Should You Be Using a Customer Engagement Platform?

If it seems like your customers have higher expectations for your brand these days, you’re not wrong. In 2022, customers expect brands they shop with to offer exceptional personalized service while simultaneously being as accessible as possible. While many brands feel they’re doing this well, most are falling short. 

Many brands don’t have the staffing to provide consistently individualized service, and while more customers are communicating with brands via multiple mediums, traditional digital platforms have restricted those mediums from talking to each other. That fragments the customer service experience and leaves your sales reps woefully lacking the context required to effectively meet the needs of your customers.

What so many of these brands lack is a unified customer engagement platform. 

What is a Customer Engagement Platform? 

Think of a customer engagement platform as the perfect marriage between your CRM, communication, and customer service platforms. A digital customer engagement platform is software that centralizes all customer interactions with a brand and tracks and manages those interactions. 

Engagement platforms work in tandem with the tools most brands are already using—chatbots, social media, email, phone calls, and instant messaging—uniting them to create automated, multichannel workflows. 

How do Customer Engagement Platforms Work? 

Imagine this scenario: you have a customer named Jenny who wants to make a purchase on your website before she leaves for work. 

She looks at the product listing on her laptop, but has to run to catch the bus before she can complete her order. 

On the bus, Jenny revisits your website on her smartphone and realizes that she has questions about the product she wants to purchase. With a customer engagement platform, Jenny is able to open a chat box on your site which has collected enough data to pinpoint which page she’s looking at and populate answers to questions she may have.

Mid-chat, Jenny realizes it’s probably easier to ask her questions over the phone. Using contextual routing technology, your digital customer engagement platform allows Jenny to make a phone call in-chat that will direct her to the right agent. 

Before they even speak to Jenny, that agent is supplied with full context of the interactions she’s already had on your website. This allows your agent to jump straight to the issue so Jenny doesn’t have to waste time.

With the help of a digital customer engagement platform, Jenny can hang up, go into her cart, and see the product she added at home still waiting to be purchased. After she’s ordered and received her product, your team can use data collected from the interaction to send targeted ads and information to Jenny that will interest her. At every step of the journey, that customer engagement platform is helping Jenny feel seen. 

The Benefits of Using a Customer Engagement Platform

Jenny is hypothetical, but a fragmented customer experience has real costs. For customers, the cost is time, and for your company, the cost is money and customer loyalty. 

Interactions are less efficient and agents have to sleuth out information about customers or go through a tedious Q&A process to attempt to improve the experience. This is burning out your team members and frustrating your clients.

Customer engagement platforms solve these problems by providing a customer experience that meets the client in every single place they’re at and a context-rich experience every time. They provide valuable analytics that help brands pinpoint weak spots in their journey or product, identify customer needs, and create a winning customer engagement strategy.

Engagement platforms also solve one of the most pressing issues for online brands today: privacy regulations. 

As more third-party organizations and businesses prioritize customer privacy, getting reliable data is becoming trickier. Customer engagement platforms help brands mitigate the challenges of these important regulations by allowing them to collect primary data directly related to their customer experience. 

Customer Engagement Platform Features 

Good customer engagement platforms provide brands with:

• Database segmentation, which allows agents to personalize every interaction in the customer journey using data about customer behavior, interests, history, and other key demographic markers
• Deeper digital knowledge bases that give customers greater access to articles and other helpful resources to resolve queries
• Virtual agents and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities that filter customer interactions and draw from knowledge bases to significantly increase first-contact resolutions
• Customer feedback and reporting that give brands an expansive look at what is or isn’t working for their customer
• A fully integrated system that works with the tech stack they already have to enable automatic information flow

Should You Be Using a Customer Engagement Platform? 

If you’re looking for ways to provide top notch customer service at every touchpoint without staffing your contact center 24/7, a customer engagement platform is definitely something to consider. It makes the work easier and more rewarding for your agents, and it makes your customer feel pretty special, too. 

Request a personalized demo of UJET’s customer experience management technology today.