Effective communication with customers is the cornerstone of any successful business. Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) are designed to unify and streamline these interactions, providing powerful tools for personalization and efficiency.
From real-time support to targeted marketing, learn how CEPs can transform the way you connect with your customers and why they're essential for achieving long-term success.
In this blog:
- What is a customer engagement platform (CEP)?
- Benefits of a customer engagement platform
- Customer engagement platform vs. CRM
- Must-have features of customer engagement platforms
- How to choose the right customer engagement tool for your business
What is a customer engagement platform?
A customer engagement platform (CEP) is a unified portal that monitors, controls, and supports every customer interaction across multiple touchpoints. CEPs empower companies to create personalized customer journeys and deliver engaging experiences across channels.
Think of a customer engagement software tool as your command center. It unifies all the communication mediums your customer service and marketing teams use, including CRM systems, email, business text messaging, live chat, chatbots, knowledge bases, and voice channels like IVR systems, VoIP, and click-to-call.
A CEP breaks down silos between analytics, engagement, and automation, enabling your business to better understand user behavior. With AI capabilities, a CEP enhances the personalization and efficiency of customer interactions. As an essential part of your martech stack, this omnichannel solution helps account-based revenue teams improve efficiency in acquisition, retention, upsell, cross-sell, and growth.
A customer engagement platform enables your customer service teams to focus on long-term growth goals by simplifying workflows, boosting collaborations, and task automation. Without a customer engagement tool, your teams will spend significant time and effort optimizing engagement activities. Simply incorporating an engagement platform can increase your team's productivity in making data-driven choices and multiply engagement metrics.
80% of customers are more likely to buy from a company that provides a tailored experience. Source: Startup Bonsai
Benefits of a customer engagement platform
A robust customer engagement platform (CEP) simplifies interactions and provides an outstanding customer experience. Here are the key benefits of implementing this tool:
Improve Revenue Growth
CEPs empower customer-facing teams to understand customer interactions and monitor activities contributing to profit growth. Data science, machine learning, multivariate testing, and conversation analysis help teams identify which activities drive profits and focus on those with the most significant impact on the bottom line.
Increase Customer Retention and Customer Lifetime Value
Customers are 93% more likely to make repeat purchases from businesses offering exceptional customer experiences and support. CEPs help retain consumers by providing better experiences, leading to higher spending per customer over time.
Provide a World-Class Experience
73% of consumers switch businesses after a negative experience. CEPs enable constant engagement and value delivery through preferred communication channels. Automating routine tasks, optimizing workflows, and offering behavioral insights ensure a satisfying customer journey.
Offer Exceptional Personalization
CEPs boost relevance at every touchpoint through unparalleled personalization and analytics. Using first-party customer data, businesses can develop highly tailored experiences, improving their CX strategies. Customer data platforms (CDPs) aggregate data from mobile apps, websites, and POS systems, providing a single view for more personalized interactions.
Unified Customer View for Stronger Connections
CEPs provide a unified view of customer data across all channels. This ensures that marketing, sales, and customer service teams have access to the same comprehensive customer information. Teams can interact with the full picture in mind, delivering a cohesive and consistent customer experience. This unified approach helps customers feel recognized, fostering trust and building strong, lasting relationships.
Enhance Conversational Support
Features like co-browsing, video chat, and ticketing systems enhance the support experience by providing real-time assistance and resolving issues quickly. These tools enable support teams to interact with existing customers more effectively, leading to higher satisfaction.
Increase Operational Efficiency
CEPs streamline processes by automating repetitive tasks and optimizing workflows. Teams can focus on more strategic activities, improving overall productivity and operational efficiency. Centralizing customer data and interactions reduces the need for multiple tools and platforms, saving time and resources.
Gain Actionable Insights
Robust analytics and reporting features provide actionable insights into customer behavior and engagement. This data helps make informed decisions, refine marketing strategies, and improve customer service. Real-time insights allow quick identification and addressing of issues, enhancing the overall customer experience.
Omnichannel Communication
CEPs support seamless communication across various channels, including email, SMS, messaging apps such as WhatsApp, live chat, and voice channels. This ensures a consistent and integrated experience, allowing customers to engage with your brand through their preferred medium. Omnichannel support maintains continuous engagement across customers prefer platforms.
Enhance Collaboration Across Teams
A centralized platform for customer data and interactions enhances collaboration between marketing, sales, and customer service teams. Ensuring everyone is on the same page fosters alignment and effective teamwork, delivering a cohesive message. Improved collaboration leads to better customer outcomes and a more unified business approach.
Customer engagement platform vs. CRM
A Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) and a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform are both essential for understanding and managing customer interactions. However, they serve distinct purposes and offer different benefits. Here’s a summary of the key differences:
CRM Platform
- Primary Use: Primarily used by sales teams to manage customer data and track sales opportunities.
- Functions: Collects and records customer interactions to improve marketing, drive revenue, and enhance customer service.
- Features: Offers contact management, sales management, and productivity tools. It helps manage customer opportunities, improve sales and service discussions, and provide executive insights.
- Focus: Focuses on managing customer relationships, tracking sales, and improving operational efficiency.
- Marketing Use: Marketing teams use CRMs to develop and manage marketing campaigns, providing a complete picture of leads and prospects to close opportunities more quickly and target the right resources effectively.
Customer Engagement Platform
- Primary Use: Designed to create personalized customer journeys and deliver integrated experiences across multiple channels.
- Functions: Gathers data from various sources to provide insights that enhance the customer experience strategy. Automates repetitive tasks like sending messages, collecting feedback, and making recommendations.
- Features: Focuses on real-time customer engagement, personalization, and automation.
- Focus: Aims to deliver outstanding customer experiences by integrating and analyzing customer data across all touchpoints.
Other Tools
- Customer Data Platform (CDP): Aggregates first-party data from multiple sources to provide a unified view of the customer. Enhances personalization and analytics by consolidating data from mobile apps, websites, and POS systems.
- Marketing Automation Platform: Automates marketing tasks such as email campaigns, social media posts, and lead generation. Helps in managing and analyzing marketing campaigns across various channels.
If your main focus is managing customer data and tracking sales opportunities, a CRM system is likely the better fit. However, if you aim to enhance customer engagement and provide personalized experiences, a CEP offers more robust capabilities.
Use the following infographic to see a detailed comparison between CEPs, CRMs, CDPs, and Marketing Automation Platforms.
Must-have features of customer engagement platforms
CEPs are designed to help businesses personalize the customer experience and journey. To do this, they need to offer several features that allow for this level of customization. Here are some must-have features of customer engagement platforms:
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Audience segmentation
Every day, you collect massive amounts of information about your consumers via different platforms, and a CEP allows you to put that data to good use. Customer engagement software can help you segment audience data, enabling you to detect and act on trends. It also implies that you can hyper-personalize your consumer conversations.
For instance, you can segment audience data based on the following:
- User persona
- User demographics
- User journey
- User behavior
Advanced customer data segmentation allows you to be valuable to diverse consumers and provide relevant, contextual, and tailored messages in their journey.
AI-Powered Chat
AI-powered live chat combines real-time responses with intelligent automation, ensuring that customers receive timely and relevant assistance. This integration blends advanced chatbot functionalities with live chat support, enabling seamless transitions between automated responses and human intervention.
Live chat captures visitors' attention and engages them in meaningful conversations, helping businesses understand buyer intent and desired actions.
79% of businesses say offering live chat features have positively impacted sales, revenue, and customer loyalty. Source: Kayako
How AI-Powered Chat Improves Customer Engagement:
- Minimized Queue Times: Live chat offers the shortest queue timescompared to other support channels.
- Efficiency and Cost-Effectiveness: Supports multiple simultaneousconversations, making it a cost-effective support option.
- Smart Routing: Directs inquiries to the appropriate teams, enablingquick resolutions.
- Proactive Interaction: Allows employees to proactively engage withconsumers, guiding them through their journey and providing timely support.
AI-powered chat is a valuable tool for enhancing customerengagement, ensuring quick and efficient communication
Chatbots
For a customer engagement platform (CEP) to stand out, offering both AI chatbots and scripted chatbots is a significant advantage. These features are essential for delivering an advanced, personalized, and conversational customer experience.
- AI Chatbots: Leveraging artificial intelligence, AI chatbots understand the context of user inquiries and deliver highly personalized responses. They excel in managing complex scenarios, continuously learning from each interaction to improve effectiveness. AI chatbots predict customer needs by analyzing data from past interactions, understanding real-time behavior, and identifying patterns. This allows them to offer proactive assistance and relevant suggestions, enhancing the customer experience and providing efficient support around the clock.
- Scripted Chatbots: Operating based on predefined rules and scripts, scripted chatbots handle straightforward tasks and frequently asked questions (FAQs). They ensure consistency in responses and are ideal for first-level customer assistance, pre-qualifying prospects, and collecting essential data like contact information through forms. Their simplicity and reliability make them a valuable component of any customer engagement strategy.
- Hybrid Solutions: The best CEPs seamlessly integrate both AI and scripted chatbots, allowing businesses to benefit from the strengths of each. This hybrid approach ensures that scripted chatbots efficiently handle simple queries, while AI chatbots address more complex issues, providing a comprehensive and flexible customer service experience.
- Generative AI Capabilities: The latest trend in chatbot technology, generative AI chatbots, are capable of creating human-like, conversational responses. This enhancement not only improves customer interactions but also increases engagement by making conversations more natural and fluid. Unlike traditional chatbots, generative AI chatbots can dynamically generate responses based on context rather than relying on predefined scripts. Their ability to understand and adapt to nuanced language makes them highly effective for complex customer interactions, setting a new standard in customer support.
Knowledge base
A knowledge base is an effective tool for collecting, managing and sharing organizational knowledge. Most customer engagement solutions allow you to create your own knowledge base of help articles that consumers can use to find answers without needing to contact your support staff. Customers only need to submit a longtail term related to their problem into the search field, and the software will return all relevant help desk content from the knowledge base.
Chatbots can use an effective knowledge base to direct customers to the most appropriate solution for their inquiries. CEPs can also track the links clicked when consumers visit your knowledge base. You can also monitor if users get their queries addressed and keep track of the materials you have already published.
Omnichannel communication
The growing number of devices and channels through which customers connect with businesses has been one of the challenges to improving customer satisfaction. During a service call, consumers can use a laptop, phone, iPad, or desktop, and they expect to be able to access some or all of those devices to find information or connect with a business.
Interacting with your consumers via multiple channels is essential and tracking their entire journey, irrespective of medium or device, enables employees to continuously offer proactive, personalized customer support. CEPs that optimize omnichannel interaction are excellent for maintaining consistent messaging across channels such as email, SMS, push notifications, social platforms, etc.
Tip: Choose a customer engagement platform that allows you to track your audience's journey and offer timely, relevant communications across the channels your consumers choose.
Personalization
CEPs record every interaction a customer has with your business, including storing transcript records of chats, web and SMS messages, surveys, online forms, information about the web pages they visit, the products they buy. By tracking this data, you can deliver hyper-personalized content that links directly to consumer concerns or interact with them with the information that is most relevant to them. Customer engagement platforms are all about harnessing data to give consumers more of what they desire.
A/B testing
Customer engagement tools have comprehensive message-testing capabilities that enable you to experiment with various channels of communication with your consumers. You can essentially A/B test your messaging throughout the system like you would with email marketing, or A/B test your landing pages. By experimenting with different message versions, you can acquire invaluable insights into how, where, and when various types of groups of users interact.
Integrations
A customer engagement platform must integrate seamlessly with your existing technology stack to be effective. This helps automate the movement of information into and out of your CEP, which enhances proper data utilization across multiple channels, and you can be confident that no data will be lost. A robust customer engagement platform like Velaro, is built to work with other technologies and will have robust native connectors to improve workflows.
How to choose the right customer engagement tool for your business
There are various customer engagement solutions available. Choosing the best one depends on the features required and your specific business objectives. Before making a decision, ask yourself the following questions:
What are your expectations for the platform?
You may wish it to link with your CRM, or you choose self-service support. Some businesses want their customer interaction platforms to handle customer loyalty programs. You can also leverage the tool to guide your marketing strategies and collect user engagement feedback. Your company's priorities define the ultimate decision. Identify your use case and browse through different options to find the tool that meets your needs.
How much personalization do you need?
76% of consumers are likely to purchase from businesses that offer a tailored digital experience. Personalization is a crucial driver of company success, but you must determine the extent of personalization required based on your consumer segments. Features such as advanced segmentation allow you to reach consumers based on demographics such as region, age, gender, preferred product niche, etc. It needs customer behavioral data, which a robust CEP can offer.
What communication channels do you plan to use?
Choose a platform that enables you to implement an omnichannel and unified strategy across your critical customer interaction and engagement channels. Live chat, chatbots, social media platforms, SMS and messaging applications, and email marketing are some channels to consider.
Do you need automation?
Customer engagement systems provide varying degrees of automation. Determine whether you require automation features and how many workflows can be automated without impacting customer engagement.
Does it offer a 360o customer view?
Your CEP of choice should unify all of your consumer data. With this knowledge, you should be capable of extracting information that will help you anticipate your consumers' demands and provide a more personalized approach. This data can help your marketing team generate a 360o view of your consumers and develop a holistic understanding of their needs.
Trends in Customer Engagement Platforms
Customer engagement platforms are rapidly evolving due to technological advancements, especially the use of generative AI for self-service and customer support. AI and machine learning (ML) are transforming customer engagement by offering more personalized and efficient interactions.
Predictive analytics, powered by ML algorithms, analyze past customer behaviors to forecast future actions. Sentiment analysis gauges customer feelings based on their feedback. These technologies enable hyper-personalization, creating tailored experiences using first-party data, digital interactions, and emotion-centric marketing.
Interactive content, like videos and quizzes, fosters two-way communication, engaging customers more effectively.
Looking ahead, the integration of generative AI will further revolutionize customer engagement platforms. Current developments could include AI co-pilot tools that assist both the users of the application and the end users. These tools will support customer teams in a varied set of ways that can reduce operational costs, optimize resource allocation, and empower customer service teams to focus on high-value interactions.
Maximize your ROI with a customer engagement platform
As interactive and integrated marketing campaigns continue to gain prominence, the need for advanced technology is also growing. The ability to collect data, now and in the future, coupled with more intelligent analytics and a more personalized approach to customer engagement, is becoming increasingly important in business. As a result, companies are looking to customer engagement software both as a means of interacting with customers across all available channels and as an obligation to ensure that their interactions are meaningful.
Not every CEP is created equal, and you must choose one to help you achieve your business goals. Once you've evaluated each feature and picked the CEP that seems a good fit for your company, don't be afraid to invest in training for your team. Good design can only take you so far; integrating this new tool into your business procedures will take some effort.
