Nowadays, the customer journey needs to be more personalized as customer retention has become a complicated task that often seems impossible.
Interestingly, improving the customer engagement rates will ensure that the customer interacts with your business and in turn, boost the retention rate.
Thanks to the customer engagement platforms available in the market, encouraging customer engagement is not an impossible task to perform. Here’s a handy table featuring the best customer engagement platforms for your business, with details in the article below.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement implies the different sorts of communications and interactions that customers have with your brand via diverse channels, fostering a relationship with your brand.
The more the customers engage with your brand, the more it rekindles the relationship with your customer. This also cuts down the acquisition costs, resulting in efficient business growth.
Keeping customers engaged at all times leads to high customer engagement, proving advantageous for businesses and organizations. When customers interact, they consider your brand to be more valuable, which leads to customer loyalty and satisfaction. This is why the concept of social media customer service has emerged.
Some of the advantages offered by customer engagement are as follows:
- Boost in brand experience
- Increased customer loyalty
- Access to customer feedback and in-depth insights
- Better customer experience
- Boost in sales funnel velocity
Knowing the voice of the customer is integral for customer satisfaction, as the expectations of customers from brands have increased, and they prefer a more personalized approach.
What is a customer engagement platform?
A customer engagement platform is software that handles different types of customer communications over varied channels such as web chat, email, or social media. The software is often equipped with features like multi-channel communication, CRM systems, reporting, marketing personalization, and customer self-service.
The platform offers pleasant customer experiences that thrive in positive relationships with your customers.
Some of the exciting benefits offered by customer engagement platform are compiled below:
- Access customer data from the robust communications platform as a service (CPaaS) from one place.
- Build a meaningful and deep relationship with your customers so that they do not feel unappreciated.
- You can scale up to meet the requirements for services, security, and compliance set by enterprise companies.
Furthermore, it is possible to comprehend each customer interaction and deliver unique customer experiences across digital channels.
Key features of customer engagement platforms
The customer engagement software should include the following features:
- Multi-channel engagement – It should provide multi-channel support to communicate with your customers, such as email, text, voice call, and social media.
- Automation rules – Automation rules to execute customer engagement strategies when certain criteria are fulfilled.
- Gamification – Gamification features for rewarding agents with badges to encourage effective competition and boost customer productivity.
- Reporting – The customer engagement software should be equipped with a fully-featured analytics package that gives you powerful analysis and reporting tools.
- Centralized dashboard – This facilitates the customer support team to view and manage all your customer data and communication from one dashboard.
- Integrations – These platforms should be able to support third-party app integrations which may include apps related to e-commerce, social media, and more.
- CRM – The built-in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) for managing necessary customer data that ranges from contact information to previous orders, and tickets.
Now that you know about the important features to look for in the customer engagement platform, below are the best ones available online.
Salesforce
Reinvent the customer experiences using Salesforce and build CRM-powered sites, portals, forums, apps, and more.
With CRM, you can easily deploy point-and-click builders, components, and out-of-the-box vertical applications for an advanced customer experience and to digitize end-to-end business processes.
Features:
Recognize users for being active in the community and reward loyalty with customizable badges.
Create customizable ranks, badges, and scoring systems as incentives for participation.
Members can identify and endorse other customers as experts on specific topics.
Create a public leaderboard to thank users for their contributions.
You are empowered to connect the customer journey by breaking down silos and connecting systems, data, applications, and content. Using the data drives sites, portals, and mobile applications you can engage with more customers and accelerate the business growth.
Twilio
Twilio is a popular customer engagement platform that delivers personalized data-driven engagement to customers.
The platform combines an extensive suite of digital communication channels, first-party customer data, and flexible solutions to choose from. Serving customers globally, Twilio delivers messages and emails when and wherever they prefer.
Features:
- Unified first-party customer data to deliver personalized and seamless engagements.
- Build flexible engineering solutions to boost communications ROI, increase operational efficiency, and speed up deployments.
- HIPAA-eligible health solutions are customizable to meet the patient needs for omnichannel virtual care, appointment reminders, and more.
- Deliver personalized e-commerce experiences at scale to build long-lasting customer relationships.
- Offer personalized omnichannel experiences with built-in security for financial services.
You can also build unique marketing campaigns for your global audiences which are meant to serve a special purpose.
DialPad
DialPad is a leading AI-powered customer engagement platform that is transforming how teams, agents, and customers connect. The platform enables you to leverage powerful AI tools in a way that the best customer experiences are delivered without the need for training and modeling.
Features:
- AI tools like live coaching and real-time transcriptions to support representatives on live calls and during post-call reviews
- Mobile app to talk, message, meet, and support customers and carry out business communications.
- Dialpad customer intelligence real-time analytics feature to support your teams.
- Pre-built integration support with apps like Salesforce, Zendesk, and Google Workspace.
- Real-time analytics to have complete visibility into the agent usage and adoption across global offices.
The platform acts as a collaborative workspace that empowers agents to carry out customer conversations from a centralized platform using tools like Knowledge Centers. This also improves agent productivity, such that better customer relationships prevail across omnichannel, digital, and outbound conversations.
Moengage
Empowering more than 1200 brands like Titan and Dominos, Moengage is an insights-based customer engagement platform that strives to transform customer engagements into live results.
Features:
- AI-driven insights and analytics to understand and deliver omnichannel experiences for the customers.
- Sherpa AI-powered campaign optimization to optimize interactions and improve ROI.
- Personalization for websites to deliver relevant and personalized experiences.
- Single API support to build, manage, and send transactional alerts in real-time.
- Use welcome coupons, helpful tips, and more to help customers enjoy the products.
By leveraging the benefits offered by personalized engagement, the platform ensures that the right message is delivered at the appropriate time to the customers. You can easily view the data insights, such as the number of end customers engaged with your brand, messages sent globally, and the omnichannel experiences delivered each month.
Sprinklr
Sprinklr customer engagement platform lets you deliver frictionless customer service across all modern channels. Unifying the case management and agent interactions within a single customer engagement software solution ensures that your customers get the freedom to communicate on their terms.
Features:
- A unified platform to manage customer service across 30+ digital and voice channels.
- Conversational AI and self-service solutions to scale business capabilities at a reduced cost.
- AI-driven insights and assistance to cut down the overall handle time.
- Automated speech and text analytics for optimizing business operations.
- Detects customer intent via AI to accelerate the agent response time.
By converting the conversations into a single-touch experience, Sprinklr reduces the chaos that prevents teams from recognizing and solving the problems of their customers. Moreover, service teams can choose the channels their customers usually prefer in their region and treat them as a unit of a single experience.
Zoho
Choose Zoho to deliver an omnichannel customer experience no matter the communication channel you use – email, social media, phone, and live chat. Its customer engagement center lets you create a context for contacts, conversations, and processes, which enables the support teams to quickly identify the stage of the customer life cycle in which the interactions belong.
Features:
- Territory management to segregate customers according to geography and product lines.
- Two-way data sync between Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk to help identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities.
- It built support for email, social media, phone, and live chat to engage the customers on the right channel.
- Handshake mode for the customer agents to distinguish a ticket from a prospect and long-standing customer.
- SaleSignals integration to send real-time notifications to get notified about each activity performed by a customer.
The platform is equipped with business intelligence, which intelligently analyzes your response patterns and automatically recommends the best time to engage with the customers.
Intercom
Want to engage customers when they are most likely to take action? Intercom may be your best bet! Its customer engagement software builds a direct channel for your customers within your product, app, and website wherever you can catch their attention.
Features:
- Create multi-channel campaigns to deliver a consistent experience across every message.
- Support for over 350 integrations including CRMs, marketing automation, email, reporting tools, and internal databases.
- No code platform to drive actions without having to write long codes.
- Split testing feature to test your messaging and campaigns and compare their performances.
- Advanced targeting features to target customers based on their attributes, past engagements, or self-reported data.
- Track the campaign impacts and discover new ways to manage and improve the overall performance.
The platform aims to boost the activation, growth, and customer retention of your business by helping them engage more meaningfully with your product. Its powerful data storage features allow you to convert customer experiences into tailored and personalized digital engagement.
LiveAgent
Rated as the number one help desk software for small to medium businesses in 2020, LiveAgent proudly offers its services to brands like Forbes, Airbus, and Nascar.
This customer engagement platform supports multi-channel engagement features bestowing the ability to communicate with the customers via multiple customer-preferred channels such as email, text, voice call, as well as social media.
Features
- Supports automation rules to execute customer engagement strategies when some conditions are fulfilled.
- Support gamification to reward agents, boost productivity, and promote healthy competition amongst individuals.
- Full-featured analytics package to give access to powerful analysis and reporting tools.
- A centralized dashboard to manage all customer data and communication and a universal inbox accessible by your customer support team.
- CRM capabilities to manage all the customer data ranging from contact information to previous orders and tickets.
LiveAgent offers a trial period of 14 days so that you can test its offerings and ensure align with your business goals.
FlowUp
Designed to cater to the needs of diverse industries like insurance, real estate, tourism, health and wellness, and more, FlowUp ensures that you leverage the power of customer engagement policies to build better relationships with your existing customers.
Features
- Supports integration with communication channels like text and voice to enhance customer engagement outreach strategy.
- Optimize communication with calls, SMS, tele-surveys, etc, and segregate customer groups for easy follow-ups.
- Auto-responders to respond appropriately and instantly with customized pre-programmed responses.
- Supports a wide range of CRM software integrations to send real-time updates without the need to code.
- Set up a custom voicemail box for missed calls.
FlowUp ensures that each stage of the customer journey from onboarding to repeating the purchases is built on a unique workflow. The customer engagement platform allows you to respond instantly and accurately to the inbound inbound messages and follow up instantly will new opt-ins.
Segment
Powered by Twilio, Segment is an AI-based platform that empowers you to gain access to precise and impactful customer-related data.
Features
- Evaluate campaign performance, deliverability metrics, and historical trends to gain in-depth customer insights.
- Align warehouse data automatically and optimize it for cost and performance.
- Build a unified customer database across the web and mobile.
- Activate data and intelligence to improve the customer’s experience.
- Understand, predict, generate, and engage each customer in real-time.
Corporations like IBM and Intuit already trust the intelligent Segment features to transform each customer interaction into a unique experience. Exclusively designed for Twilio customers, they offer a unified customer database that delivers a unified customer view on the web, mobile apps, and data warehouse.
The warehouse data is configured to automatically align with the schema such that the cost and performance are greatly optimized.
Conclusion
Having a cordial relationship with your customers is of utmost necessity for businesses of all sorts. However, the process of improving customer engagement is indeed a challenge in itself. Building a good relationship with your customers and increasing customer engagement can be challenging, but it’s not impossible.
Having the correct platforms by your side will help you adopt a personalized approach to be able to build a place in your customer’s hearts.
Before settling for a customer engagement management software, you should first opt for a trial period to check if it offers everything it promises.
Also read: 9 First-Party Data Strategies for Driving Customer Engagement