In the modern day, the goal of customer service has transformed from cutting costs to providing a differentiated customer experience. Due to this shift, the software used to connect with customers has also transformed, transitioning from call center software into customer engagement platforms. Customer engagement platforms optimize the customer journey and cater to the experience of the customer rather than simply helping or providing service to the customer.
In this blog, we will cover the purpose of customer engagement platforms and the features customer engagement platforms should have to create a great customer experience at every step of the customer journey.
What Is a Customer Engagement Platform?
A customer engagement platform is a solution that allows you to engage with customers through various touch points in their customer journey with your company, producing higher customer satisfaction and building deeper customer relationships. Touch points in the customer journey can happen over traditional and digital channels, including voice calls, emails, social media, live chat, and website CTAs. The data from these touchpoints are stored in your CRM (Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, etc.) so that agents can easily view past interactions to make for a more seamless customer journey.
Customer engagement platforms ensure a positive customer experience with your business and allow you to give individual customers personalized attention. It also gives you the opportunity to take advantage of key moments in the customer’s journey, resulting in higher customer engagement and higher conversions of leads to opportunities.
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Key Features of Customer Engagement Platforms
Customer engagement platforms provide great opportunities for companies to connect with customers on a deeper level and boost customer engagement. To make the most out of your customer engagement solutions, ensure that these features are included:
Comprehensive Customer Data
Having full access to customer data is one of the most crucial aspects of having a successful customer engagement platform. An engagement platform needs to have the most relevant information in order to be fully effective. Relevant information can include customer profiles, previous interactions and behaviors, and customer interaction history. This information is crucial in determining where the client is in his or her journey with your business, and how close he or she is to becoming an opportunity or sale.
With comprehensive customer data and full CRM functionality, customer data can also be utilized to analyze customer behavior and identify areas of improvement when managing the customer’s journey. Customer data can give deep insights into the customer’s journey, allowing sales people and marketing teams to refine the customer journey, deliver the right message to customers, and find points of relevance to the customer’s needs.
Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence is an emerging, but under-utilized feature in the customer experience industry. Implementing AI into your customer engagement solution will streamline your contact center operations and workflow, and make constant interactions with thousands of customers manageable.
Artificial intelligence provides automation in customer interactions in a variety of ways. AI can act as a virtual assistant for agents during a customer interaction. AI can also assist by suggesting responses to clients’ questions based on natural language processing, machine learning, and speech/text analytics. AI powered conversational IVRs can further improve the customer experience by intelligently routing customers to the right department without the need for a live agent.
AI can also assist in analyzing customer data and interactions. These analytics and algorithms provide invaluable insight that is useful for companies of any size, whether you’re a large enterprise or small business. Through analytics, you can identify pain points, implement best practices effectively, and in turn, increase revenue and ROI from your customer experience operations. AI can be used to automate your quality assurance system, allowing you to monitor 100% of interactions in real time and intervene at the right time when an interaction becomes negative.
Custom, Personalized Scenario Building
A successful customer engagement platform is able to be tailored to custom situations or use cases in your industry. Tailoring your software to match any customer situation is one of the keys to providing a personalized customer experience, especially in large companies. To do this, ensure that your contact center software has dynamic APIs and a Unified Agent Desktop that allows you to program the software for any customized scenario.
The best customer engagement platforms should also adapt to the customer. This means being flexible enough to add new channels of communication and contact center technology. New products in the contact center industry are emerging constantly, and being able to cater to the customers on any emerging channels is crucial in customer engagement.
Bright Pattern Customer Engagement
Bright Pattern’s contact center software provides all of the features needed for a great customer engagement platform. As one of the only vendors to provide powerful omnichannel mixed with advanced AI, Bright Pattern’s contact center software ensures great customer experiences with every interaction and seamless contact center operations by removing silos between channels.
