Let’s be honest, "customer journey orchestration" sounds like a mouthful. It’s one of those corporate terms that sounds complicated because, well, it often is. The big idea is to create a perfectly smooth, personalized experience for every customer, no matter how they connect with your business. To get this right, companies often look at complex platforms designed to connect all the dots, and Engage Hub is a big name in this space, especially for enterprise-level automation.
But what does it actually do, and is it the right tool for your team? We’re going to walk through what Engage Hub is all about, its main features, and some of its potential downsides. We’ll also look at a more modern, nimble alternative for teams who need to see results without waiting months for a return on their investment.
So, what is Engage Hub?
Engage Hub is a cloud-based AI platform that automates and organizes customer communications across a bunch of digital channels. Its main purpose is to help businesses map out, see, and improve the entire customer journey, from the first time someone sees an ad to their last support ticket.
Looking at their website, the platform seems to stand on three key ideas:
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Journey Automation: This is about building and managing complex, multi-step customer workflows that can change based on what a user does.
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Conversational AI: Using AI chatbots and self-service tools to answer common questions and keep them from flooding the contact center.
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Cross-Channel Communications: Making sure the conversation feels consistent, whether a customer is talking to you over SMS, email, or social media.
With big clients like Sainsbury’s and TIM, Engage Hub is clearly aimed at large companies. These are the kinds of organizations that often deal with complicated old systems and need a heavy-duty tool to pull all their customer data and interactions into one place.
A closer look at Engage Hub’s features
Engage Hub’s platform is split into a few core parts, each built to handle a different piece of the customer experience puzzle.
Engage Hub’s customer journey orchestration
This is the heart of the platform. It gives businesses a visual board to map out every possible customer interaction and then automate the right response based on their actions. The goal is to pull data from different systems, like your CRM and ERP, to get a single, clear picture of the customer. By breaking down those data silos, the platform hopes to create a smarter, more connected experience.
Their Salesforce AppExchange app, the "Customer Journey Tracker," is a big part of this, giving teams a way to watch these journeys as they happen and quickly find any bumps in the road.
Engage Hub’s AI in the contact center
Engage Hub uses AI to automate common customer service questions, mostly to cut down on agent workload and reduce operational costs. They claim they can achieve over a 32% call automation and deflection rate. The focus here is on handling simple, repetitive questions through self-service, which frees up human agents to deal with the trickier or more emotional issues that really need a human touch.
Engage Hub’s cross-channel communication and integrations
The platform is built to send personalized messages across all the digital channels your customers actually use. A key selling point for big companies is its promise to integrate with existing legacy systems without forcing a complete, painful "rip and replace" of the tech you already have. This is a big deal for businesses that can’t afford the chaos of a massive tech overhaul. To make this happen, Engage Hub partners with different CRM, ERP, and payment providers to centralize data for its automations.
The catch: potential downsides of Engage Hub
Even the most powerful platforms come with their own set of challenges, and it’s important to know what you’re getting into.
Engage Hub pricing and setup
One of the first things that might raise an eyebrow is the lack of clear pricing. A quick look at TrustRadius shows no public pricing info. You know the drill. You find a tool, head to the pricing page, and… nothing. Just a "Contact Sales" button. The Salesforce AppExchange lists a starting price of "£250 GBP/Journey/month," but what exactly counts as a "journey" isn’t clear and could get expensive fast as you grow.
Platforms built around "journey orchestration" almost always mean a big upfront investment in setup, consulting, and a long sales process. This isn’t something you can sign up for and get running by the afternoon. In contrast, modern tools like eesel AI offer straightforward, predictable pricing with monthly and annual plans that don’t hide costs in confusing per-resolution fees. You can actually forecast your expenses without any nasty surprises.
The risk of a "boil the ocean" project with Engage Hub
The idea of orchestrating the entire customer journey sounds fantastic in a boardroom, but actually doing it is a massive project that touches every department. These initiatives can take months, sometimes years, to show any real results. There’s a real risk they get bogged down in internal politics, lose steam, or just fail to deliver on what they promised.
Most teams don’t have that kind of time. They have immediate problems to solve, like a helpdesk drowning in tickets or internal knowledge that nobody can find. They need to show a win this quarter, not next year. It’s often smarter to focus on one high-impact area first instead of trying to fix everything at once.
Engage Hub: Lack of self-serve and testing
Big enterprise platforms like Engage Hub rarely let you just sign up and play around. Getting started usually means you have to sit through demos, talk to sales reps, and go through a guided onboarding. You can’t just create an account and start building.
On top of that, there isn’t always a solid, self-serve simulation mode to test how the AI will perform before you let it talk to your customers. This means you have to take a bit of a leap of faith when you turn on the automation, hoping it works as advertised.
This is where a different approach really makes sense. A platform like eesel AI is designed to get you live in minutes. And more importantly, it has a simulation mode that lets you test its AI agent on thousands of your past tickets. This gives you a data-backed forecast of how it will perform, its resolution rate, and how much it’ll save you before you ever flip the switch for a real customer.
eesel AI: A faster, more flexible Engage Hub alternative
For teams that care about speed, transparency, and being in control, eesel AI is a practical alternative. It’s an AI platform built to automate frontline support and bring all your internal knowledge together, focusing on delivering value right away inside the tools you already use.
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Go live in minutes, not months: eesel AI is genuinely self-serve. You can sign up, connect your helpdesk (like Zendesk or Freshdesk), train the AI on your knowledge, and launch an AI Agent without ever having to talk to a salesperson.
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Unify your actual knowledge: While Engage Hub pulls data from CRMs, eesel AI connects instantly to where your team’s real knowledge is hiding: past support tickets, macros, Confluence pages, Google Docs, Slack threads, and more. This makes sure the AI gives answers based on what’s actually worked before, not just what’s in a structured data field.
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Total control and a confident rollout: eesel AI puts you in the driver’s seat. You can choose exactly which kinds of tickets to automate, tweak the AI’s personality and actions, and use the simulation engine to get its behavior just right in a completely risk-free environment.
Engage Hub vs. eesel AI: A quick comparison
| Feature | Engage Hub | eesel AI |
|---|---|---|
| Primary Use Case | Full customer journey orchestration | Frontline support automation & internal Q&A |
| Setup Time | Weeks to months; requires demos & consulting | Minutes; fully self-serve with one-click integrations |
| Pricing Model | Opaque; quote-based or per-journey | Transparent monthly/annual plans; no per-resolution fees |
| Knowledge Sources | Primarily CRM and legacy systems | 100+ sources including past tickets, Confluence, Google Docs, Slack |
| Simulation & Testing | Not specified as a core feature | Powerful simulation on historical tickets before going live |
| Ideal User | Enterprise marketing & CX strategy teams | Support, IT, and Ops teams needing immediate ROI |
Engage Hub: Is it the right tool for the job?
Engage Hub is a beast of a platform for large-scale customer journey projects, but it’s a huge investment of time, money, and people. It’s built for a top-down, all-in overhaul of the entire customer experience.
But for the teams on the ground, the ones trying to solve urgent support problems, shrink ticket queues, and give their agents AI help today, a more agile and transparent tool is a much better fit. eesel AI is the practical choice for businesses that want to use AI without the cost, complexity, and risk of a massive enterprise project.
Ready to see results you don’t have to wait a year for? Get started with AI automation in minutes. Try eesel AI for free or book a demo today.
Frequently asked questions
Engage Hub is designed for large enterprises dealing with complex legacy systems and massive customer data sets. Smaller businesses or teams needing a quick, self-serve solution might find it too complex and costly for their immediate needs.
Its primary goal is to orchestrate the entire customer journey by connecting data from different systems like your CRM and ERP. This creates a single, consistent customer experience across all digital channels, from marketing to support.
Implementation is a significant project that often takes weeks or months, involving demos, consulting, and a guided onboarding process. It is not a self-serve platform that you can set up in an afternoon.
Engage Hub doesn’t publish clear pricing, requiring you to contact their sales team for a custom quote. Its model is often based on factors like the number of "customer journeys" you build, which can make costs difficult to predict without a formal consultation.
Yes, a key feature is its ability to integrate with existing legacy systems without requiring a full "rip and replace" of your current tech stack. It’s built to pull data from various sources to get a unified view of the customer.
The platform’s AI focuses on automating and deflecting common, repetitive customer service inquiries through self-service tools like chatbots. This frees up human agents to handle more complex or sensitive customer issues that require a human touch.
