Why you need a Customer engagement platform

Customer engagement platforms have become more and more popular among companies over the past few years, but what are they and why should we need one to improve my company.

It is quite a name “Customer engagement platform”, but also what is it?

In this article, I’ll cover first what a customer engagement platform is, then how it can work for you and your website, app and brand.

So what is a CEP (Customer engagement platform)?

So simply put, it's a unified piece of software used to help the way you engage customers.

The name does give it justice and makes it more obvious, but a platform like this is quite special and has recently become something more important. Especially as more websites, brands, online stores are growing and as more visitors are flocking to rely more on online services.

This is mainly thanks to a number of factors:

• Tons of channels, companies need to do a lot in todays world to get noticed, on top of that being able to provide unified messaging is becoming more and more complicated. CEP’s can help centralize the experience and align towards a clear objective.
• A website is not enough, you cannot move fast enough to optimise traffic, with a solution like this you can dynamically tweak the experience in real time and see major improvements.
• Apps, websites, in-person and more, your customers exist across many mediums, including in real life, being able to provide them a unified experience is near to impossible without some way to centralize it. CEPs help by showing you a simple management experience where you can have full control.

On top of these points, now more than ever is the internet more accessible and just expected across many different types of people. Especially now that most people have some sort of smartphone where they can download and install an app, or where they can easily access a website and purchase something within 3 steps.

So following on from the question above

With having so many visitors using different channels to interact with your brand, having a way to centralize and manage all these channels has become quite complicated.

Some channels would include:

• Social media, having visitors engaging with your content on Instagram or TikTok
• Your website, managing the overall experience and how they find the ideal product to purchase and interact with your company.
• Your app, if you have one, to help ensure it's easy to use and customers can find what they need.
• SMS, direct to consumer messaging, is the messaging clear, does it drive customers to engage in the right way
• Email, less urgent than SMS, but a great way to keep customers up to date on the latest news and sales around your brand.
• Plus many other channels

On top of all of these channels, you need to ensure you provide a consistent and effective layer of communication to your customers.

But how do you do that?

Simple, with a customer engagement platform. This is a way to centralize the engagement around your brand and the ways your customer interacts with where you exist.

Platforms like this also help provide a seamless omnichannel experience, and can even be extended to work in-store.

How can I start using one of these platforms?

So normally this would depend on the scale of your brand. Solutions like this are typically designed for medium-sized companies, those that would have hundreds of consistent customers and users per month.

In the market today there are a good few solutions for companies who are of this size. So it depends. Typically the use cases would depend on the needs of your existing company.

If you are a small company, then your focus normally would be on getting initial growth and being noticed in social media until you reach profitability.

For a bigger company, it may involve using a social media scheduler tool and running interesting posts to grow online engagement and eventually start selling enough to make ends meet.

Once you are a medium-sized company, advertising and online promotion is still very important and something you need to keep doing, but it would lead to running sales and promotional events to drive more interest and perhaps urgency around your brand, like a “limited time only sale”. But you would start to have other issues in the company, maybe around order processing and scaling your fulfilment processes. Once resolved you would then start thinking about implementing a viral loop into your website/store, perhaps a referral program to pull in friends of existing customers, or to build more loyalty around your brand by having existing customers posting reviews of recently purchased products.

So you start thinking about how to drive promoters of your brand, so the promotion starts to be integrated with your overall company.

And this is where the customer engagement system may step in. So now instead of you looking for solutions to solve these specific problems. The platform would be able to provide them based on the metrics you wish to increase.

So a journey the platform could provide could be to have the customer post a review on social media a few days after receiving their package, based on this review you would in turn see the impact it would have and start to notice more visitors arriving at your store and in turn becoming customers themselves.

What is really nice about a platform like this is it combines a number of existing solutions into one unified solution.

Also check out our article on the best Shopify apps to help get you up and running.

The unified solution

So leading on from the previous chapter, it leads to explaining how your customer engagement platform combines multiple solutions and presents a single point of view.

In today's world, we have access to a number of solutions that solve specific needs we have, those needs would be:

• Analytics
• Customer database
• Email/newsletter provider
• Split testing frameworks
• Link tracking solutions
• Social media scheduling
• Excel 😅
• Plus many more depending on how you work

With each you would need to actively maintain them and use them for specific purposes.

If you wanted to learn what product is receiving the most traffic but not the most sales, you need something like Google analytics.

If you needed to contact a group of customers who are interested in a sale, you would need yet another tool to solve that problem.

And of course, Excel, i think every company i have worked with has used it in some way to represent work to do or to list relevant information.

There's a single solution

But this is what the customer engagement platform can start to do, it can start removing the need for these individual solutions.

With a CEP:

• You learn about how customers interact with your store and website
• You learn what product is selling and which ones are not
• You find out what type of customer likes what type of product
• And you then act on the analysis the tool provides, by changing the flow a visitor would typically experience
• You can target a segment of visitors and send them specific sales to see how they engage
• And you can interact with social media and drive more visitors to convert

The core idea is to no longer depend on multiple time-consuming solutions, instead, the unified solution provides a way to start learning who your customers are and engaging them to in turn convert them into long-lasting valuable customers.

So how does Embedery help?

Embedery is a unified customer engagement platform, with it you can build powerful ways to interact with your visitors and to eventually convert them into value customers. Embedery also can handle further engagement with existing customers to help drive more value and to provide an overall better experience for your customers.

We constantly providing more and more features and value to our customers, and we’d be very happy to talk with you on your specific needs. Please feel free to contact us at info@embedery.com.