What Can Customer Engagement Software Do for Your Business?

Customer engagement platforms (CEPs) are powerful tools that can help your business create strong relationships with your customers, allowing you to drive increased customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue.

The top customer engagement tools can offer all this functionality in a single platform. In this post, we’ll examine key features to look for, the benefits of adopting a customer engagement platform for your business, popular use cases, and top customer engagement software providers to consider.

Key Features of Customer Engagement Software

When considering customer engagement software providers, several key features are critical to ensuring you can create strong experiences across the entire customer lifecycle with diverse touchpoints.

Customer relationship management

Track all customer interactions, preferences, and purchase history in a single, easy-to-use dashboard. Customer engagement software should integrate with the tools and communication platforms you already use (including your CRM) to provide a single location to assess customer data and deliver more personalized experiences.

Marketing automation

Automate marketing campaigns and leverage first-party data based on customer interactions to reach the right clients at the right time and with the right message.

Marketing teams can streamline workflows and increase customer engagement with multiple communication options, such as SMS messages or push notifications. They may also work with contact centers to increase outreach with outbound calls.

Omnichannel functionality

Omnichannel customer engagement allows you to leverage multi-channel communication options for both your customers and your support team. Customers can reach out on platforms where they’re already active, and you can engage in kind — all while synching the interactions to a single dashboard and accessing past communication for more personalized experiences.

Customer communication channels may include SMS messaging, social media platforms, email, phone, video calls, live chat, and self-service knowledge base options.

Live chat and ticketing

Offer real-time support and address customer inquiries efficiently. Support reps can provide nearly instant customer service, and you can even use AI-powered chatbots to handle basic customer inquiries.

Ticketing solutions can help you track all customer service interactions, escalate concerns to the right department as needed, and ensure that a solution is found. This is an essential part of customer experience management.

Social media integration

Manage your social media presence and engage with customers on their preferred platforms. Popular examples of social media communication channels include Messenger, WhatsApp, and X (formerly known as Twitter).

Analytics and reporting

Gain insights into customer behavior and campaign performance with detailed analytic tools. Monitor key customer engagement and satisfaction metrics so you can find opportunities for optimization. Doing so consistently — especially when combined with the analysis of customer feedback — can help your business improve your customer experience.

Benefits of Customer Engagement Software for Your Business

Customer engagement platforms can help you implement new strategies, initiatives, and workflows that automatically improve customer engagement and satisfaction rates. Let’s discuss the key benefits CEPs can offer.

Enhanced customer relationships

Customer engagement platforms help you build deeper connections with your customers by providing timely communication and facilitating personalized experiences. Customers are more likely to have higher retention rates as your business becomes more valuable to them.

Improved customer satisfaction and loyalty

By addressing customer needs and concerns promptly, CEPs can boost customer satisfaction and reduce churn.

Loyal customers are more likely to make repeat purchases, and providing exceptional service is a reliable way to cultivate and retain customer loyalty.

Some companies even use customer engagement platforms to implement customer success strategies, ensuring that clients get the most out of their product or service through targeted campaigns, well-timed outreach, self-service knowledge resources, and responsive support.

Higher revenue

Loyal customers typically spend more — sometimes substantially so. A recent study found that returning customers spend 67% more than new customers, so consistently engaging customers and providing strong customer experiences is essential to long-term profitability and business growth.

A strong customer engagement solution can help you improve customer lifetime value for maximized revenue, especially when combined with a dedicated customer engagement strategy.

Use Cases for Customer Engagement Software

Customer engagement solutions may be used differently depending on the type of business using them. Let’s review common use cases by industry.

E-commerce

E-commerce brands often use customer engagement software to personalize product recommendations, create targeted promotions, and offer seamless customer support.

In some cases, their sales team may use live chat features to engage with customers while shopping, answering product questions and steering users toward the right products (and occasionally taking advantage of an upsell or cross-sell opportunity).

Healthcare

Healthcare organizations may use CEPs to enhance patient engagement, streamline appointment scheduling, and improve communication. They may, for example, send automatic procedure reminders through SMS messages or push notifications, which include instructions on what the patient should do before they show up for their appointment.

Financial services

Businesses in the financial services industry may use customer engagement software to provide personalized financial advice, streamline account management, and improve overall customer satisfaction. By better understanding an individual client’s concerns based on past interactions (and not just their portfolio), they can make strong recommendations that align with each client’s preferred risk level, budget, and long-term goals.

Hospitality

The hospitality industry strives to deliver exceptional guest experiences with CEP software. They want to manage bookings efficiently, track guest needs, and improve overall guest loyalty. And they want to deliver great experiences to new customers and returning visitors alike.

The hospitality industry might track past customer concerns and requests and check that they’re staying up to date with guest needs. They may use CEP tools to ensure that all customer requests make it to their booking software, whether the customer called, sent an email, or made the request on their original booking form.

“Customer service is one of our competitive advantages. We want to be able to be available to our customers every day of the week for any questions they may have. Overall, we are very, very happy we switched to Nextiva, and we’re not looking back.”

~Lindsay Fattor, General Manager, Rainbow Ryders

Top 5 Customer Engagement Platforms

There are plenty of options when it comes to customer engagement solutions, and finding the right one for your business is key. Let’s look at five of the most highly rated CEP options right now.

1. Nextiva

Nextiva is a unified communications platform that offers extensive customer engagement and experience management functionality. A well-rounded solution, it’s one of the best customer engagement software options on the market, with a 4.5-star G2 rating and over 3,200 reviews.

The platform includes the following features:

• Unified customer interaction. Nextiva centralizes all customer conversations, providing a seamless experience across different channels, reducing friction, and enhancing customer satisfaction.
• AI-powered solutions. The platform leverages AI to predict customer needs in real time, automate the next steps, and facilitate smooth transitions between bots and human agents, leading to faster and more personalized customer journeys.
• Proactive context awareness. Nextiva reduces customer frustration, enables quicker problem resolution, and helps agents serve and sell more effectively by providing agents with full context from previous interactions.
• Scalability and reliability. Nextiva’s platform is highly scalable and self-redundant, ensuring no planned downtime and limitless growth potential. This makes it suitable for businesses of all sizes, from small enterprises to large corporations.
• Advanced reporting and analytics. The platform gathers data based on customer sentiment and customer surveys to help you better understand how your engagement strategies are impacting CX.
• Transparent pricing. Nextiva offers multiple product plans with transparent pricing, making it easy for organizations to choose plans that work for them now and scale up later as needed.
• Exceptional customer support. Nextiva offers 24/7 support to all customers, with multiple support options including email, phone, and chat.

2. Intercom

Intercom is an AI-focused customer engagement platform that excels in offering real-time support. It has a 4.5 rating and over 3,000 reviews on G2.

Intercom’s standout features include:

• Diverse messaging options. Use live chat, messaging, and in-app notifications to maintain contact throughout the digital customer journey.
• Seamless customer experience. Offer real-time support and personalized communication within the platform’s mobile app for on-the-go communication.
• Ticketing solutions. Track complex customer concerns with Intercom’s intuitive ticketing solution, which includes back-office collaboration features and the option to track multiple customers in a single ticket to resolve recurring issues.

3. Zendesk

Zendesk is an outstanding ticketing, help desk, and customer service platform. It has a 4.3-star rating and over 5,800 reviews on G2.

Its best features include the following:

• Intuitive ticketing software. Zendesk’s ticketing software is exceptionally user-friendly, making it a strong platform for complex user issues like technical concerns.
• Robust platform. The platform can help you successfully manage customer inquiries and provide effective support through customer service representatives and help desk resources.
• Omnichannel support. Zendesk offers support for diverse communication channels, with the option to enable 24/7 support.
• AI suggestions. The platform leverages AI agents for frontline communication, reducing the total number of inquiries your human agents need to handle.

4. EngageBay

EngageBay offers multiple distinct products for marketing, sales, and service, with the option to purchase an “All-In-One Bay.” Its all-in-one suite has over 330 reviews and a 4.7-star rating on G2.

EngageBay’s notable features include:

• Comprehensive communication solution. EngageBay allows you to take advantage of marketing, sales, and support features all on one platform or purchase products individually as needed.
• Free live chat software. EngageBay offers free live chat software to all-in-one customers that includes standard features website widgets, interaction tracking, email transcripts, and chat shortcuts.
• 360 customer view. The platform’s CRM software helps you track customer interactions across all platforms, with features like automated lead scoring and customer behavior tracking included.
• Help desk reports. EngageBay allows you to track customer service KPIs to better understand what factors are influencing your overall customer experience.

5. ActiveCampaign

ActiveCampaign is a customer experience platform that has over 13,000 G2 reviews and a 4.5-star rating. The platform is best known for its extensive marketing automation features, and it’s best suited for businesses looking to improve the customer experience with targeted marketing outreach campaigns.

ActiveCampaign’s best features include:

• Advanced marketing automation. Leverage email marketing, marketing automation, CRM integrations, and exceptional A/B testing features across marketing touchpoints.
• Audience segmentation. Deliver personalized experiences through landing pages and email marketing thanks to complex audience segmentation.
• Lead forms. Capture customer intent data to better support them through their sales process with native forms, including form templates and A/B testing options.
• Omnichannel marketing. Connect with users across multiple platforms, including SMS, social media, social media ads, and email.

Engage Customers With Nextiva

Adopting a customer engagement platform can be beneficial for many businesses across diverse industries ranging from e-commerce to finance, especially if they have a high volume of customer support requests.

Unified customer communication platforms like Nextiva may be the ideal solution for most of these businesses. Nextiva provides exceptional ease of use for agents, AI-powered automation, insight-driven recommendations, and a seamless customer experience that can make exceptional CX easier than ever.

Learn more about Nextiva’s customer journey platform today. 👇