Stronger relationships with the customer are imperative for all profitable businesses. Stronger than simple transactions, the relationships form loyal bonds that exist long after any transaction is concluded. With an increasingly digital setting in which they operate, companies require more astute means to retain customers.
Customer engagement platforms facilitate such. By making use of information and automation technology, every single interaction can become personalized and related.
Utilizing technology to customize every interaction makes customers feel valued. These platforms convert infrequent buyers into loyal advocates, driving satisfaction and confidence.
We will look at what top customer engagement platforms are, why companies require them.
What is a customer engagement platform?
A customer engagement platform is a unified software solution that enhances and streamlines a company’s interaction with its customers through multiple channels.
It enables companies to engage better with their customers, personalize their messages, collect and analyze customer information, and provide seamless, high-quality experiences throughout the customer lifecycle.
Criteria for comparing top customer engagement platforms
The key things to remember while selecting the optimum customer engagement platform for your requirement are these:
Features and functionality
Make sure that the platform is easily integrated with your current Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system so as to develop a unified customer view of interaction.
Ease of use
A simple interface and a platform’s minimalistic design guarantee that every team member can easily learn and operate the system with few training sessions and costs. The users are able to accomplish actions with relative convenience without requiring extensive technical expertise.
Scalability
The platform you work on must be able to support a growing number of customer interactions as your business expands without sacrificing performance. It must possess flexible features and customization that can grow with your business needs. This encompasses integrating with new users, other tools, and scaling functionalities up when needed.
Customer support
Seek platforms that offer 24/7 support across various channels like phone, email, and live chat. To get the most out of whatever platform you select, ensure that it comes with extensive training materials, including tutorials, webinars, and documentation.
Pricing
Check for transparent and openly stated pricing arrangements with no obscure charges. Learn what is actually included in the price plan options and how functionality or users affect the price. Then calculate the potential return on investment (ROI) by simply dividing the price by the anticipated benefits, which may include a higher level of customer satisfaction as well as added sales.
Customer reviews and ratings
Real-world experience from other users provides valuable data on the platform’s performance, reliability, and usability. Look for reviews at independent review websites and consider both positive and negative feedback.
Significance of Customer Engagement Platforms to Companies
Customer engagement platforms are the key to companies nowadays that need to establish deep customer relationships. They make tasks such as campaign management across multi-channels and understanding customer behavior easy.
They also make the process more efficient. Automation eliminates the drudge, so that teams have to worry about strategy and imagination. Data, in real time, enables firms to respond to customers’ requirements and optimize campaigns to better perform.
Using a customer engagement platform translates into increased retention, satisfaction, and revenue, and therefore is an unavoidable investment for each firm that values customer loyalty and business development.
Top 10 best customer engagement platforms
1. HubSpot
HubSpot is a prominent customer engagement platform that specializes in offering an end-to-end solution for marketing, sales, and customer service.
It is created to serve businesses of all sizes and integrates various tools to enable teams to work efficiently and enhance customer relationships.
The platform specializes in assisting businesses in delivering customized experiences through targeted campaigns.
It is a user-friendly system guarantees all customer information is readily available later for more meaningful interactions. HubSpot also enables businesses to automate mundane tasks, so teams can work on strategic objectives.
Being an all-inclusive solution, HubSpot offers strong tools to review performance and track success. This guarantees businesses can modify their strategies according to data and keep improving engagement
Features:
- Centralized management of customer data.
- Marketing automation to automate campaigns.
- Email marketing tools for personalized communication.
- Social media management to enhance online engagement.
- Analytics and reporting to monitor performance.
Pricing:
- Free: Core CRM software, email marketing, and live chat.
- Starter: $50/month per hub .
- Professional: Marketing Hub is $890/month, Sales Hub is $450/month, Service Hub is $450/month.
- Business: $3,200/month for Marketing Hub, $1,200/month for Sales Hub, $1,200/month for Service Hub.
2. Zendesk
Zendesk is one of the foremost customer engagement platforms that is mostly customer service and support-focused. It is known for its ease of ticketing and allows organizations to handle and close customer requests efficiently.
It brings together the communication of the customer through several channels, which include email, live chat, and social media. It facilitates organizations to extend quick, individualized, and effective support to customers.
Zendesk’s feature-rich analytics and reporting capabilities further enable companies to monitor performance, detect bottlenecks, and enhance customer care strategies, further making it most suitable for those companies that want to focus most on outstanding customer support.
Features:
- Ticket handling system for prompt query resolution.
- Multi-channel integration of support for seamless communication.
- AI-driven chatbots for automated 24×7 customer assistance.
- Customizable customer portals to facilitate self-help.
- Advanced reports and analytics to monitor performance.
Pricing:
- Basic: $19/agent/month
- Growing teams: $49/agent/month
- Advanced: $99/agent/month
- Integrated service: $49/agent/month
- Advanced suite: $79/agent/month
- Full-featured: $99/agent/month
- Complete: $150/agent/month
3. Klaviyo
Klaviyo is an automation marketing tool that is specifically designed for eCommerce businesses that prefer to personalize their communication. It is particularly well-suited for designing email and SMS campaigns based on the preference of the customer.
The platform integrates very smoothly with eCommerce platforms like Shopify and WooCommerce. This enables the business to leverage the data of customers to run very localized marketing.
Klaviyo’s emphasis on personalization and automation sets it at the very top of the eCommerce brands seeking to drive conversions, cultivate loyalty, and foster meaningful customer relationships.
Features:
- Brandable email templates to match your brand’s look.
- Auto SMS advertising to connect with customers in real time.
- Smooth integration with leading eCommerce platform.
- Sophisticated audience segmentation to send targeted campaigns.
- Real-time analytics dashboards to track campaign performance.
Pricing:
- Free plan: 250 contacts and 500 emails/month.
- Paid editions: $20 a month, price scaling by contacts and additional features.
- SMS fees: Additional charge based on volume of messages.
4. MoEngage
MoEngage is an artificial intelligence-powered customer engagement platform that takes companies closer to their customers and allows them to learn from them. It has been created to develop contextually relevant, multi-channel campaigns that engage and retain customers.
It enables companies to predict customer needs and create initiative-based campaigns. This results in enhanced satisfaction and loyalty.
The customer journey orchestration and campaign optimization features of MoEngage make it an ideal choice for companies that intend to deliver world-class customer experiences.
Features:
- AI-powered customer segmentation for proper targeting.
- Multi-channel engagement capabilities to maintain regular communication.
- Real-time campaign optimization to achieve complete potential.
- User journey orchestration software to follow customer paths.
- Predictive analytics for data-driven decision-making.
Pricing:
- Free Starter plan limited to 10,000 monthly tracked users (MTUs).
- Paid plans according to your MTUs.
5. UserGuiding
UserGuiding is an onboarding and engagement specialist that offers interactive guides and tutorial builder tools. Its primary mission is to provide a simple user experience, which means customers have no problem navigating products or services.
The system is ideal for businesses that prefer to engage clients from the time of their first interaction. Interactive onboarding streams and tooltips guide users through complex features, ensuring greater satisfaction as well as a reduced churn rate.
With its user-friendly interface, UserGuiding is simple to use by companies in the rollout of in-app guides and feedback collection. This is user-friendly while harvesting the greatest value from the platform.
Features:
- Interactive onboarding to create frictionless user experiences.
- Customizable tooltips to lead users.
- Feedback gathering to enhance product services.
- Analytics to track user interactions.
- Support for integration with popular software such as Slack and Zapier.
Pricing:
- Basic – is $89 monthly
- Professional – is $389 a month
- Corporate – begins at $689+ a month
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6. Twilio Engage
Twilio Engage is a robust customer engagement platform that is meant to bring together communications from various channels under one umbrella. The platform offers businesses the ability to build customized interactions through SMS, email, and voice.
Twilio Engage is scalable in nature and can be utilized by small startups as well as big businesses. Twilio Engage works towards delivering data-driven, real-time campaigns to engage the targeted audience.
Its APIs and workflow integration capabilities allow businesses to customize workflows so campaigns suit customer tastes and needs.
Features:
- Multichannel messaging via SMS, email, and voice.
- Tailored workflow APIs.
- Real-time insights for improved targeting.
- Flexible solutions for small or large businesses.
- CRM and marketing tool integrations.
Pricing:
- $15 a month and above
7. UserPilot
UserPilot is specifically geared towards SaaS companies that aim to streamline user engagement and onboarding. It offers the support of creating in-app messages, walkthroughs, and feature announcements.
UserPilot has the focus of achieving maximum user adoption by assisting companies guide customers through products. Its behavior-based targeting makes its messages and prompts timely and relevant.
UserPilot also includes analytics to monitor user behavior so that companies can make smart decisions about how to best improve their product experiences.
Features:
- Real-time interaction with in-app messaging.
- Interactive tours for facilitating onboarding.
- Behavioral targeting for context-driven prompts.
- Tracking of feature adoption to boost retention.
- Analytics for learning about user behavior.
Pricing:
- Starter: The Starter plan that is most basic starts at $249/month
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses bespoke pricing and includes all features from Starter + Growth with bespoke roles/permissions
8. Optimizely
Optimizely is a pioneer in experimentation and optimization, and it has tools to make customer experiences better through A/B testing and personalization. It helps businesses experiment with different strategies and discover what works best for their audience.
The platform is centered around bringing data-driven insights to businesses so that they can optimize their campaigns, content, and user experiences. Optimizely is ideal for companies that need to optimize their approach constantly for increased engagement.
It has integration capabilities so that companies can integrate Optimizely with other software, creating an integrated marketing environment that fuels growth.
Features:
- A/B testing for identifying high-performing approaches.
- Personalization capabilities for tailored experiences.
- Real-time analytics for immediate insights.
- Integration with marketing and analytics tools.
- Experimentation capabilities for continuous improvement.
Pricing:
- On request
9. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a customer engagement platform that is centered on analytics to enable companies to know what users do. It gives them in-depth knowledge of how customers engage with products or services, allowing them to make data-driven decisions.
The platform is useful for product teams that require user engagement to be enhanced. Its tracking of user journeys and discovering bottlenecks assists companies in building improved experiences.
Mixpanel’s real-time analytics allows businesses to respond immediately to what their customers want, and hence it is a great tool to drive engagement and retention.
Features:
- Real-time analysis for on-the-dot insights.
- Funnel analysis for drop-off identification.
- Cohort analysis for monitoring user patterns.
- Customizable dashboards for effortless reporting.
- Integration with platforms such as Slack and Salesforce.
Pricing:
- Beginning at $20 per month
10. Kangaroo
Kangaroo offers an extensive loyalty and rewards system designed to generate customer engagement, acquisition and retention via gamification. With its tiered pricing model, Kangaroo enables you to select a range of features that fit your needs from basic reward points and redemption to higher-level features like email and SMS marketing. The platform also has reporting features to enable you to view customer behavior and make your campaigns more effective.
Features:
- Integration with POS Systems
- Communication tools
- Loyalty rewards programs
- Customer support
- User-friendly interface
Pricing:
- Starts at $59 per license
Conclusion
Customer engagement platform have revolutionized the way businesses communicate with their consumers. They offer one-to-one, productive, and relevant communication across numerous channels, with the customers enjoying the sense of being valued and interacted with.
Apart from being practical for reaching consumers, these platforms also provide the insights required such that businesses can create loyalty and satisfaction.
Each of these platforms has distinct features that cater to different business requirements, from automation to multi-channel communications and insights. The right platform can significantly enhance customer experiences and drive long-term success.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement is the continuous dialogue between a brand and a customer, including all touchpoints and communications to build loyalty, satisfaction and emotional attachment.
2. How CRM and a customer engagement platform are different ?
What’s the distinction between a customer engagement platform and CRM? One deals with maintaining customers’ interactions and data, but a customer engagement platform exceeds it by bringing customers personalized interactions via multiple channels, building greater relations, and enhancing customer experience altogether.
3. Are there compliance requirements fulfilled in customer engagement platforms?
Yes, compliance is usually facilitated in customer interaction platforms by features such as data encryption, access controls and compliance with regulatory standards such as GDPR or CCPA.
