4 signs you need to invest in a customer engagement platform (and how to find one)

It’s not enough to only provide great customer service; you should be providing this across all your channels - from email to social media. And this is what a customer engagement platform provides. As well as implementing the right solution, you must ensure you’re doing it at the right time.

Here are some signs that indicate it’s time to look for a customer engagement platform…

When should you look for a customer engagement platform?

1. You’re struggling to provide a consistent, omnichannel customer engagement strategy

The companies with the most robust omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain 89% of their customers on average, compared to 33% of companies with the weakest strategies. Then, think of the fact that it costs five times more to attract a new customer than to retain an existing one.

Having a strong omnichannel strategy becomes even more vital, doesn’t it?

Your customers want to be able to reach out to your brand via different channels. So, if you can’t meet this demand, you’ll be impacting customer experience and loyalty. You could even be affecting your reach as you’re not present where your customers are…which then impacts revenue.

A customer engagement platform integrates with multiple business systems and centralises your customer data. This means a 360-degree view of your customers so you can:

• Interact with customers via their preferred channel (for example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 comes with Customer Service omnichannel capabilities)
• Provide a consistently excellent service and experience, no matter the channel
• Better anticipate your customers’ needs (for example, Dynamics 365 Customer Insights uses AI so you can make more informed decisions)

2. You’re struggling with disparate systems and fragmented information

68% of people in the UK expect customer service agents to know their contact, product and service information when they reach out to them. If their issue has to be passed across different departments, they don’t want to repeat their information multiple times. The next agent should pick up right from where the previous left it.

It’s frustrating if they have to repeat themselves several times and will impact customer satisfaction and experience. Unfortunately, this is often the case if you’re using multiple disparate systems, all of which are storing a portion of your key information.

A customer engagement platform includes a CRM system, which unifies your data from multiple systems. Now your customer service team can rely on one source of truth. This means:

• Faster, more efficient service delivery as your agents can quickly find the information they need to solve the case
• Cross-team collaboration - modern customer engagement platforms like the Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement Suite integrates with office tools such as Microsoft Teams. This makes it easier for your teams to share knowledge and resolve complex cases more quickly, regardless of location or job function
• More in-depth, up-to-date context so your agents can provide personalised interactions more easily.

3. Your customer service team isn’t as productive as they could be

If your customer service agents are spending a disproportionate amount of time searching for information, that means they’re being inhibited from providing excellent customer service. In that case, you could benefit from a customer engagement platform.

To start with, this platform would centralise your customer data (thanks to a CRM) so it’s easier to locate this information you need. You’ll also be able to benefit from:

• Automation that automatically assigns cases to the agent(s) best equipped to resolve them
• In-depth insights (e.g. from surveys and customer histories) that help you optimise agent performance and boost customer engagement
• Agent-facing bots that use contextual data on customers and your business to provide your team with smart recommendations. This can help your agents work more proactively and avoid case escalation too
• Cross-team collaboration which helps speed up case resolution time

4. You’re struggling to keep up with customer demands

Customer demands are always changing. Keeping up with them is a challenging task but if it’s becoming even harder than it used to, it could indicate you’re ready for a customer engagement platform.

This platform unifies your customer data, giving you a complete view of their behaviours and preferences. Thus, making it easier for you to keep up.

Modern customer engagement platforms will even feature AI-infused insights that allow you to take a proactive approach and provide a better customer experience. For example, Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service comes with an Insights feature that allows you to:

• Improve customer satisfaction, thanks to customer satisfaction scores (CSAT) which highlight emerging issues. If you can resolve these issues before they impact your wider customer base, you can boost your overall satisfaction and encourage loyalty
• Streamline operations, thanks to case resolution insights, backlog trends and historical comparisons. You can use this insight to review agent performance and business impact, and work to boost productivity
• Gain complete visibility - view all of the above in customisable dashboards and easily analyse and share reports. This makes it easier to make more informed, high-level business decisions

So, how do you find the right customer engagement platform?

As you might be able to tell by this point, the key feature of a customer engagement platform is its ability to centralise data. And that directly impacts your customer service and experience. After all, companies who offered the best customer experiences are nine times more likely to consolidate data from multiple sources.

However, there are so many platforms out there, it can be tricky to filter the right options from the wrong ones. And then how do you decide on just one?

The traditional CRM system has now evolved into a modern customer engagement platform (sometimes labelled as a ‘suite’ of apps), complete with information-gathering and storage capabilities, sales and marketing automation, and customer engagement. Our guide will help you find the ideal CRM system, one that boosts your customer engagement, satisfaction, experience and sales.

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