Engagement solutions. Lead a customer from engagement to happy “wedding”

It’s becoming increasingly complicated for advertisers and marketers to deal with the targeted ads “noise”. It creates obstacles of engagement with their customers and cutting through the media storm created by competing brands. Consumers are becoming more demanding of better personalized and individually tailored experience.

If you want your customer engagement strategy to be effective – especially when they can easily switch their loyalty in this digital age – you should be seamless and pin-point accurate in offering your products or services.

A genuine and smart “forklift” is needed to deal with large amounts of information and customer data – a customer engagement solution.

What is a customer engagement solution? Can it be effectively used for customer engagement analytics? How can the solution help your engagement manager? Follow the article to find the answers.

Customer engagement solution, or a magic wand on marketer’s armory

There is a thing that a marketer or advertiser should always bear in mind to increase customer engagement. Customers don’t stand if you tell them what they need or want anymore. They already know that since they’ve been searching on the internet, through social media, blogs, forums, and so on. The thing they want is to be treated as individuals and individually. They want to see that their business matters much to you and that you care.

Therefore, the customer engagement process should be as individual- focused as possible. It is true for b2b customer engagement and customer engagement activities in retail alike.

Customer engagement solution will help you to:

• improve customer loyalty;
• raise customer purchases;
• increase customer-based profits;
• establish and develop customer ambassadorship for your brand.

According to customers, 5 major benefits can be underlined as a result of a smart customer engagement policy. 

The kingmaker, or customer engagement platform

Consumer engagement solutions are numerous and wide-ranging according to the ways companies interact with their customers, including through:

• customer relationship management (CRM);
• customer service;
• customer feedback;
• digital marketing;
• customer success;
• live chat software.

What unites these seemingly disparate instruments together? What is a customer engagement platform? Why does good communication so much?

The powerful software tool that embraces all these instruments and helps businesses to manage complex customer relationships is a customer engagement platform. Customer engagement platforms allow businesses to interact with customers and manage all the interaction with them through various software instruments, like CRM, mail, social media, chat, etc.

It is vital for a company that every interaction with a customer should lead to their satisfaction. But it is crucially important to avoid becoming obsessive and stay behind the scene until the right time and place.

The quality of a communicative session influences a customer’s reaction to a brand greatly. And it very much depends on what reaction there will be.

Customer engagement platforms make engagement with a company seamless for customers. The software creates a magical sense that customers are getting the attention and the support they need. When your clients contact support, they get thoughtful and smart recommendations, answers to their frequently asked questions, and fast personalized resolution to their problems.

To use an engagement platform is to lead to earning trust, loyalty, and sales from customers by delivering fast, individually tailored services in the channels customers prefer most.

This allows the company’s team to create unique customer journeys and automate the major part of the workflow for customer engagement. In addition, customer engagement platforms free up your team to focus on finding new ways of customer support and solve more complex problems.

The features of a customer engagement platform

A customer engagement platform comprises the following features:

• Multi-channel engagement. Engagement or communication with customers can be done through multiple channels, which can be integrated using the platform, for instance, through email, on a website itself (personalised communication based on visitor behaviour and customer information), chat, social media platforms, etc.
• Self-service options. When a customer has a query or a problem, the common way to solve this for a customer is to call the customer support center to get the problem solved. Contacting customer support is time-consuming. A self-service option would be of great use for customers who prefer to do it on their own. It ensures that customers can search for the issue they have and find a solution themselves. This makes it convenient for them and also saves your business resources.
• Customer service portal. It is a digital mechanism for supporting and managing customers’ information by customer support representatives. The significant feature of the portal is that it acts as an information hub about a customer, his/her products and other services. It often contains a knowledge base with FAQ, service notices, and product updates. Some tech-savvy businesses use ERP to link customer service portals to other technology systems within the company, such as procurement, project management, accounting, manufacturing, etc.
• Marketing. Customer engagement platforms can reach out to customers more easily and offer them services and products according to their interactions. The platforms help your marketers to understand what the customer needs and offer the right solution for that.
• Live chat is one of the best interactive ways to communicate with customers. Most of them do not prefer phone calls or personal meetings. Live chats allow the customers to do whatever work they are doing and interact with the business simultaneously. In addition, live chats can help your business to promote products and services in a more effective way.
• Account management. By using customer engagement platforms, you can manage customer accounts easily and effectively. A customer profile with all the interactions can be viewed to understand the way a customer buys from your company. This can be further used for offering better solutions for customers and workflow improvement.
• CRM support. Customer engagement platforms help to manage the sales pipeline effectively. When the platform is integrated with corporate CRM, it allows the business to anticipate customer expectations and help to create a better customer experience during the selling process.

Digital engagement solution. A spyglass or a blindfold?

Like the Moon has the bright and dark sides, digital entertainment solutions have their advantages and flaws.

The benefits of customer engagement platforms are:

• They can help the business to reach out to its customers and serve them wherever they are.
• The accuracy of marketing and sales is improved due to customer data, which is collected by engagement platforms.
• Customers can be engaged with reached out on a real-time basis, helping to create a great experience.
• They help the business to provide fast and effective customer support and service.
• They provide a consistent experience to customers across all communication platforms.

Customer engagement platforms have certain pitfalls:

• Disjointed customer view. Very few software platforms integrate a comprehensive set of engagement capabilities. This is a major issue for brands that adopt customer engagement software. Customers inclined to view companies as single entities. And they don’t typically notice (or know) that different teams and different technologies might be used for each individual interaction.
• Omni-channel vs. multi-channel. Multi-channel engagement means that customers can interact with your brand in a variety of ways. Omni-channel engagement is based on unifying communication across all channels to provide a consistent brand experience. Customers can switch from one channel to another without the brand missing a beat.
• Customer value. Another common pitfall of customer engagement technology is ensuring that every interaction provides true value to customers. The opportunity for proactive customer communication doesn’t mean it’s appropriate all the time. Customer engagement should be timely in order to successfully provide value to customers.

Conclusion

Customer engagement software programs place the customer experience at the core of the customer journey. That is ultimately beneficial for both customers and companies.

Add a human touch to your customer engagement activities. Build long- lasting fruitful relationships with individually tailored messaging and smart automation across all channels your clients prefer to improve customer engagement.