You’re no doubt familiar with the practice of customer relationship management (CRM). A CRM platform is a tool that’s used to store customer details, manage sales and contact clients. For years, they have been a valuable piece of software for any customer-facing business. But today, many companies are shifting towards a new kind of resource – the customer engagement platform.
If your company already uses a CRM that seems to do the job well enough, you may be wondering whether you need to invest in a customer engagement platform too. Well, if you want to optimise your digital touchpoints, manage your communications across all platforms via one central hub and ultimately improve customer experience, we’d highly recommend it.
Read on to learn what a customer engagement platform is, its many benefits and how it could help your business.
What is a customer engagement platform?
A customer engagement platform is a comprehensive software suite that enables an organisation to manage and optimise its customer journey. From within the platform, a brand can carry out a wide variety of actions, from accessing its customer data to sending personalised push notifications.
In short, a customer engagement platform acts as a single source of truth. It brings together data from disparate sources (such as social media, sales databases, chatbots and help desks) in order to provide a 360-degree view of each customer. The main capabilities of a customer engagement platform include:
- Storing sensitive customer details securely and compliantly
- Unifying your customer data management
- Monitoring customer engagement in real-time
- Providing metrics to analyse performance
- Automating processes such as marketing messages and push notifications
What are the benefits of a customer engagement platform?
- It turns insight into action
Overall, how much customer data does your business collect? Whether it’s a customer’s mobile number or a heat map to visualise their journey through your site, this information is crucial when it comes to creating personalised customer experiences. But the truth is that if your insights aren’t actionable, then there was really no point collecting the data in the first place.
The key reason why your business may need a customer engagement platform is that this software will convert your insights into actions. By compiling these fragmented customer profiles, you can create a centralised source that not only stores sensitive data, but enables you to respond to it effectively – all from within the same platform.
For example, a simple database might tell you that a particular customer has visited your site twelve times in the last month. A customer engagement platform, on the other hand, can tell you this is 60% more often than your average visitor and enable you to send targeted marketing messages that are specifically aimed at customers who show high levels of loyalty.
- It optimises interactions across all channels
Mobile, desktop, social media, email – today, customers expect a seamless experience across all of their different devices and channels. Because a customer engagement platform compiles various metrics from all of these sources, it enables businesses to provide continuous communications.
Let’s say that one of your customers is out and fills their shopping cart while visiting your mobile site. When they get home, they load your site on their laptop in order to complete their purchase. A comprehensive customer engagement platform will make sure that the contents of their cart has been transferred to the new device, enabling them to check out with ease.
This helps your customer feel as though your brand recognises them as an individual, rather than as a series of clicks on a screen. With personalisation increasingly important in the customer journey (more on that later), this is an excellent way to make your user experience as effortless as possible and win repeat business as a result.
- It adds the personal touch
Personalisation is one of the most important marketing strategies for businesses hoping to increase their customer loyalty. Known as situational marketing, personalisation enables organisations to target people with adverts and other interactions that take their preferences into account.
Customer engagement platforms make it much easier for brands to align their marketing with each customer’s preferences. From enabling targeted push notifications, to segmenting customers according to their preferred method of communication, this software suite means that you can create comprehensive customer profiles.
According to some estimates, we see between 4,000 to 10,000 marketing messages per day – and the majority of these have absolutely no impact on us. Offering a personalised service enables businesses to stand out amidst a sea of faceless brands.
By storing customer preferences in a customer engagement platform, you can build your marketing strategy around each person’s specific criteria. Whether it’s enabling people to opt-out of sensitive marketing messages such as those around Mother’s or Father’s Day, or simply triggering a ‘Welcome Back’ notification when somebody returns to your site, these gestures are easily automated from within a customer engagement platform – but are likely to have a lasting impact on your customers.
- It can automate relevant campaigns
A powerful customer engagement platform will allow your business to automate different marketing campaigns according to set criteria. For example, an online clothing shop might choose to send an exclusive email about its range of jumpers to customers who live in a region that’s forecast heavy snow. Another company might notify people who have previously clicked on a particular product that its price has recently been reduced.
Instead of having to filter through sensitive data manually, a customer engagement platform can automatically target relevant customers based on factors such as their location, age, or past behaviour. This streamlines the process of creating specific or time-sensitive campaigns.
Ready to learn more?
With so many clear benefits, the question isn’t whether you need expert customer engagement solutions – it’s when you’re going to make the move.
At 3radical, we draw on the latest gamification techniques to deliver interactive experiences to your audience, while helping you capture valuable data at the same time. With customisable templates to suit your branding, it’s never been easier to boost engagement rates and gain a deeper understanding of your customers.
Whether you’re looking to attract new customers or build long term relationships with repeat buyers, our innovative Voco engagement platform will help strengthen your brand performance throughout the customer journey.
Take a look at our video below to find out more, or email info@3radical.com to talk more about your project.