What is a customer engagement?
Businesses from time immemorial have engaged with their clients by getting in touch with them in person or through phone. The advent of the internet saw the use of email as a channel to engage with customers.
Today there is software that is specifically used to engage with customers. Personal contact is not always encouraged by all customers. Customers also respond less to emails. They prefer online chat for communication. Here is where a customer engagement platform would be useful.
What is a customer engagement platform?
A customer engagement platform is a software solution that allows a business to interact with customers. It helps to manage all the interaction with a customer and integrates various elements like CRM, mail, social media, chat, etc.
Customer engagement software offers a single solution that covers all functions and processes in the organization that interact with clients. It is a set of modules that offers a solution to manage interactions with customers throughout the life cycle and has the ultimate objective of improving customer satisfaction and creating loyal customers.
The ultimate aim of a client engagement software is to help the business carry out an effective marketing campaign.
This helps a customer to cross-sell products. During the interactions, sufficient information about the customers and their preferences are collected. This information can be used to create personalized recommendations for products and services. The platform can be used to effectively connect to customers and help create a great experience for them.
Importance of a customer engagement platform
Customer Engagement Platforms deliver value to every business.The reason why they are important is because of two benefits that they provide. The first is that they help in revenue growth, and the second is that they ensure that every interaction with customers helps to create a great experience for customers.
1) Customer Engagement Platforms help in revenue growth
A client engagement software can help a business to enhance its revenue. Customer engagement is not just a mere interaction between the business and the customer. It helps to build a strong relationship between the business and the customer.
The customers are paying the business to get the best quality product/service. In order to ensure this happens, the business should be able to have the best processes and develop the best product. For this revenue and profitability is needed. The more revenue a company earns the more funds it has to be able to invest in quality in all activities.
Software for customer engagement would empower a business to create higher revenue by developing robust processes that are data-driven. While doing this what is important is to plan and create processes that can help an organization understand and react to customer needs at all times. These processes then need to be implemented and customers should be able to feel the impact of these processes. Once processes are implemented, it is important to measure the result of the processes.
The result of this measurement should be used to further improve the processes, leading to better quality products and services.
Process metrics when collected and analyzed manually is cumbersome and not effective. The use of latest technologies like predictive analytics and other Artificial intelligence methods can help a business to get a better understanding of customer interactions.
Customer interactions can be measured and this measurement would be actionable, meaning actions on improving processes can be taken based on this. The business can look at every process for the viewpoint of revenue generation. The ultimate aim should be to drive growth in revenue. Software analytics helps to understand which processes would create revenue and which would not.
2) Customer Engagement Platforms help in creating a great customer experience.
If revenue has to grow then a Customer Engagement Platform has to create a best in class customer experience. This helps in creating customer satisfaction. With effort, the business can convert satisfaction to loyalty.
A loyal customer would not only provide business to the organization, but also recommend others to use the services of the business. For this to happen, a great customer experience is needed.
Every single member of the business who interacts with customers, whether a marketing manager, a sales executive, an accounts executive, or a customer support executive need to focus on creating value in the process of interaction. This can be done as follows:
Ensuring that all the key touch points in the customer interaction, namely email, phone calls, social media interaction, and meetings management need to be brought into one place. This would help in stream lining the workflow and ensures effective collaboration between teams.
Software provides intelligent tools to help a business automate low value tasks, thereby freeing employees and allowing them to focus more on value adding tasks.Whether it is scheduling a meeting or doing a follow up automation can help make this effective.
The platform allows the staff of the business to do the right things so that they can deliver the highest value during their interactions with customers.
Technology can thus help add value to customer interactions and this can help to create a great experience for customers. The cumulative effect of such great experiences would lead to a stronger relationship between the business and its customers. This would lead to customer loyalty, driving revenue growth.
Features of a customer engagement platform
A customer engagement software would provide many useful features to help the business improve the quality of interactions with customers. A good platform would provide features like:
Multi channel engagement
Engagement or communication with the customer can be done through multiple channels. All these channels can be integrated using the platform. The interaction can help in the marketing effort of the business. Whether it is through chat, email, or social media communication, the platform can help in the marketing effort.
Self-service options
When a customer has a problem or a query, the common way of solving this is for the customer to call the customer support centre and get his problems solved. Contacting customer support is a time consuming process. There are many customers who prefer to do it on their own. A self-service option would be of great use for such customers. A self-service option ensures that customers can search for the issue they are facing and find a solution themselves. This makes it convenient for them and also saved resources for the business.
Marketing
Customer engagement platform can help a business to carry out its marketing activity effectively. It can reach out more easily to customers and offer them products and services based on their interactions. The platform can help the marketers understand what the customer needs and offer a solution for that.
Live chat
This is one of the best ways to interact with customers. Most customers do not prefer phone calls or personal meetings. They are happy to interact through live chats. This allows the customer to continue doing whatever work he is doing and in parallel interact with the business. Live chat can help the business to promote their products and services in a more effective way.
Account management
A good platform for customer engagement helps a business manage its customer accounts easily and effectively. The customer profile with all the interactions can be viewed. This can help the business to understand the way the customer buys from the organization. This can then be used to offers better solutions. It can also help to improve the workflow.
CRM support
A good platform would provide integration with the CRM that the business uses. This helps to manage the sale pipeline effectively. When the platform is integrated with the CRM, it allows the business to anticipate customer expectations and help to create a better experience during the selling process.
Benefits of a customer engagement platform
Using a software for customer engagement can be beneficial for an organization. As we have discussed, it helps in enhancing customer satisfaction and helps to drive growth in revenue. Apart from this, there are many other benefits for a business that includes:
It can help the business to reach out to its customers and serve them wherever they are. Connecting to customers is a big benefit of such a platform.
The accuracy of marketing and sales would improve thanks to the data, which gets generated by the engagement platform.
Customers can be engaged with on a real time basis, helping to create a great experience.
It helps the business to provide better customer support and service.
It provides a consistent experience to customers across all platforms.
A customer engagement platform is a one-stop solution that allows organizations to manage their interactions with customers in a more effective way. This allows the organization to create a great experience for customers, which can translate to better revenue growth.
