Choosing the right customer engagement tools can make all the difference in how you connect with your audience.
Whether it's for marketing, sales, support, or logistics, the right platform helps you engage customers effectively and scale your business.
In this article, we’ll explore some of the top options—including Telerivet, HubSpot, and Intercom—to help you find the best fit for your needs. We’ll cover:
- What are customer engagement tools?
- Open world vs walled garden
- 3 key customer engagement use cases
- Connectivity for DIY customer engagement: Telerivet
- Prepackaged customer engagement for marketing: HubSpot
- Customer support and beyond: Intercom
Customer engagement tools are SaaS products that businesses use to communicate with their customers or potential customers.
But engagement isn’t just about the act of communication. It can be broader than that. It implies the use of multiple channels and, in its broadest sense, includes both synchronous and asynchronous communication.
The customer engagement landscape involves a huge number of use cases. However, the primary ones tend to be customer support, customer success, sales, and marketing. Of course, there are many subcategories within these areas, but "customer engagement" is a useful catch-all term for understanding the dynamics at play in this type of communication.
It’s not just about reaching out to customers at key moments—it’s about fostering ongoing communication. Ideally, you want customers or potential customers to engage with you: to send a message, click to learn more, hop on a call, or watch a video. Each of these touchpoints is an example of customer engagement, and different tools can help facilitate these interactions.
The gold standard in the B2B SaaS playbook is what might be called "surround sound" or "360-degree" engagement. This approach involves leveraging all available communication channels in effective and profitable ways to create a constant, consistent, and ever-present experience for current, future, and even past customers.
Customer engagement tools are the software solutions that make this possible. In this article, we’ll break them down and explore a few that might be useful for you.
Open world vs walled garden
One key distinction in customer engagement is the difference between an open world and a walled garden.
These metaphors are quite literal, and their meaning should be relatively clear from the start. When we talk about walled garden products, we’re referring to platforms that keep activity contained within their ecosystem. In other words, you can only communicate with other people who are also on that platform.
A simple example is the difference between a Facebook message and an email.
With email, as a channel and as a protocol, as long as you have a person’s email address, you can contact them. Whether their provider allows your email to get through depends on various factors, but the line of communication is open regardless of which software they use as their email client.
With a Facebook message, it's different. You can’t send a message on Facebook and have the recipient receive it on Reddit. These are separate platforms, and communication is restricted to other users within the same platform.
At first glance, the distinction between open world and walled garden products might seem black and white—either a platform is open, or it isn’t. But in reality, it’s more of a spectrum.
Even in the world of Communication Platforms as a Service (CPaaS), some tools are more closed than others.
Telerivet, for example, is designed to be as open-world as possible. You can use Telerivet to send an SMS or a WhatsApp message to a customer, but if you prefer not to use Telerivet’s internal systems for sending messages, you can integrate a different system instead.
Telerivet offers plug-and-play options that give you control over which providers you use and how you connect to them.
When considering customer engagement tools, it’s worth thinking about the values of an open internet—and how the tools you choose shape the kind of internet you want to see.
3 key customer engagement use cases
The first customer engagement use case is a simple one: basic customer support interactions.
Let’s say you’re a B2B SaaS company, and a user visits your website because they’re having trouble logging in. They need help, and they need it now.
The obvious solution is a live chat system.
With a live chat system—perhaps with some intelligent screening at the beginning—you can quickly assess how urgent the issue is and try to resolve it in real time. If necessary, you can escalate the support conversation from live chat to another form of support. You can do this quickly, instantly, and directly from a modal on your website.
This is customer support done well. And it requires customer engagement software.
The second example is sales-focused.
This time, let’s look at it from the other perspective. You’re a sales team manager, and you want your team to hit their targets and earn their bonuses.
You see them making call after call, sending email after email, and working to get leads into meetings.
But is it working? Are the meetings going well?
With a strong customer engagement platform, you can analyze aggregated data about those meetings—how they went, how effective they were. Maybe even run sentiment analysis. You could pull data on the most frequently discussed topics across the team, across the quarter.
For example, is there a noticeable difference in conversation topics between accounts that closed versus those that were lost? Can you learn from that data to improve future sales efforts?
By engaging with leads and then learning from those engagements, you can refine your sales process over time.
The third example is different again.
You’re at home, and you want to order food.
That process involves communication at multiple levels—with the restaurant, the delivery person, and with yourself for updates on delivery and arrival times. Messages need to move from place to place, from phone to phone, with timely alerts. And all of this has to happen in an effective sequence that adapts to real-time logistics.
This requires a well-programmed set of customer engagement tools—tools that not only entice customers and keep them updated but also ensure the logistics run smoothly.
This kind of use case is exactly what Telerivet is known for. It powers platforms across the world, including some of the biggest delivery apps in existence.
Customer engagement use cases can be found almost anywhere, achieving almost anything. But which ones are right for you?
Connectivity for DIY customer engagement: Telerivet
Telerivet is the most flexible option of all the tools we’ll discuss in this article.
Telerivet can be used to orchestrate communications, but it can also be thought of as hardcore dev tooling for extreme situations.
Why?
You can use Telerivet to simply send updates via text—a straightforward use case, like sending a thank-you message to someone who has made a purchase. This is one of the simplest programmable SMS API use cases you can think of.
But beyond that, Telerivet powers the logistics behind many of Asia’s biggest super apps. It is also used by humanitarian organizations worldwide, including the Red Cross, Doctors Without Borders, and the Norwegian Refugee Council.
They use Telerivet because it not only allows them to choose which providers they want to operate with, but also because Telerivet provides more than just SMS, WhatsApp, Viber, and voice.
Telerivet enables the creation of custom gateways.
It allows organizations to build their own networks in underserved locations, helping field workers in war zones establish mobile phone networks on the ground to communicate and get things done.
So Telerivet can do both.
It can be a hardcore tool to build out your connectivity nervous system, but it also provides easy-to-use, what-you-see-is-what-you-get interfaces to build messaging pathways, campaigns, polls, and more.
Telerivet provides connectivity completeness, allowing you to manage all of your connectivity from one centralized location—an open-world central communications layer into which you can plug all of your other communication tools and channels.
If you're looking for choice over providers, customizability, and true global reach, check out Telerivet—it might be the right tool for you.
Prepackaged customer engagement for marketing: HubSpot
HubSpot is the dominant player in the marketing category when it comes to customer engagement.
Is it the dominant player for sales? Probably not. Salesforce takes the cake on that one.
But it’s not far from it.
HubSpot is a massive company, and it’s increasingly used by teams both very small and very big.
Historically, it found its niche with small to medium-sized businesses, but it has leveraged that to enter more verticals and provide more use cases.
I’ve used HubSpot in many organizations, and my only critique would be that the social media tools are not quite as good as some of the other players on the market.
But they still work perfectly well.
From social media to the website, from marketing content to customer support, success, and sales—HubSpot offers it all.
But its marketing tools and analytics are where it really excels.
You could think of HubSpot as being the ideal platform for your asynchronous communications with customers, with the synchronous element being a secondary bonus.
In this sense, with HubSpot, you can point them toward all of the content you have made and communicate with them when they need it most.
Through HubSpot, you can measure all engagement.
And that means you can look back on all engagement. You can see all the different touchpoints—whether someone came to your website, clicked on a social post, booked a webinar, received an email, opened an email, or went on a sales call.
Inevitably, when you close a client and you have this paper trail in HubSpot, every team is going to claim responsibility—that their action was the one moment of engagement that really won them over.
Whoever’s right, at least with HubSpot, you know.
With HubSpot, you can engage the customer and see and measure that engagement—all from one tool.
It’s a bit of a walled garden in its own way, but it’s a very useful tool with a different set of use cases from Telerivet.
Customer support and beyond: Intercom
Intercom can be an excellent option for customer support and success.
There’s quite a bit of overlap with HubSpot, as both tools have expanded their use cases as they’ve grown, reached more users, and sought to solve more problems.
But if HubSpot is primarily asynchronous with synchronous as a secondary function, Intercom is the inverse.
At its core, Intercom is a customer support tool. It is more of a communications platform than HubSpot.
Within Intercom, you can use it as a kind of virtual contact center—a place where you can engage with customers through different channels, do so live, and have access to saved replies. You can easily escalate from Level 1 support to Level 2 support, tag customer conversations into distinct inboxes for different teams, and forward those conversations to team members' email addresses.
You can also build out a whole help center.
And you can leverage AI to help with chatbot support at the Level 1 support stage.
This type of support can help reduce the demands on your support team, allowing you to scale more efficiently and effectively.
Intercom is a really interesting and useful choice, particularly for small to medium-sized teams, and even more so if your product is a SaaS platform.
Intercom comes with a whole range of in-product features, so you can track and measure customer in-product behavior in a way that is useful for your support team—but also super useful for your product team.
These types of insights can benefit the company in many different ways.
It’s not unusual for companies to have both Intercom and HubSpot, though I’m sure sales reps from either company would tell you that you only need one.
Telerivet, on the other hand, can provide the extra communication expanse and flexibility the others can’t.
Telerivet: Messaging when it matters
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“Our lives are a million times easier because of Telerivet. We're growing exponentially, doubling our reach every year... and it's Telerivet's technology that makes this all possible.” - MyAgro
"The user interface is very intuitive and detailed, making it easy to set up. The few times we have required technical support, or had a query about a needed feature, the response has always been quick" - Médecins Sans Frontières (Doctors Without Borders)
"One of the most important aspects of a tool like Telerivet is the user interface. We have hundreds of people across the region relying on Telerivet for their daily tasks, and we need to provide them with the most efficient way of accomplishing that." - Grab
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