7 Customer Experience Management Tools for Every Part of a CX Program

Customer experience management tools fall into four groups, and the right one depends on what kind of program you run. Experience management suites such as Qualtrics and Medallia run organization-wide feedback programs across many channels. Reputation management platforms such as Reputation and Birdeye help multi-location businesses collect and respond to reviews and keep their local listings accurate. Customer success platforms such as Gainsight and ChurnZero help B2B and subscription companies manage account health and renewals. AskNicely brings customer feedback to frontline staff in service businesses. All of these tools collect a large amount of open-ended feedback, and at the end of this guide we cover Kimola, which teams use to analyze that feedback.

This guide is about the platforms that run customer experience programs. If you are looking for tools that measure and track customer experience signals, such as web analytics, survey tools, help desks and social listening, see our guide to tools for tracking customer experience.

This guide is written by the Kimola team. Kimola is our product, so we explain where it fits and where it doesn't, and we describe every other tool based on its public documentation.

What Customer Experience Management Tools Do

Customer experience management is the work of turning customer feedback into action. A CX management tool usually collects feedback at key moments, routes an unhappy response to the person who can fix it, tracks whether that person followed up, and reports on how experience changes over time. Many tools add related jobs, such as responding to online reviews, scoring the health of each customer account or coaching frontline employees.

Very different products are sold under this label. A hospital network, a chain of car dealerships and a B2B software company all manage customer experience, but they need different tools. The main questions are who your customers are (individual consumers visiting locations, or business accounts with renewals), where they share feedback (surveys, review sites, support conversations) and how large the program is.

How We Chose These Tools

We picked tools that each run a distinct part of a customer experience program and that teams actually use for that job. For every tool we looked at what it manages, who it is designed for, how much setup and rollout it typically needs, whether pricing is published and whether a free plan or trial is available. Prices are taken from each vendor's own pricing page.

Experience Management Suites

1. Qualtrics

Qualtrics is an experience management platform, and its customer experience product collects feedback from surveys, calls, chats, social media and digital behavior. Automated workflows route feedback to the right team, configurable triggers flag at-risk customers, for example when CSAT drops below a set level, and dashboards cover locations, contact centers and digital channels. Qualtrics also offers AI agents that act on customer context. In 2026, Qualtrics completed its $6.75 billion acquisition of Press Ganey Forsta, a healthcare experience company that works with more than 41,000 healthcare facilities.

Qualtrics fits large organizations that want one platform for surveys, closed-loop follow-up and reporting across many teams and channels. That breadth takes planning: teams that only need to run a single survey or analyze one feedback channel may find the rollout heavier than the job requires.

Pricing: Pricing is not published and is based on the usage you plan for. Qualtrics offers a free Qualtrics Surveys account with up to 500 responses, 30 questions per survey and three active surveys at a time, but features unique to the customer experience suite are not included.

2. Medallia

Medallia is built to run experience management programs across large organizations. It covers customer, employee, contact center and digital experience, with feedback capture, role-based reporting, integrations and AI features such as generated themes, root cause assistance, suggested responses and summaries. Its administration tools are designed for complex, global programs.

In June 2026, ownership of Medallia passed from Thoma Bravo to a group of its lenders led by Blackstone, with Apollo and FS KKR, who committed $150 million in new capital and significantly reduced the company's debt. Mark Bishof has been CEO since January 2025, and the company says it is putting the new capital toward its AI roadmap.

Medallia fits enterprises with large, multi-channel feedback programs and teams dedicated to running them. Smaller teams with a narrower need may find that a full deployment is more than they need.

Pricing: Pricing is not published and is available on request. Medallia prices its platform by Experience Data Records, a unit that covers the data from one customer or employee interaction, in annual tiers.

Reputation and Review Management

3. Reputation

Reputation is an AI-powered reputation management platform for multi-location businesses. It brings together review requests and responses, business listings, location pages, surveys, social media publishing and listening, and an Actions feature that routes issues to teams and tracks follow-through. Its Rep Score combines reputation signals into a single metric that can be compared across locations. Reputation serves industries such as automotive, healthcare, retail, property management and financial services.

Reputation fits brands with many physical locations where online reviews and local search visibility shape the customer experience. It is built around locations, so a B2B company managing a small number of large accounts would get less from it.

Pricing: Reputation publishes its prices per location per month: Rep Core is $80, Rep Core + Pulse is $115 and Rep Core + Surveys is $150. Enterprise plans, designed for more than 125 locations, are priced individually.

4. Birdeye

Birdeye is a platform for multi-location brands built around AI agents that it calls "AI coworkers." One handles marketing tasks such as reviews, listings, social media, webchat and visibility in AI search. A second handles front desk work such as appointments, reminders and waitlists. A third covers surveys, customer insights, competitor tracking, ticketing and reporting. Birdeye focuses on industries such as healthcare, dental, automotive, real estate, restaurants and home services.

Birdeye fits local and multi-location businesses that want reviews, customer messaging and front desk operations in one place. Teams that only need a reputation or survey tool may not use much of its scope.

Pricing: Pricing is not published and is quoted based on the number of locations.

Customer Success Platforms

5. Gainsight

Gainsight describes itself as a customer retention platform. Its main product, Customer Success, gives customer success teams health scorecards, a 360-degree view of each account, playbooks, success plans, surveys and digital journeys. Gainsight also offers Customer Communities, Product Experience for in-app guidance, Skilljar for customer education (acquired in 2025) and Staircase AI (acquired in 2024), which turns customer signals into risk scores and recommended actions. AI agents can handle work on long-tail accounts, and Agent Studio lets teams build their own.

Gainsight fits B2B and subscription companies with established customer success teams that manage renewals and expansion across many accounts. It is designed around account management, so businesses that serve individual consumers will find other tools in this guide a closer fit.

Pricing: Customer Success is offered in Essentials and Enterprise plans, and pricing for both is available on request. Essentials includes 10 full users and unlimited viewer licenses. A free trial is offered for Product Experience.

6. ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a customer success platform for B2B and subscription businesses. It offers customer health scoring, customer journeys, automated plays, in-app communications, renewal forecasting, reporting and NPS, CSAT and CES surveys. A set of AI agents supports customer success managers; one example, Retrospective, launched in August 2026, reads the history of a churned account and drafts a churn analysis for the manager to review.

ChurnZero fits customer success teams that want account health, automation and in-app messaging in one platform. Like other customer success platforms, it gets the most value when usage data from the product and CRM data are connected, which takes setup time at the start.

Pricing: Pricing is available on request through a demo.

Frontline Feedback for Service Businesses

7. AskNicely

AskNicely is an AI-powered customer experience platform for multi-location service businesses. It runs NPS and CSAT programs with conversational surveys, shares feedback with frontline teams in real time, and uses leaderboards and recognition to motivate staff. It also helps turn happy customers into online reviews, and its NiceAI add-on analyzes sentiment across surveys and reviews. AskNicely focuses on service industries such as home services, healthcare, insurance and legal.

AskNicely fits businesses where the customer experience depends on individual employees, such as technicians or advisors, and where managers want those employees to see feedback directly. Its focus is on service teams, so it is less suited to digital-only products.

Pricing: AskNicely offers Learn, Grow and Transform plans. Pricing scales with response volume and is available on request, plans are mainly annual, and there is no free trial.

Analyzing the Feedback Your CX Program Collects

Kimola

Kimola is an AI platform that turns customer feedback into enterprise-grade market research. It is not a customer experience management platform: it does not send surveys, respond to reviews or manage accounts. Instead, it analyzes the open-ended feedback that CX programs collect, such as survey comments, online reviews, support tickets and call transcripts, and explains why customers feel the way they do and which issues matter most.

Reading all your feedback in one place. A CX program's text usually sits in several tools. Kimola analyzes survey exports, review data and support conversations together, finds themes in the data itself without predefined labels, and gives every theme mentioned in a comment its own sentiment. It then asks every comment research questions called Dimensions, such as Pain Points, Underlying Causes and Experience Stages, so you can see not only what customers complain about but why it happens and at which point in the journey. Feedback in more than 30 languages is analyzed together, which helps programs that run across countries.

Deciding what to fix first. Other columns in your data, such as location, region or customer segment, are used in comparisons. If complaints about wait times are concentrated in one region, Kimola shows that as a Signal only when the difference is statistically significant. Scores are deterministic and take the number of comments into account: a theme with 43 positive comments out of 50 ranks above a theme with 5 out of 5, because five comments say very little. Action Plans form hypotheses from the analysis, test each one against the feedback, and keep only the actions the evidence supports. On the Enterprise plan, Tasks assign a finding to a team member with the supporting feedback attached, and two and four weeks after the work is done, Kimola reads new feedback on the same topic to see whether customers noticed the change.

Comparing with competitors. Public reviews on Google Business, Trustpilot, Tripadvisor, the App Store and other platforms can be collected by pasting a link, including reviews of competitors. A multi-location brand can compare what customers say about its own locations with what they say about a competitor's. Kimola also connects to Zendesk, Intercom and Google Sheets, and files can be uploaded from any survey tool.

Kimola works alongside the platforms above rather than replacing them. It does not design or send surveys, respond to reviews, manage business listings, score account health or run customer success workflows, and it is not built as a real-time monitoring dashboard. If your program collects only a few dozen comments a month, the reporting in your CX platform may be enough. The free Starter plan is limited to 150 queries per month, and Spaces and Tasks are available only on the Enterprise plan.

Pricing: Kimola has a free Starter plan with no credit card required, and paid plans start at $49 per month. Pricing is public on the pricing page. Smaller teams use Kimola self-service, and Enterprise plans are priced individually and include an account manager.

How to Choose a Customer Experience Management Tool

If you run a large, multi-channel feedback program and have a team to manage it, an experience management suite such as Qualtrics or Medallia covers surveys, routing and reporting in one place. If you run many physical locations and online reviews drive new customers, Reputation or Birdeye is the stronger fit, with Reputation's published per-location pricing making it easier to estimate costs.

If you sell to businesses on subscriptions and your main risk is churn, a customer success platform is the right category: Gainsight for larger customer success organizations that want a broad platform, ChurnZero for teams that want health scoring, automation and in-app messaging together. If your customer experience depends on frontline employees in a service business, AskNicely puts feedback in front of the people who deliver the service.

Whichever platform you choose, it will collect more open-ended feedback than anyone can read. If you want to understand why customers feel the way they do, which issues matter most and how they differ across locations, segments and competitors, Kimola is built for that.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is customer experience management?

Customer experience management is the process of collecting customer feedback, acting on it and improving the experience over time. In practice it includes running surveys, following up with unhappy customers, responding to reviews and coordinating improvements across teams. CX management tools support these steps with feedback collection, workflows and reporting.

What is the difference between managing and tracking customer experience?

Tracking customer experience means collecting and monitoring signals, such as website behavior, survey scores, support conversations and public feedback. Managing customer experience covers the programs built on those signals, such as closing the loop with customers, managing reputation and preventing churn. Our guide to tracking tools covers the first group, and this guide covers the second.

Is there a free customer experience management tool?

Most CX management platforms are sold through a demo and a quote. Qualtrics offers a free survey account with limited responses, but it does not include the features of its customer experience suite, and Gainsight offers a free trial for its Product Experience product. For analyzing the feedback you already have, Kimola has a free Starter plan with 150 queries per month.

What happened to Medallia?

In June 2026, Medallia's owner, Thoma Bravo, handed control of the company to a group of lenders led by Blackstone, with Apollo and FS KKR. The new owners committed $150 million in new capital and reduced the company's debt, and Medallia continues to operate under CEO Mark Bishof, who has led the company since January 2025.

Why not just use ChatGPT to analyze customer feedback?

General-purpose AI assistants are good at summarizing a small set of comments. Classifying thousands of comments consistently, testing whether differences between locations or segments are statistically significant, getting the same result from the same data every time and tracing every number back to the feedback behind it need a different kind of infrastructure. That is the work feedback analysis tools are built for.

Conclusion

Customer experience management tools differ most in the kind of program they run: organization-wide feedback programs, location reputation, account health or frontline service. Choosing the right category matters more than choosing the tool with the longest feature list. If you want to see what your customers' feedback says about why they feel the way they do, you can start on Kimola's free Starter plan.