You Get the Customer Experience Idea, What’s Missing Is Customer Engagement

Without even trying every company produces a customer experience – good or bad – when they interact with their customers. But no business in today’s service-driven economy can afford to leave it at that. You have probably defined an ideal customer experience and have many solutions in place to help your company create it: an ERP system, CRM software, payment solutions, social media listening tools, an IVR, the list goes on. But that’s not enough either. What you’re missing is customer engagement – the piece that ties it all together.

Customer engagement is the manner in which a business interacts with a customer. It implies a level of involvement with the customer, a commitment to the customer/business relationship. This is conveyed through consistent and seamless interactions across every channel, be it your company’s website, IVR, in-store sales reps or social media.

Historically, customer engagesmart has been difficult to achieve. It can take months to integrate the various technologies supporting these channels – or disparate solutions would need to be replaced with those from a single provider. But that is no longer the case, thanks to the availability of the customer engagement platform.

By serving as the glue that holds together customer-supporting technologies, a customer engagement (CE) platform allows businesses to easily engage customers and create their ideal customer experience.

The data gathered from a multi-channel customer engagement platform can be used to build a relationship with the customer, bringing value to both the customer and the company. Here are just a few examples:

• • Seasonal purchases can be followed up with appropriate email or SMS offers; for example, the purchase of a lawnmower might be followed up with a coupon for fertilizer.

• • Offers presented on a company website can complement purchases made in the store.

• • In-store sales rep can read a negative review written by the customer, who is now exchanging the product in question, to offer a replacement that is more suitable to his/her needs.

• • A grocery store can send coupons for frequently purchased items to the customer via email or snail mail.

• • Discount offers or pricing updates can be sent to customers on items that they abandoned in their online shopping cart.

• Call center service reps can ask customers how they like a specific purchase.

A CE platform integrates technologies so that information can be leveraged across all of them, providing data to the systems that customers interact with across every channel. The best part: A CE platform can unify your existing technologies, regardless of vendor, to change how your systems interact with customers and provide a cohesive experience.