Customer Engagement Platforms: A Complete Guide
Table of contents
How do you turn one-time customers into loyal advocates of your brand? There’s no magic recipe for this, but one thing I’ve seen many businesses do is invest in customer engagement.
What does that mean? Invest in engaging the customer across their journey with your brand. Communicate with them proactively, address their concerns or queries, and follow-up whenever required. It’s about ensuring their pain points are promptly addressed and their expectations are consistently met, if not exceeded.
But in order to do this at scale for your customer base, a manual approach won’t work. That’s where you need a customer engagement platform.
These are tools made to assist companies in meaningfully connecting with their customers. Businesses that use these platforms have an edge over others in communicating with customers and resolving their issues effectively.
In this article, we’ll delve further into:
- What is a customer engagement platform
- Features of customer engagement software
- 7 best customer engagement tools for businesses
- Benefits of customer engagement platforms
Table of Contents
- What is a customer engagement platform
- 7 best customer engagement tools
- Key features of a customer engagement platform
- How is a customer relationship management (CRM) system different from a customer engagement platform
- Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
- 1. Can a customer engagement platform help small businesses?
- 2. What aspects should I consider when choosing this platform?
- 3. What is the role of AI and machine learning in these platforms?
- 4. Are there any privacy concerns associated with the platform?
- 5. How do you measure the success of this platform?
- Conclusion
What is a customer engagement platform
A customer engagement platform (CEP) is an integrated suite of tools created to manage, optimize, and improve all interactions between a business and its customers across multiple touchpoints and channels.
Let’s say there’s an online retail store called “E-Shop Universe.” Customers communicate with this retailer via live chat, email, social media, mobile app, and website. Without a CEP (customer engagement platform),these interactions might be disconnected, resulting in inconsistent responses.
By using a customer engagement tool, “E-Shop Universe” can unify all these interactions from different channels. This makes communication smoother and ensures your company’s support team can respond to customers quickly and consistently.
Interestingly, customers who successfully engage with businesses tend to exhibit a 23% higher share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth than regular customers.
7 best customer engagement tools
Here are the 7 best customer engagement platforms for businesses:
| Tool | Key Features | Starting Price |
|---|---|---|
| Hiver | – Shared Inbox – Email Delegation – Email Notes – Analytics and Reporting – Automation | $19/month per user |
| Help Scout | – Knowledge Base – Customer Management – Messaging – Reporting | $22/month per user |
| Zendesk | – Ticketing System – Live Chat – Analytics – AI and Automation | $69/month per user |
| Salesforce Customer 360 | – Customer Data Platform – AI-Powered Insights – Marketing Automation – Sales and Service Integration | $25/month per user |
| Intercom | – Live Chat – Bots and Automation – Customer Data Platform – Messaging | $39/month per user |
| Drift | – Conversational Marketing – Chatbots – Account-Based Marketing – Live Chat | $2,500/month |
| Hubspot CRM Suite | – Contact Management – Email Marketing – Sales Automation – Analytics | $45/month per user |
1. Hiver
Hiver is designed to transform Gmail into a central communication hub where businesses can effectively engage with their customers. With Hiver, your company can interact with its customers across multiple channels – email, chat, phone, knowledge base, and Whatsapp – right from their Gmail inbox.
The biggest advantage with Hiver is that it’s super easy to set up and get started with. The platform also offers white-glove onboarding for all users, at no additional cost.
Key Features:
- Email Management: Hiver turns emails into actionable tasks which can be assigned to dedicated team members. This way, every email query or request gets an owner. It ensures accountability for every email and offers visibility into task ownership.
- Collaborative Tools: Hiver enhances teamwork by allowing internal teams to leave notes on messages and discuss responses internally. This reduces the back-and-forth communication and ensures that customers get swift responses.
- Smart Routing: Based on preset rules, Hiver can automatically distribute incoming customer messages to the right team or individual. This ensures that each message is handled by the most suitable person, leading to faster and more accurate responses.
- Performance Insights: Hiver provides detailed reports that give an overview of team performance, average response time, and customer satisfaction levels. This data helps businesses identify things they’re doing well and areas that need improvement.
- Quick Responses with Templates: For frequently asked questions, teams can use pre-written templates in Hiver. This speeds up response time and maintains a consistent tone in replies.
- Knowledge Base: Hiver also helps companies build a knowledge base. This empowers your customers to self-serve and easily find the answers to their queries.
2. Help Scout
Help Scout is primarily a customer support platform, but it’s designed with a personal touch.
Instead of emphasizing on ticket numbers and automated replies, it focuses on fostering genuine conversations between businesses and their customers. It organizes customer questions, concerns, and feedback under one roof, making it easier for customer support teams to provide timely and relevant responses.
Key Features:
- Docs Knowledge Base: Empower your customers with self-service options, allowing them to find answers instantly.
- Beacon: An on-site tool that combines chat, search, and knowledge base to assist customers in real time.
- Reports: Detailed insights into team performance, conversation volumes, and customer satisfaction to continually refine engagement strategies.
Pricing:
Help Scout offers three pricing plans. They start at $22 per user per month and go up to $65 per user per month for the Pro plan.
3. Zendesk
Zendesk is a comprehensive customer service solution. It brings together different modes of communication, such as email, chat, and phone, into one unified platform.
This means no matter how a customer chooses to reach out to your company, the conversation is captured in one place, helping your support team manage and resolve issues more coherently.
Key Features:
- Omnichannel Support: A unified interface that pulls in communications from email, live chat, phone, and social media, ensuring consistent and seamless interactions.
- Answer Bot: Leverage AI to provide instant answers from your company’s knowledge base, scaling support and empowering customers.
- Sunshine: A customizable CRM platform within Zendesk that offers businesses a 360-degree view of their customers.
Pricing:
For small businesses, Zendesk might seem expensive. Plans start at $69 per agent per month and go up to $149 per agent.
4. Salesforce Customer 360
Salesforce Customer 360 is an extension of Salesforce’s vast toolset, dedicated to providing a complete, holistic view of customers.
It collects and organizes data about each customer’s interactions, purchases, preferences, and feedback, enabling businesses to better understand and cater to individual customer needs and preferences.
Key Features:
- Single Customer View: Collate data across various touchpoints, presenting a unified customer view.
- Personalized Journeys: Use AI to craft bespoke customer journeys, enhancing engagement and satisfaction.
- Integration and Scalability: Seamlessly integrate with other Salesforce tools and third-party applications, ensuring adaptability and growth.
Pricing:
The basic version costs $25 per user per month, billed annually. The advanced version, “Platform Plus,” is $100 per user per month, also billed annually. Additional “Add-on” features from Salesforce can raise the overall cost.
5. Intercom
Intercom is a customer engagement platform designed to facilitate seamless communication between businesses and their customers.It’s a tool that businesses add to their websites, allowing them to chat in real time with visitors. This can be for answering product questions, providing support, or even guiding a potential customer through a sale. Intercom also offers automation, so commonly asked questions can be addressed instantly.
Key Features:
- Customizable Chatbots: These bots can qualify leads, answer queries, and even book meetings 24/7.
- Targeted Messages: Send behavior-driven messages, engaging customers with the right content at the right time.
- Product Tours: Guide users on how to use your product with onboarding flows, enhancing user experience and product adoption.
Pricing:
Intercom’s pricing can be a bit complex, but it essentially offers four tiers. The “Start” plan is $39 per month per seat. The “Grow” plan is $99 per month for 5 seats. The “Accelerate” plan starts at $499 per month for 10 seats, and the “Scale” plan starts at $999 per month for 10 seats.
6. Drift
Drift is designed to enhance website interactions. It’s a chat tool that connects businesses directly with site visitors. The idea behind Drift is to remove barriers between potential customers and businesses.
By offering real-time chat, it provides instant answers and can guide visitors towards making a purchase or finding the information they need.
Key Features:
- Live Chat: Allows businesses to engage visitors while they’re active on the site.
- Email Playbooks: Automates email sequences based on behavioral triggers, maintaining engagement even when users are off-site.
- Account-Based Marketing: Recognizes high-value visitors and provides them with personalized experiences.
Pricing:
Drift offers three pricing options. The “Premium” plan starts at $2,500 per month. The “Advanced” and “Enterprise” plans are available upon request.
7. Hubspot CRM Suite
Hubspot’s CRM Suite is a collection of tools created to manage and improve business-customer relationships. It keeps track of all customer interactions, irrespective of the touchpoint and channel.
This information helps businesses understand what their customers are interested in, and how best to communicate with and serve them.
Key Features:
- Contact Management: Consolidate detailed records of customer and prospect contacts, tracking every interaction to fuel engagement strategies.
- Marketing Automation: Deploy automated, personalized campaigns based on user behavior.
- Conversations Inbox: Centralize emails, chats, and more, ensuring teams have full context during customer interactions.
Pricing:
HubSpot CRM Suite offers three pricing plans. Prices range from $45 to $7,710 per month, depending on the plan.
Key features of a customer engagement platform
Here are some of the key features of a customer engagement platform:
- Unified customer view: A single interface that centralizes customer interactions across multiple channels. Companies get a unified view of the customer – which includes past conversations, purchase patterns, and more.
- Real-time engagement: Real-time interaction features, including live chat and instant notifications, that help support teams swiftly respond to consumer enquiries.
- Automations: Interactive workflows that free up your team’s bandwidth and help them concentrate on more important tasks – by automating repetitive processes like follow-ups, replies, and collecting feedback.
- Sentiment analysis: Analyze sentiment from emails, chats, and social media postings using natural language processing. This helps your business gain a comprehensive understanding of customer satisfaction and brand perception.
- Reporting and analytics: Comprehensive insights on critical metrics, such as campaign performance, support metrics, ROI, and quality of customer interactions.
- Customer feedback and surveys: Through surveys, NPS ratings, and reviews, a customer engagement platform assists in gathering and analyzing consumer feedback. This feedback loop helps improve engagement methods, product quality, and overall services.
How is a customer relationship management (CRM) system different from a customer engagement platform
| Aspect | Customer Relationship Management System | Customer Engagement Platform |
| Focus | Managing a company’s interactions with current and potential customers. | Managing, streamlining, and enhancing all interactions between a business and its customers across the entire customer journey. |
| Functions | Automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support processes. | Covering awareness, consideration, purchase, retention, and advocacy. Providing tools for personalizing customer experiences. |
| Key features | – Centralizes customer and prospect information across sales, marketing, and support teams. – Maintains detailed records of interactions and tracks leads through the sales funnel. – Used for lead scoring, sales forecasting, and email marketing automation. | – Ensures consistent and integrated customer engagement across various channels (web, mobile, social media, in-person). – Personalizes customer experiences. – Offers omnichannel approach |
| Data emphasis | Collection of historical data, tracking past interactions, purchases, and communications to build a retrospective view of customers. | Leverages both historical and real-time data to predict future behavior and proactively engage with customers. |
| Users | Predominantly used by sales and marketing teams. | Used by various teams across the company to ensure consistent and personalized customer engagement. |
| Approach | Mostly reactive, relying on historical data. | Both reactive and proactive, using real-time data to predict and influence future customer behavior. |
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
Here are some frequently asked questions about customer engagement platforms for businesses.
1. Can a customer engagement platform help small businesses?
Yes, small businesses can significantly benefit from such platforms. They help in understanding customer needs better, improving the quality of support, and engaging customers more effectively, which can be crucial for growth and retention in the long run. Most importantly, these platforms offer a cost-effective solution for small businesses.
2. What aspects should I consider when choosing this platform?
Take into account these factors: your company size, the demands of your sector, the channels your customers communicate on, the simplicity of tool integration with your current systems, your budget, ease of use, and training time for your agents.
3. What is the role of AI and machine learning in these platforms?
These platforms rely heavily on AI and machine learning to provide intelligent automation, predictive analytics, chatbots for customer service, personalized customer experiences, and more effective data analysis for decision-making.
4. Are there any privacy concerns associated with the platform?
Yes, handling customer data always involves privacy concerns. Businesses must ensure that the platform complies with relevant data protection regulations like GDPR and maintain transparent data practices to protect customer privacy.
5. How do you measure the success of this platform?
Success can be measured through various metrics such as increased customer satisfaction scores, higher engagement rates, improved customer retention, growth in sales, and enhanced customer lifetime value.
Conclusion
When selecting a customer engagement platform, it’s essential to find the right balance between usability and a range of features.
Take the time to understand your business’s specific needs and choose a platform that aligns well with your current and future objectives.
Hiver is one such tool, especially for those who already use Gmail. Picking the right platform, like Hiver, can make a big difference in building strong relationships with customers.
Get started with Hiver today. Free for 7 days.
