Ten Questions to Consider When Selecting the Ideal Platform for Customer Engagement

Overview

In essence, customer engagement serves as a benchmark for evaluating how well a company interacts with consumers at different stages of their lives. Building a meaningful and valuable customer-brand relationship requires consumer interaction that goes beyond a simple transactional relationship. The standard story for consumer involvement has changed. It has changed from being a role driven by sales or support to anticipating, engaging, and establishing enduring connections with customers.

Read more Why Choose BetterCommerce for perfect customer engagement platform and if you have any questions related to this topic, connect with us.

When used effectively, a customer interaction platform may increase user awareness, generate inbound growth, and occupy user mindshare. How can you choose an engagement platform that meets all of your company needs when there are so many options? These are ten crucial things to ask before selecting a platform for client involvement.

Throughout the customer journey, a customer engagement platform centralizes, evaluates, records, and optimizes each encounter across several touchpoints. It enables your brand to provide the consumer with a unique and enjoyable experience. An engagement platform takes care of everything, including data analysis, campaign personalization and testing, behavior pattern analysis, and ensuring optimal engagement. By increasing efficiency in acquisition, retention, upselling, and cross-selling, this facilitates the simplification of account-based revenue teams.

How might platforms for client involvement aid in your growth efforts?

Increased revenue: The engagement platform assists you in putting data-driven procedures into place for different teams that interact with customers. Your teams may now measure activities that increase revenue and comprehend interactions. Every activity may be linked to income through the use of data science, machine learning, multivariate testing, and conversation analysis. This aids in determining what works so that teams may concentrate exclusively on initiatives that have the greatest financial impact.

Smooth consumer experience: 93% of consumers are inclined to repurchase from companies that provide exceptional customer service and experience. Delivering value and communicating with consumers regularly across the channels they use most frequently is the goal. Teams may concentrate on different user groups by using a smart engagement platform, which automates manual labor, optimizes productivity, and offers behavioral insights. Your staff are able to find holes, fill them, and make the experience enjoyable.

Increased loyalty: Consistent and pertinent communication with your consumers is made possible and guaranteed by the customer engagement platform. The secret to creating a community of fervent brand fans is to go above and beyond your offering and provide genuine value. These pleased clients will recommend your goods or services and serve as brand ambassadors, helping to grow your company.

Decreased churn: A customer engagement platform helps people understand the value you provide by establishing regular and pertinent communication. Consequently, this raises the likelihood of a subscription. Maintaining regular communication will improve brand recognition and user connection.

Revenue from engaged clients is a major factor for a brand. Actively interacting and nurturing consumers is the best retention strategy. An engagement platform’s comprehensive mapping of the user experience pinpoints problems and causes of dropoffs. This enhances retention and reduces churn.

Short buy cycles: Sales cycles may be shortened with a well-thought-out and implemented strategy that makes use of a customer interaction platform. Campaigns that anticipate and meet the requirements of consumers while educating and informing them can help achieve this. Various groups can receive different targeted messages that emphasize the value according to their trip. Such regular interaction keeps your brand in the forefront of the prospect’s mind and influences their choice to buy. You may gain a deeper understanding of user behavior and preferences through data analysis. After that, you may better target up-sell and cross-sell possibilities and customize suggestions. This method raises the average LTV/order size and aids in making extremely relevant recommendations.

Ten things to consider when selecting a platform for customer involvement

When selecting an intelligent consumer interaction platform, you may use the following list of ten questions:

1. How well does the platform integrate data?

Make sure the engagement platform you choose can easily integrate, augment, and arrange data from offline sources.

2. How well does the platform support your business use cases?

Clearly define and identify your company use cases before you begin the engagement platform selection process. After you’ve outlined every use case, assess the platform’s capacity to satisfy your needs.

3. What about the service provider’s deployment schedule?

Before deciding, you must test the capacity to create a rapid and seamless release. Verify deployment history and establish precise deadlines, especially for high-priority and valuable use cases.

4. What features does the customer interaction platform offer in terms of data security?

In addition to following procedures and standards like SSO and 2FA, an intelligent platform should put security and data privacy first. Verify that the service complies with regulations like SOC 2, CCPA, and GDPR.

5. How much orchestration of the user journey does the platform offer?

Smooth user journey orchestration is one of the most crucial features that any intelligent platform for client engagement should have. Consider carefully whether you can automate customer journeys to provide a consistent experience across several touchpoints and devices before making a choice.

6. To what extent can the platform provide bespoke reports?

Any platform you select should have the flexibility to use the integrated analytics feature to create bespoke reports as needed.

7. How much and what kind of customer service is offered?

Examine the vendor’s support offerings both during and after activation. Additionally, look for customer success manager allocation and account management.

8. How does the ecology of partnerships look?

Examine the types of partnership integrations that the platform offers. Platforms having relationships across top marketing solutions, ad networks, analytics, attribution tools, and customer data platforms are preferred.

9. How simple is it to combine the platform with the martech stack you already have?

The majority of engagement platforms ought to work nicely with the other martech stack technologies. However, consider this factor while selecting a platform for consumer involvement. Any integration that isn’t flawless can lead to serious issues.

10. What about the service provider’s training regimen?

Make sure the vendor offers training services to your internal teams when you invest in an intelligent engagement platform. When problems occur, this lets your team troubleshoot on its own.