Choosing agile engagement platforms to move the bottom line needle

Consistently exceptional customer engagement leads to excellent customer experiences. In fact, this is what sets successful businesses apart from not-so-successful ones. Apart from offering a good product/service, brands have to proactively ensure their customers have a great brand experience at every stage of their purchase journey.

To achieve this and to enhance customer engagement in real time, a comprehensive engagement platform is required. One that integrates easily with the brand's existing martech stack and also moves the customer satisfaction needle in the right direction.

In other words, these intelligent platforms should be advanced enough to analyze minute customer behavior, unify data, and modify engagement strategies accordingly to deliver exceptional results.

Key platform features that put brands in the driver’s seat are:

Ease of Integration and Deployment:

New-gen customer engagement platforms facilitate easy integration with all other tools and software that the brand uses, including automation software and social media monitoring tools. The platform should be able to unify all customer data seamlessly and integrate with other systems, like a CRM database and other third-party tools, without any technical hiccups.

Agility is critical here. A platform that is agile enough to integrate APIs with minimal tech intervention and ready to kickstart operations in a matter of days is going to be a brand's best friend in the long term.

Formidable Customer Support

An advanced engagement partner can handle and understand consumer brands' needs without hassle. From something as small as making tweaks in campaigns to adding a new feature based on the brand's needs to optimize engagement- with the right partner, everything is easy. As a result, selecting such a partner is an investment that brands need to make sooner rather than later, as the impact can be evident even after years.

A customer-friendly engagement platform empowers businesses to meet customers where they are and take their requests as and when they arise.

Efficient Campaign Execution:

The marketing campaigns required to target Jiomart customer A, who often shops for apparel, and Jiomart customer B, who tends to shop for furniture on the platform, are going to be very different. Their channel touchpoints will differ, and so will the content of communications and the frequency of those communications. Consequently, the campaign nuances for both customer cohorts are going to be different, too.

So, brands need to look into platforms that can juggle a great number of campaigns, whether their intent is to reactivate dormant users, reduce cart abandonment, or drive repeat purchases, simultaneously.

With a versatile and flexible customer engagement platform, brands can unify all customer data (offline and online), handle multiple campaigns at the same time and help teams anticipate their customers' needs to offer a highly satisfactory experience.

Seamless Handling of Data at Scale

Most retailers deal with gigantic amounts of customer data. Millions of customers log in and out of their websites, make purchases, add products to their wishlists, and more. Therefore, a platform that is able to handle such a volume and also scale with the conglomerate's scale of growth is a must-have for today's brands.

A Platform that Captures All This and More

While there are many options in the market to choose from, Customer Engagement Platforms (CEPs) incorporate all the above-mentioned capabilities efficiently. CEPs help marketers take the wheat from the chaff and make the best of the customer insights garnered.

If that wasn't proof enough of their superiority, they play well in tandem with other platforms like CDPs by helping marketers make sense of the customer insights provided by CDPs. They use these actionable data points to create customized campaigns, which, when distributed through relevant channels, enable CEPs to analyze how customers are responding to each such campaign.

The stark truth staring at brands everywhere is that customer relationships are getting more complex. If they want to positively impact their bottom line, they require smart platforms that come equipped with intelligent analytics and handle scale easily to drive highly satisfactory customer journeys.

Raviteja Dodda

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Raviteja Dodda is CEO and Co-founder at MoEngage.