Have trouble managing customer engagement? Want to know how you can improve and do better? Well, look no further!
In this read, we will cover all aspects of the Customer Engagement Platform, which will help you fully understand this unknown territory.
So without further ado, let’s dive into the unknown!
What is a customer engagement platform?
In short, a Customer Engagement Platform or CEP helps you manage and overlook every engagement of yours with your customer.
It records every single interaction with your customer over social media platforms, live chats, or any other ticketing systems that you might be using. These records will actively help you recognize the interest and needs of your customers.
To increase your sales, you can use this information to your advantage. You can give your customers exclusive offers according to their interests. Who doesn’t love a good offer?
Other than that, these things come in handy in various ways.
How customer engagement platforms improve the overall customer experience
Sometimes communicating with shop owners can be a hassle for customers. Just to reduce these hassles, customer engagement platforms come in.
No matter where your customers are trying to communicate, whether it’s Facebook, your website, or any other place, customer engagement tools make things easier for customers.
Needless to say, satisfied customers mean more business growth so measuring customer experience is essential for success.
The benefits don’t end here!
You might not even realize, but some features can really satisfy your customers even more.
For example, sending your customers recommendations, answering common FAQs, etc, all can be done with customer engagement software with ease. And all of these are done in the preferred medium of your customers.
Automation is the new name of the game. Customer engagement software does exactly that and helps you with both time management and improving your business growth.
A good customer engagement tool will not only help you scale up your business growth but also increase your website engagement. This takes your business up to a different level while also making your customers happy.
Some tools offer real-time customer engagement services such as live chats so your customer won’t have to wait an infinite amount of time for a response.
Some even offer video chats, and this can be really important in order to gain your customer’s trust. If you can conduct a video chat session with your customer, then they will truly feel special and not think they are talking to some random bot on live chat.
Talking about time management and growth, have you heard of the new trendy productive tools called RoundPie?
RoundPie is the productive timer tool that helps you track your workflow and helps you improve your time management skills. It not only tracks your time but also has fun while completing your tasks.
Features a customer engagement platform should have
Choosing the perfect customer engagement platform can be very challenging. Moreover, this choice can be decisive in winning your customers back that have abandoned carts on BigCommerce while they were shopping, for instance. There are a lot of features that you must have, and a lot of features can be not so important in the long run.
It usually creates a lot of confusion about which features are significant.
Just to clear those confusion, we organize the most important features that a customer engagement tool should have.
- Live Chat:
Most of the customers abandon their cart due to any unsolved issue that didn’t get resolved.
This is where live chat arrives, being the savior. With live chat, your customer won’t have to wait an infinite amount of time just for a simple response. In the case of a business driven by the customers, live chat software can really come in handy.
You will be able to easily communicate with your customer in real-time while making your customers satisfied.
According to the statistics, 63% of the customers would happily return to a website that offers a live chat. And that number is increasing rapidly as we speak.
- Chatbot:
As we have discussed customer satisfaction, providing 24/7 customer service over live chat can be pretty tough. But if you are unable to respond to the query of your customer, they will leave unsatisfied.
In order to tackle this issue, we have to bring in technological innovation called Chatbot.
With a good knowledge base, a chatbot can provide 24/7 service while reducing the ticket amount and will also make your customer pretty satisfied.
Needless to say, it will deliberately lower the pressure on your employees and save some valuable time.
- Knowledge Base:
A knowledge base software can be a potent tool if you can make it correctly.
The reasons you want to make a good knowledge base are numerous. But the main reason is its shareability, and a business should always keep improving and provide a better service.
With a customer engagement platform, you can easily track your customers’ movement on the knowledge base software. You can also track whether they found their answer or not while also keeping track of resources they shared.
- Third-Party Integration:
Third-Party integration is one of the crucial features that you should have. It will increase efficiency and keep you safe from possible data loss.
Imagine a customer contacted your customer service and had to explain everything twice just because they interacted with members of 2 different channels. This will lead to some possible confusion and, worst-case scenario, an unhappy customer.
With the help of third-party integrations, these problems might not occur, and you can run as many channels as you want in a single place.
- Social Media Channels:
Apart from marketing purposes and making people recognize your brand, social media can be helpful in case of communication and engagement.
Social media channels can actually provide a faster and reliable response that customers often crave. It can help you engage more potential customers and make them explore your brand. In fact, according to Hiver's study, 37% of respondents describe a customer service experience as good when their issues are resolved on time.
On the other hand, you can also make your followers feel special with occasional special deals and offers. Nobody rejects a reasonable offer!
At the end of the day, you must choose which features are really important to you and will help you in the long run. Otherwise, the customer engagement software will just become a useless luxury item.
Choosing a customer engagement platform: Our recommendation?
Till now, we have been talking about the important features and benefits of a customer engagement platform. Now it’s time to show you the path to perfect customer engagement software.
The software that we would recommend after immense research is ThriveDesk.
ThriveDesk is a simple, affordable customer engagement software for exemplary customer service. It is the best solution for you if you are a Bootstrap SAAS startup, have a WordPress theme or plugin business, and eCommerce business.
You can easily track conversations and improve responsiveness with easy-to-use, built-in functionalities like shared inbox, CRM, Live chat, Reporting, Knowledge base, and a lot more integration.
ThriveDesk primarily offers three different ways to connect with your customers and engage them, and according to the current trends, these are more than enough for any business.
- Shared Inbox - a common inbox for all your customer conversations
- Live Chat - for real-time support
- Community - to build a thriving, engaging community for your customers.
All around, you can consider ThriveDesk as a true Zendesk alternative so far.
Core features ThriveDesk offers
- Shared Inbox: Manage all conversations from one place; Therefore, you will not have to jump from one tab to another to keep track of all your emails and customer messages.
- Assistants and Live Chat: Convert the lead to a customer with real-time customer support.
- Reporting: The reporting tool will allow you to measure and track everything without any hassle.
- Community Forum: Create a thriving community wherever your audience is, all under your brand.
- WooCommerce: If your business is selling products through the WooCommerce website, ThriveDesk deep WordPress integration is the best way to handle all your customer tickets smoothly. Additionally, consider getting a good WooCommerce hosting to ensure great user experience.
- Knowledge Base: knowledge base will allow your customers to personalize everything themselves.
- Mobile App: The extensive mobile app will provide you with the same facilities as a desktop version.
- Email Signature Generator: ThriveDesk email signature generator is completely free and lets you create an email signature without using complicated apps.
The best possible integration you will get with ThriveDesk
Make your work life easier by integrating ThriveDesk with apps you love and find highly productive. Some of the top valuable apps you can incorporate are:
- WooCommerce: Real-time customer purchase date inside conversation.
- Easy Digital Downloads: Real-time customer purchase date inside conversation.
- Fluent CRM: Sync contact information and ticket details.
- Slack: Send internal team slack notification to a channel of your choice.
- Webhook: Real-time notification from ThriveDesk
- Envato: Validate and see Envato purchase data inside conversation.
- WordPress Post Sync: Share site post data of selected post types.
Pricing of ThriveDesk
- Basic: $25 per month up to 5 user
- Standard: $199 (On discount $99) per month unlimited user
Wrapping Up
Hopefully, after this read, your doubtful mind understands what to look for in customer engagement software. You can also consider our recommendation without any worries, as it is one of the best customer engagement tools out there.
It’s totally up to you where you want to spend your money. But it’s pretty important for the long run of your business to spend where you can make more profit than you are spending.
About the author:
Shifat Jaman is currently working as the content lead of ThemeXpert and has had prior experience in the content industry for almost three years. Regardless of writing web content, Shifat is very much good at sales page content and copywriting. You can connect with him on Linkedin.
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