With a plethora of products and services to choose from, customers are currently in the crux of a paradox of choice. What stands out among all the options is the quality of experience a brand provides in their offerings. It is extremely important for brands to have a customer-centric approach today by analyzing user behavior to provide personalized and relevant experience, which, in turn, increases conversion, retains existing users and creates brand loyalists in the long run.
Why do businesses need a Customer engagement solution?
The shift in power dynamics between customers and brands has reshaped the traditional purchase path. Adopting an omnichannel tool that covers all channels is imperative for enterprises to interact and engage with customers with ease.
Let’ deep dive further on what a Customer Engagement Platform can provide.
A Customer Engagement Platform is a single portal that centralizes, optimizes, tracks, and analyzes every customer interaction across several touchpoints throughout the customer journey, helping brands provide a personalized and delightful experience. From CRM to inbox, social media, calendars, and more, a customer engagement platform consolidates all channels used by marketing teams to engage customers.
The critical role of an engagement platform for modern teams includes:
- Driving efficient revenue growth
- Delivering best-in-class customer experience
- Improving loyalty and building strong customer relationships
- Increasing subscriber base, arresting churn, and boosting retention
- Shortening purchase cycles and improving cross-sell & up-sell opportunities
- Carving unique brand recognition
Customer Engagement Metrics to Consider
How do you know if you are on the right track to gain new customers with your sales & marketing efforts and also retain them throughout their journey? With the below given metrics, you can gauge how users are responding to your content across app, web etc. and the areas where you could possibly improve your campaign.
- Open and Click Through Rates (CTR)
- Average time spent on the website/ page
- Social Media Interaction
- Customer referrals
- Direct User Feedback / NPS
- Repeat Purchase/ renewal
Questions to ask before purchasing a customer engagement solution
How do you choose a platform/ tool among so many options? Option fatigue is real. Having a quick checklist to go through and question yourself on how business requirements and organization goals can be collectively achieved with a customer engagement tool can be extremely helpful. Here is a list of questions to ask while choosing an intelligent Customer Engagement Platform:
- Examine product abilities such as strength, flexibility, robustness, core and extended functions.
- Examine ability to structure, enrich and seamlessly integrate data from offline sources.
- Examine the ease of usage of the interface.
- Examine if the tool is business-agnostic and serves your particular needs.
- Define and identify use cases to understand if the platform can meet your demands.
- Examine deployment timeline for quick and smooth release of high value/priority use cases.
- Examine the platform architecture to identify deployment options, i.e., cloud or on-premise.
- Inspect vendor reputation, proven industry experience and intellectual value-add.
- Examine the security aspect of the platform, including data privacy.
- Examine if you can automate customer journeys for a seamless experience across touchpoints.
- Examine the ability to generate custom reports using analytics as per your business needs.
- Inspect the kind of support the vendor provides during and after activation.
- Examine the partnership ecosystem provided by the vendor.
- Examine the ease of integration of the platform with your existing marketing tech stack.
- Inspect training services provided by the vendor to enable independent troubleshooting.
- Ask if the platform is future-ready, scalable and has the capacity to embrace change.
- Question the frequency of application updates from the vendor’s end.
- Identify if your organization is ready for an automation overhaul.
- Ask if there’s any hidden cost that comes with the service provided.
- Examine if the platform allows you to migrate and sync data.
Every organization has different requirements when it comes to customer engagement and success. Take the time to understand your own requirements and how they are likely to change and how a 360 ° customer engagement tool can provide a personalized and targeted experience to each customer and eventually help achieve business goals.
