Customer Engagement Platforms

As more modern companies develop better systems of record keeping and data aggregation, many businesses are also seeing the value in updating their customer engagement platforms (CEPs) as well. The industry has seen such a shift toward improving solutions surrounding customer engagement that there are now customer engagement platform companies that specialize and focus on helping businesses engage with their customers across a variety of channels. 

Customer engagement platforms can provide businesses with innovative and technologically advanced solutions to help companies better understand their customer base, develop stronger customer relations, and ultimately provide customers with better service. Transformation doesn’t happen overnight, however. Developing newer and more reliable channels for communication with customers can take time, but the benefits are numerous and can have lasting effects. 

Customer engagement is such an important aspect of contemporary business practices because competition can be so fierce. When other companies, especially competitors, are investing in customer engagement, those same audiences are spending less time thinking about your organization and your solutions. By engaging with customers more effectively, companies can have a much easier time retaining loyal customers and customers can also provide immediate, invaluable feedback as well. 

There are innumerable ways to engage with customers but some initiatives are going to be more effective than others. It may take time to develop an omnichannel approach that fits your organization’s needs, but once your team has a variety of engagement techniques that work well, you can begin to nurture and grow your customer relations capabilities.

Some customer engagement platform examples could include a greater social media presence, utilizing a preferred customer program or loyalty program to provide added benefits, as well as curating and creating highly personalized content exclusively for a business’s customers. Customer engagement software can help your marketing team develop effective engagement strategies to allow your business to fulfill its growth and customer relations objectives.

Customer Engagement Strategy

We’ve touched on some of the basics of customer engagement strategies, but why is customer engagement important? Modern consumers tend to be busy individuals with frequently divided attention spans; companies from all different types of industries are vying for their customer’s attention, so it is imperative for contemporary businesses to develop some kind of engagement strategy to not only engage with customers on a personal level but to provide those customers with better, more reliable goods and/or services. 

When developing your organization’s approach to customer engagement strategy, it can be important to understand the various types of customer engagement and what each opportunity can provide your business. One popular and relatively new type of customer engagement is ‘gamification’ – or the process of integrating game mechanics with relevant content targeted toward customers. Since many popular video game franchises are massively multiplayer and generally offer some sort of progression system for leveling up and character development, many of these game attributes lend themselves to be used in gamification applications. And since human beings are a playful species, friendly competition amid gamification efforts can increase engagement while simultaneously stimulating the reward centers of your customers’ brains. 

Other customer engagement examples might look like a special rewards program, targeted social media campaigns, sweepstakes or contests, and additional personalization initiatives. Rewards programs have been valuable parts of a business’s customer engagement repertoire for decades; customers typically enjoy rewards programs, especially when they feel that the rewards are adequate and participation requires little effort on their end. Crucially, rewards programs can also funnel customers toward other channels of engagement.

Customer engagement marketing, when done right, can help companies understand their customers better. This, in turn, allows organizations to improve the goods and services they provide based on direct customer feedback. Additionally, when companies are able to drive their customers online to interact with the company’s digital media, that provides an invaluable stream of data which further enables the organization to make additional improvements. This data is invaluable to developing more effective engagement techniques for the future. 

Companies like Braze empower businesses to transform their customer experiences by personalizing interactions with real-time data. Braze’s solutions can slash acquisition expenses, and help your company develop a personalized relationship with each unique customer while improving overall lifetime value. Customer engagement platforms help marketing teams achieve their growth objectives by developing native customer data platforms and native omnichannel solutions. Braze can also allow businesses to direct their focus on establishing better customer lifetime value to enable more sustainable growth moving forward.

It’s also possible to integrate Braze with Twilio-Segment, a leading CDP, and use Braze Email for various marketing campaigns providing marketing teams with engagement solutions with scaling capabilities. Optimizing customer engagement initiatives can be an effective way to achieve growth objectives while improving general customer relations. Companies that take care of their customers are generally more likely to see those customers return and participate in future engagement initiatives. 

Suffice it to say there are as many customer engagement strategies as there are stars in the night sky and more strategies are being developed all the time. Some strategies are trendy; one business will provide a unique and alluring engagement strategy that captivates audiences’ attention for a brief moment and not long thereafter, dozens of imitators will mimic the original strategy with their own personal spin or flair. But viral marketing, especially as it relates to customer engagement, can be a fickle enterprise amid even the strongest circumstances. For businesses to achieve success and establish loyal customer bases in modern marketplaces, they need to be able to rely on software solutions that simplify the many complexities of effective customer engagement. 

Top Customer Engagement Platforms

The best customer engagement companies understand that expanding and improving organizations’ customer engagement initiatives is crucial for improving customer relations and can even help grow revenue streams. While it may take some time to observe the full benefits of developing a robust customer engagement strategy, the positives are numerous and can help sustain the longevity of your organization even amid times of economic uncertainty. Customer engagement platforms help reduce acquisition costs, improve customer relations, and can help improve brand perception and brand awareness as well. 

The best customer engagement platforms, in turn, help companies provide their customers with greater attention and quality services, but they can also provide companies with invaluable data insights about customer preferences. An effective customer engagement platform ought to improve life for the business and its customers alike in order to facilitate more business in the future. There are software solutions available presently on the market that can provide unique and effective customer engagement solutions. 

The primary difference between a customer engagement platform vs. CRM systems is that sales teams utilize CRM techniques to help with automation, whereas a CEP approach can allow businesses to provide more customization and personalization for customers. They each serve a unique purpose and some businesses may prefer one over the other or a hybrid amalgamation of the two. Customer engagement is one of the most important investment opportunities for modern businesses – quality customer engagement initiatives can help ensure that your customers think of your brand when they have a particular need. 

The Braze CEP is one of the top customer engagement platforms available on the market. And as one of the most reputable customer engagement software companies, Braze understands the importance of improving customer engagement and strengthening customer relations. Braze is trusted by thousands of organizations – like Peacock, Grubhub, Nascar, Hinge, and others - from around the globe to help provide highly personalized experiences for each of their customers. Not only are the engagements uniquely personalized, but they also help to form strong and lasting relationships with a reliable customer base. 

Braze has experience creating and improving the tools to help businesses reach their ideal audience. From all that time and experience, Braze has developed a toolkit that can assist virtually any aspect of the customer lifecycle. With features such as Content Cards, Liquid Tags, Webhooks, and SMS and an ecosystem of partners called Braze Alloys, Braze provides businesses with a wide array of flexible and capable customer engagement and data management/analytics solutions. 

And because all of its custom APIs and SDKs, alternative martech platforms are easily integrated into Braze. 

Modern companies understand that they need modern solutions in order to succeed and continue to have a chance to grow their customer base. By working closely with your sales and marketing teams in tandem with a customer engagement platform provider, you can potentially unlock new levels of customer engagement with your most loyal buyers. These same customers can also provide real-time and near-real-time feedback as you continue to collect and analyze data to further improve engagement initiatives. 

Companies like Braze offer more than a checklist and a hyperlink to a how-to article; some of their customer engagement platforms are utilized by brands and organizations with global recognition. Businesses that take time to invest in multiple different communications understand the importance of meeting customers in the middle – quality customer engagement platforms can provide solutions that have immediate as well as compounding beneficial effects.

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