The world has become omnichannel. Customers now have multiple sources of information and communication and are constantly bombarded with information. But not all information they receive is meaningful, and not all make them take desired actions.
Customers want brands to engage with them on many communication channels, like friends and family members. That means brands must make their presence omnichannel and provide fast, personalized services, meaningful marketing, and thoughtful recommendations.
But managing these channels can quickly become a challenge, subsequently hampering results.
So, the best way to deal with these communication channels is to have a customer engagement platform.
A customer engagement platform is software that helps companies manage complex customer relationships and allows them to guide customers through their journeys. It does this by sending out personalized messages to each customer across multiple channels and devices.
These messages are based on several factors, these are:
Businesses need to develop long-lasting relationships with their customers. And with omnichannel engagement, they can personalize their customers' experiences according to their preferred engagement channel.
With so many channels to engage with customers, it’s all about creating great experiences with an engagement strategy that focuses on delivering the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. And by doing so, brands can foster emotional relationships with customers, which can translate into improved customer satisfaction, sales, and customer retention.
A customer engagement platform should provide the following benefits for a streamlined customer experience.
With a customer engagement platform, you can increase engagement rates. You can use push notifications to remind customers of new app updates.
You can engage users in real-time using advanced digital engagement tools such as chatbots, video chats, and co-browsing options.
Customer engagement platforms help scale customer service so that multiple customers can be handled and multiple pain points can be addressed.
AI chatbots can help lead generation by asking preset questions to website visitors. Moreover, it helps close sales instantly, increasing the sales funnel velocity.
The customer engagement model provides a clear view of all the interactions a business might have with its customers. The following are the five stages of a customer engagement model:
A company can create a viable customer engagement strategy once it understands its customer engagement model.
Let’s suppose that you have invested in a customer engagement platform. Now, you want to use it for the following purposes:
Customer engagement platforms can also be used for more complex actions, such as pausing notifications for customers who have turned them off.
Also, companies can use the advanced analytics features offered by customer engagement platforms to improve customer relationships. This allows businesses to gauge the effectiveness of their customer engagement platform.
AppFlows helps in customer engagement by allowing users to engage with their customers through email automation. You can integrate AppFlows with your product through an API and send unlimited automated emails to your customers.
With AppFlows, you can interact with your customers throughout their journey. Moreover, you can create hyper-personalized segments for better targeting and engagement.
LiveChat checks all the boxes of a top customer engagement platform. It’s easy to use, has a self-serve model, integrates with third-party software without a hitch, provides omnichannel support, and has AI chatbots to guide the customers.
If you want a customer engagement platform built purely for salespeople by salespeople, then you don’t have to look further than Pipedrive.
With Pipedrive, you can visualize your entire sales pipeline and customize it to suit your needs. Also, you can segment leads, see a customer's contact history, create web forms for getting leads, get real-time data from analytics, and forecast revenue.
If you have multiple teams working on different projects, Zoho CRM Plus can be the platform for you to unify them and coordinate their efforts.
With Zoho CRM Plus, you can manage the entire customer lifecycle from just a single place. You can send messages across multiple channels. Moreover, Zoho’s advanced AI can learn customer behavior and tell you when to contact them. Also, AI is capable of predicting business trends.
With Zoho’s advanced analytics, you can stay ahead of the curve with reliable real-time data.
With a simple UI and user-friendly controls, Freshdesk is a great customer engagement platform for those looking to get all the features desirable in a customer engagement platform.
With Freshdesk, You can engage in conversations with your leads and customers across all communication channels.
Freshdesk allows you to automate your support operations workflows, thus, allowing you to deliver a memorable customer experience.
Freshdesk implements a self-serve communication model using AI chatbots and other helpful widgets.
With Freshdesk’s advanced reporting capabilities, you can identify bottlenecks and measure team performance and customer satisfaction from a single place.
LeadSquared is also one of the top customer engagement platforms that provides a smarter way for the sales team to reach and nurture the right prospects.
LeadSquared offers both self-serve and customer service-assisted onboarding. Also, you can automate your marketing efforts with LeadSquared and keep track of all the data from a single dashboard in real-time.
Businesses interested in acquiring a customer engagement platform need to focus on the following features to improve engagement and get the most out of their customer engagement platform.
Moreover, choosing a cost-effective platform as the company grows is essential. A cloud-based platform is, therefore, best suited as it’s managed off-site and has robust security features.
When choosing a customer engagement platform, looking at the software's user-friendliness is crucial. This will allow you to focus more on engaging the customers instead of training your team to use it.
One of the main features to look for in a customer engagement platform is whether or not it allows storing information that helps personalize a customer’s experience. The software can store customer contact information, order preferences, customer support history, and account type.
Customers don’t like to be hand-held. They like to find the answers to most of their questions independently. So, it’s essential to allow your customers access to your company’s resources, and your customer engagement platform should be the one to provide that information.
With such a setup, your customer support agents won’t have to spend time resolving recurring queries and can focus on the most important ones.
You don’t want a customer engagement platform with compatibility and integration issues with your existing software. That will just be a hindrance rather than something productive.
But your teams can work more efficiently with a perfectly integrated customer engagement platform. For example, by combining your social media monitoring tools with your customer engagement platform, your team can quickly resolve queries or identify problems with your social media accounts.
Email automation has made email marketing extremely easy. Now, you can set up automations that deliver highly personalized emails. Using a customer engagement platform to keep track of customers who need emails can quicken the task considerably.
AppFlows is one such platform that can integrate with any customer engagement platform. AppFlows is a low-code tool that needs to be integrated once with your customer engagement platform using an API. Once it’s integrated with your platform, you can create unlimited automations, emails, and events and also use advanced analytics to keep track of your campaigns.
Without data, businesses are blind and base their decisions on intuition rather than what the customer wants. A customer engagement platform resolves this issue by integrating with other software and providing data that can help decision-making.
A customer engagement platform should be able to provide omnichannel support. It should be able to integrate with almost all channels where your presence and your customers interact with you.
By choosing an omnichannel supportive platform, you can ensure that your team can have a single point of contact and can quickly and efficiently deal with queries and purchase events.
According to Superoffice, 92% of customers prefer the live chat options businesses provide instead of more traditional channels such as phone calls and emails.
As customer service is about quick responses, live chats resolve the issue of slow response time. It’s a complete customer service toolkit that includes co-browsing and video chat options necessary for providing an interactive customer experience.
Utilizing chatbots can also improve engagement rates and overall customer satisfaction. Chatbots are highly convenient when support teams are busy or are not available. Also, Chatbots can be scaled during the peak hours or days of the week to cater to the high number of queries. This, in turn, reduces support tickets.
Moreover, as chatbots are available 24x7, they can handle information-based queries at all times, thus, reducing the strain on support teams.
Businesses are widely adopting visual engagement tools. Video chat options significantly reduce customer support touchpoints by immediately providing contextual information to queries.
More importantly, video chat options help support teams to hold more personal conversations and build trust.
So, customer engagement platforms are necessary to improve product engagement rates. They provide a 360-degree view of all your product's touchpoints and help automate the entire process, thus, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of your business.
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Content writer by day and a book nerd by night, Ammar Mazhar has been writing for 3 years for B2B and B2C businesses. As a wordsmith, Ammar knows how to write SEO-optimized content that your users will find insightful, igniting results for your business.
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
Ammar Mazhar
August 1, 2022
