12 best customer activation tools to boost engagement and retention

To boost retention and build great customer relationships, you need active customers who experience the 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'll show you the best customer activation software to keep your customers happy and engaged—and increase their customer lifetime value.

Key takeaways

• Customer activation tools help users reach key milestones faster, improving retention and lifetime value

• The best activation tech stack combines behavior analytics, in-app guidance, customer communication, and support tools

• Look for tools with user segmentation, automated workflows, and activation metrics tracking

• Most tools offer free tiers or trials—start with analytics tools to understand user behavior before adding onboarding flows

Customer activation tools comparison table

12 customer activation tools to increase product value

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.

You'll need a combination of software to yield the best results from your customer activation strategy. The tools below fall into 4 categories: behavior analytics, in-app onboarding, customer communication, and support. Look for a mix that helps you understand your customer journey, communicate with customers, and improve your user onboarding and support experience.

1. 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. You need data on how customers use your product and what they're thinking and feeling as they engage throughout their journey.

– Marc Linneweber, Group Product Manager at Contentsquare

Contentsquare's experience intelligence platform helps you empathize with customers, spot 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 show 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. You'll be able to pinpoint confusing elements or frustrating features and improve the user experience. AI-powered session summaries help teams quickly spot activation blockers without watching hours of recordings.

• 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. Discover where to place strategic nudges towards conversion actions or key features.

• Collect valuable feedback: Surveys capture users' opinions as they move through your site. Turn responses into data that drives informed action with Contentsquare's AI, Sense, which analyzes the results for you instantly.

Contentsquare's Session Replay tool in action

Pros:

• AI-powered insights surface issues automatically

• Combines qualitative and quantitative data in one platform

• Retroactive analysis lets you investigate past behavior without pre-configuring events

Cons:

• Potential learning curve to master the full platform

• Advanced features require enterprise pricing

Pricing: Free tier available; Growth, Pro, and Enterprise tiers with custom pricing.

2. 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.

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.

Pricing: Starts at $249/month for Starter; $449/month for Growth.

Pros:

• No-code builder makes setup accessible

• Strong analytics and segmentation capabilities

• Good for tracking time-to-value metrics

Cons:

• Can be pricey for small teams

• Limited customization on lower tiers

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.

Pricing: Starts at $249/month for Essentials.

Pros:

• Easy setup with Chrome extension builder

• Event tracking built in

• Good for teams without engineering resources

Cons:

• Limited analytics compared to dedicated tools

• Pricing scales with monthly active users

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 (VoC) 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, including NPS, that can be tailored to your audience, or tell Sense your goals and get a custom survey, instantly.

Contentsquare offers more than 40 survey templates

4. Intercom

Intercom is a customer engagement 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.

Pricing: Starts at $39/seat/month for Essential.

Pros:

• Unified inbox for all customer conversations

• Strong chatbot and automation capabilities

• Product tours help guide users to activation

Cons:

• Can get expensive at scale

• Complex pricing structure

5. Pendo

Pendo is a product analytics and in-app guidance platform designed for product teams who want to understand user behavior and guide users toward activation milestones.

With Pendo, you can:

• Track product analytics: understand how users interact with your product, which features they adopt, and where they drop off

• Create in-app guides: build walkthroughs, tooltips, and announcements to guide users toward key activation actions

• Collect user feedback: gather feature requests and feedback directly within your product

• Plan your roadmap: use product usage data to prioritize features that drive activation

Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing.

Pros:

• Strong analytics capabilities for product teams

• Retroactive data analysis without pre-configuring events

• Good for enterprise product organizations

Cons:

• Enterprise pricing puts it out of reach for smaller teams

• Implementation can be complex

6. Amplitude

Amplitude is a customer activation platform focused on product analytics, helping teams understand user behavior and optimize for activation through data-driven insights.

With Amplitude, you can:

• Build behavioral cohorts: segment users based on actions they've taken (or haven't taken) to identify activation patterns

• Map user journeys: visualize how users move through your product and where they drop off before activating

• Run experiments: use a/b testing to test different activation flows and measure their impact on activation metrics

• Integrate with your stack: connect Amplitude data to your other tools for a complete view of the customer journey

Pricing: Free tier available; Growth tier with custom pricing.

Pros:

• Powerful analytics with a generous free tier

• Strong integrations with other tools

• Good for data-driven product teams

Cons:

• Steep learning curve for advanced features

• Analytics-focused without built-in in-app guidance

7. HubSpot Marketing Hub

HubSpot Marketing Hub is an all-in-one customer engagement platform that helps you nurture leads and activate customers through automated marketing workflows.

With HubSpot, you can:

• Automate email campaigns: create drip and follow-up sequences that guide new users toward activation milestones

• Score leads and customers: identify which users are most likely to activate based on their engagement

• Map customer journeys: visualize and automate touchpoints across the customer lifecycle

• Integrate with your CRM: connect marketing activities to customer data for a complete view

Pricing: Free tier available; Starter at $20/month; Professional at $890/month.

Pros:

• Comprehensive platform with many features

• Good free tier for getting started

• Strong ecosystem of integrations

Cons:

• Expensive at higher tiers

• Can be overwhelming for teams focused only on activation

8. Braze

Braze is a customer engagement platform built for cross-channel messaging, helping you reach users wherever they are to drive activation.

With Braze, you can:

• Send cross-channel messages: reach users through push notifications, email, in-app messaging, SMS, and more

• Orchestrate journeys: build automated sequences that respond to user behavior in real time

• Personalize at scale: use customer data to deliver relevant messages that drive activation

• Analyze campaign performance: measure which messages and channels drive the most activations

Pricing: Custom enterprise pricing.

Pros:

• Powerful cross-channel capabilities

• Real-time personalization

• Strong mobile messaging features

Cons:

• Enterprise pricing

• Requires technical resources to implement fully

9. MoEngage

MoEngage is a customer engagement platform that uses AI-powered insights to help you activate customers across channels.

With MoEngage, you can:

• Send omnichannel messages: reach users through email, push, in-app, SMS, and web notifications

• Use AI-driven segmentation: automatically identify user segments most likely to activate

• Orchestrate customer journeys: build automated flows that guide users toward activation

• Analyze and optimize: measure activation rates and optimize your messaging strategy

Pricing: Free tier for startups; custom pricing for enterprise.

Pros:

• AI recommendations help optimize messaging

• Good mobile capabilities

• Startup-friendly pricing tier

Cons:

• Less established than some competitors

• Limited integrations compared to larger platforms

10. Actito

Actito is a customer activation software and marketing automation platform 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.

Pricing: Custom pricing; mid-market focus.

Pros:

• Strong automation capabilities

• Good for B2C companies

• European data compliance built in

Cons:

• Less known in US market

• Limited integrations compared to larger platforms

11. 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 success 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, 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

Pricing: Starts at $19/agent/month for Support Team.

Pros:

• Comprehensive support suite

• Strong integrations

• Scalable for growing teams

Cons:

• Primarily support-focused

• Activation features require higher tiers

12. Customer.io

Customer.io is a messaging automation platform for lifecycle marketing, helping you activate customers through behavioral triggers and multi-channel messaging.

With Customer.io, you can:

• Set up behavioral triggers: send messages automatically when users take (or don't take) specific actions

• Message across channels: reach users through email, push notifications, SMS, and in-app messages

• Segment based on behavior: create dynamic segments that update as users progress toward activation

• Track activation metrics: measure how your messaging impacts activation rates

Pricing: Starts at $100/month for Essentials.

Pros:

• Flexible data model for technical teams

• Transparent, predictable pricing

• Good for behavior-based messaging

Cons:

• Requires technical setup

• Less visual builder than some competitors

How to build your customer activation tech stack

The most effective activation strategies combine multiple tools across categories. Here's how to think about building your stack:

1. Start with analytics to understand current behavior. Platforms like Contentsquare and Amplitude help you see where users drop off, what features they adopt, and where friction exists. You can't improve activation until you understand what's happening. Contentsquare's Funnel Analysis is particularly useful for tracking drop-offs at each activation step.

2. Add in-app onboarding to guide users toward activation. Once you know where users struggle, tools like Userpilot, Appcues, or Pendo help you create flows that guide them through key milestones.

3. Layer in communication for multi-channel engagement. Tools like Intercom, Braze, or Customer.io let you reach users outside your product through email, push, and SMS to bring them back and encourage activation.

4. Support with customer service to resolve blockers. Zendesk helps you quickly solve issues that prevent activation, turning frustrated users into activated customers.

Recommended stacks by company stage:

• Early-stage startups: Contentsquare (free tier) + Appcues + Customer.io

• Growth-stage companies: Contentsquare + Userpilot + Intercom + Zendesk

• Enterprise: Contentsquare + Pendo + Braze + Zendesk

The key is starting with analytics to understand your users before adding tools that act on those insights. Map out their typical journey first, then build your stack to address the specific friction points you discover.

Remember that 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 leads to better retention rates, increased lifetime value, word-of-mouth recommendations, and more feedback, which you can use to keep improving your product experience.

Boost activation 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 customer 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

The best customer activation software gives you granular insights about customer behavior, helps you understand the meaning behind user actions, and improves product functionality. That way, you can improve your customers' journey and keep them active, long-term.

Ready to boost customer activation?

Use Contentsquare's experience intelligence platform to understand your users and guide them through the customer journey.

FAQs about customer activation tools