In an age of constant communication, you’d think it would be easy to connect with customers. You can email them, text them, post on their favorite social media platforms, or even go old school and pick up the phone.
Unfortunately, the ease of communicating with customers ultimately diminishes the effectiveness of this information. It’s estimated that the average person receives 98 business emails a day —how on earth are you going to build meaningful relationships with customers and compete for their attention? !
If that’s the question your company wants answered, read on. This post focuses on customer engagement: what it is, why it matters, and which tools can help businesses connect better with customers.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the emotional connection or relationship a customer has with a company or brand. While relevant, customer engagement is not necessarily:
- Customer Experience — The interactions and touchpoints that occur between a customer and a brand throughout the customer journey.
- Customer Support — The assistance a company provides to customers to help them get the most out of a product or service.
- Customer Success — The process of increasing customer satisfaction with a product and its overall success through education, advocacy, and outreach.
While all of the above factors play a role in customer engagement, they do not by themselves determine this. After all, you can be happy with a product, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you follow the company that made it on social media or feel a sense of loyalty to the brand.
However, taking the time to build stronger relationships with customers and earn their loyalty is associated with more positive business outcomes. According to Gallop, “Compared to the average customer, fully engaged customers experience an average 23% premium in share of wallet, profitability, revenue and relationship growth.
So how do you encourage participation?
At the heart of a successful customer engagement strategy is delivering value to customers through personalized experiences and interactions. Personalization requires understanding your customers – who they are, how they like to communicate, how they prefer to interact with your product and company, and what their values and motivations are.
That might sound like a daunting task, and in the past, it probably was. Today, however, many of the tools we already use can provide us with the data we need to better understand and engage with our customers.
What is Customer Engagement Software?
Customer interaction software is any application or tool used to communicate with customers, track user behavior, or analyze customer interactions to optimize the customer journey.
Some common customer engagement tools include:
- Help Desk and Shared Inbox — Software used by customer-facing teams to manage and track customer requests.
- Social Media Management Software —Applications for creating, scheduling, and publishing content and responding to user comments across multiple social media platforms.
- In-App and Web Messaging Platform —Software for proactively connecting with customers at key points in the customer journey.
- Live Chat Products — Platforms for live chat with current and potential customers.
- Chatbot — Software capable of handling simple customer requests using artificial intelligence (AI) or predetermined conversational paths.
- Knowledge Base — An internal or external repository of published information that enables customers to find answers on their own.
- Feedback and Survey Apps — Software for delivering surveys, requesting customer feedback, and analyzing the results to inform changes.
- Email marketing software — applications that help teams create and manage email campaigns.
- A/B Testing Software — A platform that allows you to test multiple versions of a product or experience to determine what resonates most with users.
- Loyalty Platform — Software for creating and managing customer rewards programs.
- Reporting and Analytics Software — Platforms designed to track and analyze user data to inform product strategy.
Some might also think of a customer relationship management (CRM) system as a customer engagement solution. While some CRMs do have engagement features, not all CRMs do.
CRMs that include multiple engagement tools belong to another category of engagement software – customer engagement platforms.
How does the customer engagement platform work?
A customer engagement platform is software capable of managing many (or all) of the above functions within the same system. Some of the benefits of using a consolidated system are:
- Provide a more comprehensive view of customers. You get a complete view of your customers and where they are in their customer journey without switching between multiple applications.
- Save time and increase productivity. Teams can automate some of the less sensitive work required to interact with customers, allowing them to scale their work without requiring additional staff.
- Facilitate in-depth analysis with first-party data. Having native functionality means you don’t need to rely on integrations or manual reporting to analyze customer data.
What to Look for in a Customer Engagement Platform
If the idea of having all your engagement tools in one place appeals, here are some core features that should be part of any customer engagement platform.
1. Subdivision
The best way to strengthen customer relationships is to ensure your company is engaging with the right customers at the right time. Look for software that can segment your user database by customer demographics, behavior, or location in the customer journey.
This will allow you to personalize communications with customers, increasing the likelihood of engagement.
2. Communication tools
A customer engagement platform should have native tools to help you communicate with customers across all relevant channels. This includes email, live chat, social media, phone calls, knowledge bases, and if critical to your business strategy, artificial intelligence tools like chatbots.
In addition to these channels, which are often heavily used by support teams, you may also want to look for platforms that support proactive outreach, such as email campaign tools and in-app messaging services.
3. Issue Tracking
While customer engagement does not equal customer support, there is some overlap. If a customer responds to a marketing email with a product question, you want to make sure there’s an easy way to divert the request to your customer service team.
Customer engagement platforms often have a ticketing feature that allows your team to log customer issues and track them until resolution.
4. Feedback
A great product cannot be created in a vacuum, and neither can a great relationship with customers. A good engagement platform will have tools for soliciting, collecting, analyzing and responding to customer feedback.
5. Automation
The benefit of having all your customer engagement tools as part of a single platform is that it opens the door to creating sophisticated automation that allow you to better engage with customers at scale.
Some possible automation examples:
- Display a notification in the app announcing the release of a bug fix to all customers who report issues to the support team.
- Send surveys to users who use a specific product feature at least once a week.
- Send an email to all customers who read a specific blog post on your website and made a purchase within the past three months.
6. Reporting and Analysis
When it comes to product and business decisions, gut feeling is good, but data is best. Your customer engagement platform should be equipped with powerful reporting and analytics tools that provide insight into who your customers are, what they value, how they use your products, how they perceive your brand and how they communicate with your team.
Given that many people in your organization will likely need (or want) to see these insights, look for software that offers free licenses for “read-only” users or platforms that automatically report to stakeholders on demand or at a preset cadence send report
7. Integration
While it would be nice to have a customer engagement platform that can manage every aspect of the customer journey natively, it’s not always possible. When shopping for an engagement platform, look for a system that can easily integrate with other players in your company’s technology stack.
12 Key Customer Engagement Software Tools in 2023
Whether you’re looking for a specific tool or a complete platform, here are 12 customer engagement software options that will allow you to build better relationships with your customers.
- help scout
- drift
- optimization
- pivot point
- mixing panel
- walkie talkie
- kangaroo
- conversion kit
- Zen platform
- font form
- Pendo
- forum bee
