friction and continuously improve your product experience to deliver more value to customers

Doing all this manually is incredibly time-consuming and often unreliable. Luckily, there are many great tools to help you boost customer activation at every stage of the process.

Using the right tools lets you take a systematic approach to customer activation, as you collect better user data, understand how customers use your product, and find every opportunity for improvement.

The 6 best customer activation tools to increase your product value

You’ll need a combination of software to yield the best results from your customer activation strategy. Look for a mix of tools that help you understand your customer journey, communicate with customers, and improve your user onboarding and support experience. 

Here’s a list of the 6 best tools to help you increase customer activation for your business. 

1. Userpilot

Userpilot is a customer success and product experience platform that helps you increase customer activation and product adoption by providing users with a complete onboarding experience. This helps them understand all your features, and nudges them to take action.

With Userpilot, you can

• Reduce 'time to value’: design custom onboarding experiences to help new customers quickly get value from your product

• Segment users based on their behavior: this helps you personalize your product experience based on user behavior and the next stage of their journey, like converting a freemium user to a paid plan

• Set up helpful hints: hints help new users get acquainted with your product on their own, and reduces frustrating first-time experiences that prevent customers from activating. They can also direct customers to the most valuable ways to use your tool so they start seeing results fast. 

• Highlight relevant features: send nudges that trigger customers to try out your best features to ensure they aren’t missing out on ways to get maximum value from your product

• Track user activation: Userpilot tracks customer activation metrics, so you can see how well your customer activation strategy is working. If you notice customers aren’t activating, you can make adjustments to your strategy and continue tracking the results.

2. Contentsquare

Contentsquare gives you a deep understanding of your customers⁠—their needs, wants, and behavior—through qualitative and quantitative data, so you know exactly how to improve the customer experience at every stage.

You can’t increase customer activation until you understand exactly what your customers want and how they currently move through your journey. The best way to find out is to gather data on how customers use your product and what they’re thinking and feeling as they engage throughout their journey.

Marc Linneweber, a Group Product Manager at Contentsquare, explains the importance of understanding your users’ unique needs:

Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform helps you empathize with your customers and spot user issues or frustrations, understand why your customers behave the way they do, and hear from them in their own words about their experience with your product.

With Contentsquare, you can:

• See how customers engage with your site: Heatmaps shows you an aggregate of your users’ behavior on any given page. You’ll see where customers scroll, hover, and click, what attracts their attention, and what they ignore.  

• Watch real user behavior: Session Replay lets you see the exact journeys customers go through. Where Heatmaps gives you a visual of aggregate behavior, Session Replay shows you individual customer experiences that can be filtered according to different user attributes. For example, you could examine how power users interact with your software and compare their journey with less active customers, or those who’ve reported dissatisfaction. Maybe your customers are inactive because of frustration or confusion on your product page. With Session Replay, you’ll be able to pinpoint confusing elements or frustrating features and improve the user experience.

• Understand your most common user journeys: Journey Analysis turns your customer journey data into an interactive data visualization, highlighting which pages your users pass through and where they tend to drop out. This reveals where to place strategic nudges towards conversion actions or key features. 

• Collect valuable feedback: Contentsquare’s Surveys capability allows you to easily create customer surveys to capture users’ opinions as they move through your site.  Contentsquare’s Interviews capability, meanwhile, streamlines the process of meeting your users for a face-to-face feedback session. Both positive and negative customer feedback helps you ensure customers are getting as much value as possible from your product and improve customer activation.

Contentsquare's Session Replay tool in action 

3. Appcues

Appcues helps you increase customer activation by creating custom flows that encourage users to interact with and explore your product.

Appcues’ user flows guide customers through your product and help you build personalized experiences to influence their behavior, allowing you to target the right customers at exactly the right time. 

Here’s how Appcues’ key features help with customer activation:

• Build in-app experiences without needing to code: the Appcues builder is a Google Chrome extension where you can create sequences, such as welcome flows, to guide users through your product and all its most valuable features

• Create customized events: build sequences that are triggered by certain customer behaviors—such as the use of a particular feature—or by attributes like your user's location or job title. This helps your customers get personalized assistance and encourages them to use the features most valuable to them. 

• Manage flows and events: the Appcues studio lets you manage and review your flows and get an overview of customer behavior. This helps you see the big picture and understand if you’re successfully boosting customer activation.

💡Pro tip: once you have an overview of your customer flows, go deeper by hearing your users explain how they experience your product in their own words. 

Use Contentsquare’s Surveys capability on your website or product pages to capture qualitative Voice of Customer data and make the necessary changes to improve the user experience and engagement.

It only takes a few minutes to launch a survey and start collecting insights. Choose from 40+ survey templates that can be tailored to your audience, or tell Contentsquare’s AI assistant your goals and get a custom survey, instantly.

Contentsquare offers more than 40 survey templates 

4. Intercom

Intercom is a customer communication platform that helps you increase customer satisfaction and provide effective customer service. Great customer support drives activation by solving problems fast and encouraging users to adopt your product solution.

With Intercom, you can: 

• Engage and communicate with customers: using chatbots, personalized support, product tours, messages, email campaigns, and self-service support, you ensure customers always have somewhere to turn when they’re confused or uncertain

• Proactive support: you don’t have to wait for customers to reach out to you. Instead, you can step in to help when you see signs of frustration or abandonment, reducing churn.

• Give customers fast support without the effort: Intercom uses chatbots, automations, and flows to reduce workload and support tickets without compromising on the quality of your customer service. You won’t have to worry about losing activated customers due to inadequate or slow customer assistance. 

5. Actito

Actito is a customer activation and marketing automation software that helps you connect with your customers throughout their user journey.

Here are 3 ways it can help with customer activation:

• Track customer preferences and behavior: figure out how best to reach customers, no matter where they are in their journey

• Build and test activation strategies: try out different timings, channels, and messaging to find the best way to engage customers and perfect your customer activation strategies

• Create a customized customer data dashboard: collect high-level customer data and view customer interactions in one place. Then, use this information to segment, customize, and design unique user experiences that increase activation.  

6. Zendesk

Zendesk makes it easier for your team to deliver amazing customer service and lets you resolve product issues and activate your customers. This is a great customer service tool to increase customer activation.

With Zendesk, you can:

• Provide support across various channels: meet customers wherever they are and sync your conversations across different channels⁠—over messaging, live chat, email, voice, etc—so you never miss an opportunity to activate a customer

• Create self-serve support systems: create a help center and community forum so customers know where to find information anywhere they get stuck

• Efficient support with a personal touch: AI works alongside your support team to capture relevant information from each query so customers don’t have to repeat themselves and problems can be solved quickly and effectively

Boost activation with the right tools by understanding how customers use your product

As demonstrated above, there are plenty of tools out there that can improve your customer activation. 

If you want to keep customers engaged with your product and increase their lifetime value, we recommend getting tools that help you:

• Gather extensive data about how customers use your product, what they do, and why

• Give customers a chance to leave feedback and answer surveys so you know what they’re struggling with

• Provide extensive support across channels so you can step in as soon as your customer has a problem (or even before they reach out) and resolve the issue

• Guide customers to take action and move them toward your most valuable features, at the right moment

When creating your customer activation tech stack, it’s important to find the right combination of tools to help you with all aspects of activation, from onboarding to customer service and analytics. The best customer activation software gives you granular insights about customer behavior and helps you understand the meaning behind user actions. That way, you can improve your customers’ journey and keep them active, long-term.

FAQs about customer activation tools