What are Customer Engagement Platforms The customer engagement space is relatively new and still emerging as a solidified market. Currently, it encompasses a few different types of software applications. Certain customer engagement platforms have grown out of functionally different types of software solutions. Below is a list of common ‘software ancestors’ for modern customer engagement platforms: Customer relationship management (CRM) systemsSales engagement platformsCross-channel campaign ...
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The customer engagement space is relatively new and still emerging as a solidified market. Currently, it encompasses a few different types of software applications. Certain customer engagement platforms have grown out of functionally different types of software solutions. Below is a list of common ‘software ancestors’ for modern customer engagement platforms:
Though not all customer engagement platforms look the same, the primary goal of customer engagement platforms is constant across different types of solutions: to help businesses create a seamless and integrated customer experience across digital channels and touchpoints. Essentially, these platforms allow businesses to interact with their customers or subscribers wherever they are—via channels like email, webchat, SMS, social media channels, etc.
Core capabilities of customer engagement platforms include the ability to orchestrate, personalize, and optimize customer journeys across channels. Therefore, customer engagement software by default supports multichannel or omnichannel customer interactions. Another core competency of this type of software is customer engagement analytics. Many market-leading customer engagement platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to run predictive customer engagement analytics and provide personalized content recommendations.
Most customer engagement platforms have a centralized database that tracks customer interactions with things like content assets, marketing campaigns, social media posts, etc.
Though the exact set of features can from product to product, most customer engagement platforms will have the following capabilities:
Support for omnichannel customer interactions across
Push notifications
SMS and messaging apps
Social media channels
Live chat
Webchat
Customer self-service
Customer contact & interaction database
Customer engagement analytics
Content personalization
Behavioral targeting capabilities
Audience segmentation capabilities
Customer journey mapping
Customer journey orchestration
Customer journey optimization
AI-based recommendations
Data ingestion from third-party sources
Before investing in a new customer engagement platform, consider the following key factors:
Price: How much have you budgeted for a customer engagement platform? Solutions designed for use by small and midsize businesses will be less expensive than enterprise-grade customer experience platforms. For example, large legacy cloud vendors like Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce provide products designed to meet the needs of enterprise teams.
Use case: Which departments and/or roles at your company will use the platform the most? Will customer service reps be the main end-users, or marketers, customer success, or sales reps? Certain platforms may work better for specific use cases. For example, Outreach started by offering a sales engagement platform and now also offers a customer engagement platform. Therefore Outreach may be easier for sales reps to use than another type of platform, like ServiceNow.
Pricing for customer engagement platforms can vary based on the type of software application, the number of users, and the range of features included. Most vendors charge on a monthly or annual basis, typically per user license.
Pricing can start as low as $15-$50 per month per user and increase up to multiple hundreds of dollars per month.
Customer engagement platforms allow businesses to create integrated and frictionless customer experiences across digital channels. Most platforms include the following core capabilities:
Use cases for these platforms can range from customer service teams, to sales and account managers, to marketing teams.
Many customer engagement platforms have grown out of customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM systems include foundational infrastructure for customer engagement platforms, including having a contact database that can track customer interactions across channels over time.
Customer engagement platforms are, in this sense, the next evolution of CRM platforms. They layer features like customer engagement analytics, AI-based recommendations and optimization, and personalization features on top of traditional CRM capabilities.
