The boom of the virtual world has opened up more opportunities for both consumers and businesses. Consumers can now find better, more convenient options to shop, while businesses can reach out to more consumers online. In the same way, technology has made it easier for companies to provide better solutions to their customers. And if you want to build a reputable brand, you must understand the importance of customer engagement and the need for customer engagement platforms.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement refers to the approach taken by a company to build and maintain a relationship with its customers. This can come in many forms, such as regular publication of content on social media and websites, providing support channels on social media and phone, email messages to subscribed customers, and more.
Effective customer engagement needs to be intentional and consistent, and must feel more than just another form of marketing or transaction. Your aim for customer engagement is to build brand awareness and foster customer retention, so it’s imperative that your customer engagement is done not just as an afterthought.
In fact, many businesses build their own team and create strategies that will help improve their customer engagements. Additionally, most companies also invest in customer engagement platforms to improve the way they handle and build relationships with their customers. Study shows that such investments resulted in a 70% average revenue increase, with the same companies expecting to double their investment to customer engagement by 2025.
With the right customer engagement platform coupled with the right set of strategies and approach, you are on your way to boosting your customer engagement and championing your brand. But what are customer engagement platforms (CEP) and what are the makings of a good CEP?
What Are Customer Engagement Platforms?
Customer engagement platforms (CEPs) are software designed to help support, manage, and measure your interactions with your current and prospective customers. It is a help desk, customer relationship management, communication and insights tool rolled in one, all integrated in one tool for the purpose of enhancing the quality of your customer engagement.
Through a CEP, you can manage all of your customer interactions in one place and improve response times to customer queries across multiple channels. These tools are also equipped with analytics that allow you to gain insights that you can use to understand your customers better, which can then help you provide them with more personalized and improved experience. With better customer experience, you can expect higher customer satisfaction, better brand loyalty, improved conversion, and overall a better bottom line.
Features of a Good Customer Engagement Platform
Considering how much of an investment a CEP will be, it’s important to understand what to look for before deciding to pay for a customer engagement platform. Here are some of the features you must pay attention to.
1. Multi-channel Communication
Your customers have their own set of preferences when it comes to handling communications. With that in mind, it’s important that you give them the option to communicate with you in the most convenient way. If it will take multiple steps to get support for your business, then you can expect that they will just choose a different brand that is easier to connect to.
Additionally, you can find potential customers on more than just one platform. That’s why having the option to connect to them via email, social media, messaging apps or via text messages is important to help you broaden your brand’s reach.
2. Personalization Options
Providing your customers with a more personalized messaging can help enhance their experience and can even help improve your conversion rate. Thus, a customer engagement platform must provide you with an easy way to personalize your messaging and turn your messages into customer-centered interactions.
3. Audience Segmentation
Another must-have feature of a good CEP is the ease of segmenting your audience so that you can deliver a more tailored message to each of your audience subgroups. By segmenting your audiences, you get to improve email open rates and get better conversions.
4. Automated Messaging
Customer engagement goes beyond just the marketing email and social media posts that you send out regularly. It covers any form of interaction with your customers, including live chat support, push messages, cart reminder emails, and more. These behavior-triggered communications can be automated through a customer engagement platform.
5. Performance Analytics
Apart from managing your customer engagements, CEPs can also help you have a better understanding of your customers through their analytics features. Most customer engagement software have its own insights feature that allows you to understand customer behavior based on the data you have gathered from your recent interactions. This can then help you improve your future engagements and help you provide them with experiences that are worthy of their trust and loyalty.
6. Third-party Integrations
Third-party integrations allow you to make the most of your current tech stack and eliminate the burden of dealing with multiple databases. By using a customer engagement platform that allows you to integrate other tools, you can build a centralized database for all your customer records and communications, handle your customer interactions more efficiently, and improve the way you deal with customer concerns.
7. Feedback Gathering
As they say, feedback is a gift, and your customers will always have lots of feedback to provide. Thus, it’s important to give them a venue to share with you their thoughts and experiences when dealing with your brand. A good customer engagement platform supports your business’ need for feedback gathering and can also help you make the most of the data you gathered from these feedback to improve your future customer interactions.
Boost Your Brand’s Reputation Through Customer Engagement Platforms
Customer engagement platforms are here to stay, especially now that customers are having more choices when it comes to buying a product or service. If you want to be the brand of choice in your industry, then improving your customer engagement should be part of your top priorities.
In choosing the right customer engagement platform, discovery workshops can be very helpful. Contact us today at TKKIE to find out how we can help you find the right tools for your business through our discovery workshops and tech adoption solutions.
