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Best User Engagement Platforms: Comparison of Toonimo, Whatfix and Hawk Search

ueIs your user engagement solution good enough? More importantly, do you have a user engagement system in place? Without it, the already difficult process of transforming your organization into a customer centric one will become even more complicated. The challenge here is determining whether users like your services so far, and how they believe they could be improved.

Our SaaS experts understand the struggle of picking the best customer engagement platform, and have you covered with a list of reliable services that can handle user engagement for you. We’ve monitored the products’ development and paid close attention to each critical feature, and prepared a list of top 3 user engagement platforms. The power of these products is highly comparable, but they have a completely different operation mode and area of application that may be more fitting for specific organizations and needs. Check them out, and see which one works for you.

1. Toonimo

Toonimo is what we like to call a ‘digital walkthrough revolution’, and one of the rare platforms that can genuinely personalize users experience on your website. With very high score in our test, Toonimo is definitely one of our top user engagement platform picks. Even though it can suit the needs of different online businesses and teams, it is especially recommended to websites who looks to improve conversion and reduce customer support.

There are many reasons why online businesses should consider Toonimo, and its unique set of features is only one of them. Ultimately, their user-friendly design and rapid assistance will increase your sales and conversion rates, and will definitely influence the opinion customers have of your service. The most notable addition here is that Toonimo lets go of the one size fits all approach, and introduces rule-based targeting for online sellers to detect user behavior, and tailor their support approach to it. This is possible thanks to the WYSIWYG editor and the script guides that track key evaluation points to determine the need of engagement, and to respond accordingly. To make matters even better, there is hardly any other tool with a comparable entertaining power out there, as Toonimo doesn’t simply explain stuff, but it does so with imagery, creative messaging, and animated character.

toon

In the marketing sense, you can use Toonimo to improve any complex user funnel like: form fill rates and shopping cart abandonment, as the product helps you focus on the most valuable propositions and browsing patterns. Needless to say, you’ll be reducing a large portion of your support team’s workload, by providing context-adjusted support in real-time.

If you want to see Toonimo in action there is a great demo version available that will give you a good look at its features and capabilities. You can easily sign up for Toonimo free demo here.

2. Whatfix

Whatfix is another out-of-the-box solution for improving customer support, which comes relatively close to Toonimo with smart onboarding and intuitive browsing. We spotted it looking for the most comparable tool, which says a lot in favor of its engagement and retention strategies. The strongest side of this product is its self-service capacity, which helps reduce the burden of the support team and save time, and makes it a reasonable option for facilitating data access. If you want a great FAQ base to keep support agents off the line, Whatfix is the right product for you.

The most notable disadvantage in comparison to Toonimo is that Whatfix was not designed for sales, and works exclusively with behavior-based triggers. Therefore, one can’t say it has the same intuitive forecasting power as Toonimo. Going a bit deeper with the comparison, we would also recommend Toonimo as the more ‘entertaining and interactive’ product of the two.

wfx

Still, Whatfix is a blessing in disguise when it comes to saving time and spotting important trends. Companies’ managerial staff loves it because of its capacity to summarize data in a single database, while users enjoy having actions explained in an easy and user friendly way. At the same time, Whatfix is a decent comparator, which uses information from various sites and regulatory basis, making sure users will receive valuable recommendations in addition to the original results of their search. Its user-level tracking and analytic capacity are also similar to the ones of Toonimo.

3. Hawk Search

Hawk Search joins the group of user engagement products that genuinely acknowledged the importance of customer experience for business growth, and employed a variety of tactics to make the rule work for them. Nowadays, Hawk Search is the leading site search platform, which may not be as intuitive or widely applicable as Toonimo, but it still employs a variety of solid e-merchandising features.

Just like Toonimo, Hawk Search monitors and analyzes user behavior, and examines users’ roles and engagement history to deliver the most relevant information. Its ideal user profile is e-stores looking to reduce tickets and simplify purchase analytics. To start with, Hawk Search works upon open-source search technology, allowing businesses to introduce their own metrics, rules, and recommendations. Using it, you also get access to a robust sitemap generator that builds result pages just as the ones your team imagined.

hse

As you can see, Hawk Search shines once search is actually triggered, pretty similar to what Whatfix does. We recommend it as an organizational tool rather than a proactive guide, as it doesn’t have the same personalization capacity as the other two products we suggested, in particular Toonimo which welcomes visitors, guides them to their desired action (not necessarily a product), and gives them individualized real-time instructions according to their behavior. Still, if you’re looking for a product describer and a neat comparator, Hawk Search can certainly be a smart option.

Comparison of Applicability and User Profiles

Toonimo is an all-in-one user engagement platform that can be applied to literally every online business, regardless of whether e-commerce is concerned or not. It can be an individualized guide even on websites where no particular user action is required, as it main purpose is to improve satisfaction rates, and to guarantee better feedback. As such, Toonimo can be useful for sales, marketing, and customer support/service, while is robust reporting functions make it suitable even for business intelligence purposes. Being aware of it, we selected Toonimo to be the leader in this comparison, which shouldn’t discourage you from checking the other solutions as well.

Whatfix, for instance, is another tool you can apply for website guidance and better user experience. The reason why it appears on the second position is that it lacks the intuitiveness of Toonimo, as it primarily analyses user behavior retrospectively, and uses the data to build a FAQ base where users can serve themselves, rather than obtaining support during their browsing section. At the same time, the platform doesn’t have the same interactive messaging and entertaining widgets as Toonimo does, and it can’t serve the needs of large enterprises as good as it serves SMB ones. In any case, Whatfix is a ‘must consider’ for employee onboarding training, and change management.

Our last suggestion Hawk Search is also a powerful user engagement system, but one that was designed specifically for e-commerce purposes. The applicability scope is narrowed even more by specifying that the ideal users of the system are large merchandisers looking to compare products from various sites and databases. In this aspect, we’re absolutely confident there is no better choice than Hawk Search, especially considering its SEO impact, and outstanding customer satisfaction rates.

Comparison of Integrations

Let’s assume you run a medium-sized online business, and are looking for a solid user engagement & conversion platform that shouldn’t necessarily guide the user from the very beginning. An additional criterion you should always consider is integration, as otherwise you may end up purchasing a platform that jumps out of your current productivity suite, and where you must import/export information manually.

Our top recommendation for integrations is Toonimo, as it is an open API cross platform that you can relate to literally every business application you have in place. At the same time, the company offers a variety of prebuilt integrations, most of them with live chat apps and analytic systems (Google Analytics included). Whatfix also integrates with Google Analytics, while its other two prebuilt integrations are YouTube and Freshdesk. Hawk Search, on the other hand, supports front end Java integration, and offers a single Magento integration plugin.

Comparison of Reporting & Analytic Features

User Engagement platforms have long surpassed the phase where they were intentionally designed to collect information. Nowadays, they’re supposed to analyze that information as well, which is why we recommend you to look for a system that offers a robust reporting & analytic suite.

Our top choice here is once again Toonimo, a platform that offers a robust Testing & Optimization dashboard where you can examine multiple variations of scripts, elements, trigger buttons, or styles, and divide traffic percentage for each of them. Variations are compared using completion and click through rates, while there is also an independent SaaS editor you could use to create variations and tune engagement to the ideal user experience. The personalized analytic dashboard can be used to pull off a variety of custom reports, including such for individual clients and individual walkthroughs.

Whatfix is great too, but not so detailed – it measures user engagement effectiveness using user-level tracking, and drafts scheduled customer reports that however, can be customized for every purpose. In the analytic aspect, Whatfix relies mostly on its external integration with Google Analytics.

Recently, Hawk Search introduced the Auto-Complete Reporting function, allowing users to track auto-completion click activity and gain insight into visitor behavior.

Comparison of Pricing

All of the products offer quote-based packages where both the features and the price are will be tailored to your needs. Toonimo and Whatfix are suitable for small, medium, and large businesses, while Hawk Search pricing is adjusted to enterprises.

Our Final Verdict

Our experts examined the most important features, pricing, and integrations of the three leading platforms, and concluded Toonimo is the best customer engagement platform that is most capable of responding to current B2B market needs. The reason is that Toonimo is considered to be an all-in-one universal platform that can be used for all types of user engagement, in all businesses and teams, and on all devices. At the same time, Toonimo offers the most engaging and interactive widgets, the largest number of prebuilt integrations, and the most powerful reporting & analytic suite. You can also see Toonimo in action with a great demo version that is available from the vendor. You can easily sign up for Toonimo free demo here.

Christopher Robinson

By Christopher Robinson

Christopher Robinson is a senior productivity research analyst who specializes in optimizing online collaboration and project management using Scrum and agile approaches. In his work, he always emphasizes the need for distributed work training and the formation of efficient work habits. His work was mentioned in various business publications, including Entrepreneur and InfoQ. He’s a strong proponent of the GTD model. He has been cooperating with the FinancesOnline team for 5 years now, and his publications always focus on practical aspects of productivity tools that can have an actual, transformative impact on a company.

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