August 7, 2021

The Ultimate Guide to Customer Engagement Platforms: Tools for Complex Relationships

If you're looking for a new way to connect with your audience, then it's time you started using one of these advanced tools. In this article we'll discuss some of the most popular options on the market today and show you which ones will work best for your company.

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Customer engagement is a huge topic in customer service. There are many different customer engagement models and tools available on the market today.

Finding the right customer engagement platform or software can be difficult, which is why we have created this blog post for you! This blog will discuss some of the most popular customer engagement platforms and how they work with your business to maintain complex customer relationships. 

This blog post includes an introduction as well as a conclusion that provides readers with content that is worth reading, while providing keywords that search engines find valuable. 

The customer engagement models and tools can help your business manage complex customer relationships and improve customer sales, retention, and satisfaction. 

In this blog we will discuss different tools and platforms for customer engagement. Customer engagement is a huge topic in customer service 

There are many different customer engagement models and tools available on the market today. 

Finding the right customer engagement platform or software can be difficult, which is why we have created this blog post for you! 

What is the definition of a customer engagement platform?

It is a piece of software that assists businesses in managing, analysing, and optimising the customer journey. It accomplishes this by distributing customised communications to customers across numerous platforms and devices.

Customer engagement technologies enable brands to link all of their customer data in one place and provide customers with a highly tailored experience. This is dependent on a variety of factors, including:

  • their order history on the device they're using
  • In social media, the status of a support request

What's the difference between a customer relationship management system and a customer engagement platform?

Many businesses regard their CRM as a platform for consumer involvement.

Businesses can link their customer support software with all of the other customer interaction tools their teams rely on, such as a marketing automation tool, social media management software, and more, using a CRM platform like Zendesk.

This provides a single source of truth for customer information for everyone in the company, allowing for more personalised customer experiences and saving teams time from having to switch between different systems and tools.


The most effective customer engagement tools for the year 2021

Customer engagement software should be evaluated on a number of parameters, including ease of setup and usage, ability to interface with other systems a firm uses, such as a CRM database, and the level of customization it provides in creating a tailored customer experience.

It's also critical to pick a system that's both cost-effective and scalable as the business grows. For many businesses, this implies a cloud-based software solution that is administered remotely, has strong security standards, and provides a variety of functionality and price alternatives.


The following are the most important characteristics of client engagement platforms:

Customers are met where they are.

Customers shouldn't have to climb a ladder in order to interact with your company. Businesses can meet customers where they are, such as via message channels, with the help of a good customer engagement platform.

Allows for customised experiences

Customer loyalty is dependent on relationships. Businesses need a customer interaction platform with consumer context, such as a customer's support history, account type, and order preferences, to create personalised experiences.

Remote teams are supported.

Customers must be engaged in order for employees to be engaged. The finest customer engagement platform gives customer service representatives the tools they need to accomplish their jobs well.

Customers have the ability to self-serve.

Customers have long preferred to help themselves, and in our digital-first age, they rely even more on companies' online tools. Customers get answers to simple queries faster when they can self-serve, and your workers don't have to spend time fixing repetitive difficulties.

It works with the software you already have.

You want a customer engagement platform that works with all of your team's tools and software, from marketing automation to social media monitoring.

Teams can do more with the combined capabilities of different technologies when they are integrated. Teams can send segmented emails based on support history by linking their customer support software with their email marketing solution, for example.

Is it simple to set up and use Customer engagement platforms that are simple to set up and use allow you to focus on engaging customers rather than managing a tool and teaching staff on how to use it.

Provides a 360-degree picture of the customer

Your teams can anticipate customers' requirements and provide a more personalised experience with a customer engagement platform that unites all of your customer data, regardless of where it resides.

 A 360-degree customer perspective guarantees that everyone on your team, from marketing to customer service, has a complete picture of your clients.

Provides data to teams.

Data is required to learn how to improve. Teams can gain insights into enhancing customer engagement by understanding trends in how and where customers interact with the company.

Adjustable in nature

Today's businesses require client interaction software that enables them to be flexible. They must be able to toggle channels on and off rapidly. They can also unify all of their consumer data using plug-and-play apps instead of waiting for IT personnel to create specific integrations.

How do customer engagement platforms help customers have a better overall experience?

Customer engagement software prioritises the customer experience throughout the customer journey, which benefits both customers and businesses.

We're guessing that you strive for improved customer satisfaction with every connection, whether it's conversing with consumers on Facebook or assisting the occasional website visitor who might become a client or the next person your sales people speak with.

Customers can interact with a firm more easily with the help of engagement software.

 When customers contact support on their preferred channels, the software creates an almost magical sense that they are getting the help and attention they need without even having to ask for it, with smart, thoughtful recommendations, answers to their most common questions, and fast, personalised resolution to their problems.

Companies that deploy engagement software earn consumers' confidence, loyalty, and revenue by providing fast, personalised service in the channels that matter most to them. 

It allows teams to construct customer journeys that are as unique as their company, and it automates a lot of the effort involved in engaging customers.

This not only allows businesses to be available to help consumers when they need it most, but it also allows teams to focus on developing new methods to help customers, delighting them with thoughtful care, and solving more complicated problems.

The customer engagement model is a concept that has been defined.

A company's customer engagement model can be defined after it has 360-degree perspectives of its customers. A customer engagement model is a technique of considering all of a company's customer interactions throughout the customer journey.


Customers are typically tracked through five stages of interaction with a brand in customer engagement models:

  • Unawareness 
  • Discovery 
  • Consideration
  • Conversion 
  • Growth

Once a company understands its customer engagement model, it can develop a customer engagement plan that caters to the specific demands of its customers.

Marketing teams now have more strong new chances to find new clients and engage with existing ones. Companies may establish trust, loyalty, and fix problems before customers are even aware they exist by proactively communicating with customers when they need support the most.


Why is it so important for modern revenue teams to have Customer Engagement Platforms?

You can have the best sales people and account managers in the world, but if you have a system in place that is stuck in the past, you will undoubtedly lose to teams that are using technology to work smarter.


 How can you keep ahead of the competition when last decade's cutting-edge technology has become the norm this decade?

It is the ultimate sidekick for every customer facing rep in the revenue organisation, much like a Sales Engagement Platform is the ultimate sidekick for sales teams.

Imagine not being able to come to work every day because you don't have a car, Lyft, bike, bus. It's like attempting to run a business and engage with customers without using a Customer Engagement Platform. 

You may ultimately get there, but you'll lose a lot of time and energy before you even sit down at your desk for your first call of the day.

They provide incalculable value to revenue teams, but they can be divided into two categories: increasing revenue efficiency and optimising every customer interaction to offer a world-class customer experience.

Revenue-efficient growth is driven by Customer Engagement Platforms.

Your clients are paying you for the greatest service or product you can offer at the end of the day. And you can only keep that promise if you're making enough money to invest in R&D, hire the greatest customer service personnel, and provide your shareholders a profit.

Data science and machine learning technologies let companies better understand their consumer interactions than ever before.

A/B testing and conversation analysis enable customer-facing teams to use data to generate the correct outcomes faster by taking a quantitative approach to measuring previously qualitative operations.

Actionable analytics provide teams with visibility into the actions and processes that drive revenue growth, allowing each activity to have the greatest impact on the bottom line. 

Furthermore, determining revenue attribution for each action taken assists teams in determining which activities will generate the most revenue lift and which actions will actually reduce revenue growth.

These platforms improve customer interactions, resulting in exceptional customer experiences.

However, revenue isn't the only factor to consider (no, seriously!). Without consumers who like being your customers, your business would be nothing. That's why a Customer Engagement Platform's ability to assist you in delivering a best-in-class customer experience is critical.

And it all starts with a simple rep experience that allows them to focus less on low-value or manual chores and more on providing incredible value to clients, whether they're selling, onboarding, or managing and increasing accounts. This straightforward experience entails:

Streamlining workflow and allowing collaboration and information sharing across teams by bringing all critical activities and touchpoints (email, phone, social, notes, and meetings management) into one spot.

All of the tools that reps and teams need to keep their clients happy should be in one location.

Using intelligent automation to relieve reps of low-value, non-customer-facing tasks and simplify their days. Reps can automate their grunt work to deliver great work for their customers, from scheduling meetings to following up to proactively monitoring and reaching out to accounts that are at risk or ripe for expansion.

Assisting representatives in determining what they need to focus on at any given time. A good Platform is more than simply a list of activities; it's an orchestration engine that directs reps to the appropriate actions so they can provide the most value to their customers.

You can spend more time focusing on what truly counts — providing a best-in-class customer experience that will keep your base loyal for life — if you use the correct technology to assist your team achieve its goals and produce outcomes.


It sounds incredible! So, what's next?

If you want to boost revenue efficiency and provide a world-class customer experience, you should question what a Customer Engagement Platform can do for your organisation rather than what you can achieve with your CRM. 

Don't let your technology make you a slave to it at the price of your customers' delight, and don't confine the technology that generates actual results to just one team in your customer-facing revenue organisation. 

Some benefits are universal, so those customer-focused teams can use a Customer Engagement Platform to drive customer delight and revenue growth.

And benefits aren't the only things that are universal — both CRM and CEP technologies rely on customer data – but they do it in different ways. A Customer Engagement Platform requires an integrated platform with built-in analytics technology to do its job.

The customer experience has to be at the core of your technology, not an afterthought or a bolt-on feature that doesn't truly enhance how your team delivers value to customers and transforms customer behaviours for better business outcomes. 

Solutions like these help you make sense out of data, allowing you to provide insight into customer behaviour and customer needs, which creates a world-class customer experience. 

What's more? They allow you to recognise when customers are dissatisfied with your product or service so that you can engage them immediately — before they churn — and make the necessary changes to keep them happy for life. 

It sounds like something any business would want in their customer-facing group, right? 

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Heba Arshad

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