5 key benefits of a customer engagement platform

5 key benefits of a customer engagement platform

As macroeconomic challenges and record inflation continue to rise, companies around the world are reconsidering how they manage customer relationships. Rather than focus on conversion metrics based solely on individual customer transactions and engagements, organizations are seeking new ways to scale long-lasting and profitable relationships with customers.

The most agile companies are sprinting to build a premier digital customer engagement presence—one that lowers customer acquisition costs while growing a customer’s lifetime spend with the brand, also known as customer lifetime value (CLV). In order to not just survive but thrive, companies must have customers who see their brand as trustworthy and indispensable. Otherwise, companies will face ever-decreasing customer loyalty.

Building durable, trusted relationships with customers is no longer just a matter of respecting their preferences when convenient. Customers today expect brands they love to anticipate their needs and proactively engage them when, where, and how they prefer. To stand out from the rest, companies need to deliver personalized, real-time conversational messaging with their customers across all channels, while turning every interaction that they have with customers into opportunities that drive brand advocacy.

But if companies rely on off-the-shelf solutions, they’re giving up true ownership of their data and the genuine understanding that it provides. Plus, they risk losing invaluable market share to those who rely on the powerful benefits of a modern customer engagement platform.

What is a customer engagement platform (CEP)?

A customer engagement platform is a modern platform that creates precise and personalized customer experiences—combining real time data with omnichannel reach—to increase customer lifetime value and build durable, trusted customer relationships. It brings a customer data platform (CDP) and robust communications platform as a service (CPaaS) together with intelligent orchestration of personalized interactions across channels.

With insights from zero-party and first-party data, businesses are able to build unified customer profiles, personalize customer communications, and build lasting customer loyalty. After all, zero-party data is data customers intentionally and proactively share with a business, while first-party data is customer information collected online or offline from sources the business owns.

What are the benefits of a customer engagement platform?

A modern customer engagement platform:

• Brings a customer data platform and robust communications platform as a service (CPaaS) together with precise, intelligent orchestration
• Easily scales and meets requirements for services, security, and compliance set by enterprise companies
• Delivers a holistic understanding of every individual customer and the tools to advise and mentor them on a journey that builds a durable relationship

Businesses can take advantage of the following key CEP benefits while growing customer lifetime value along the way.

1. Create a deeper, more trusted advisory relationship with customers

Traditional customer relationship management (CRM) solutions—some created decades ago—tend to see customer engagement through a transaction-focused lens. But in today’s modern world, the focal point must be the customer. After all, 91% of customers say they’ll stop doing business with a company after a frustrating customer experience. The reality for consumers is that nearly all of these frustrations occur when they feel brands lack the context, understanding, and appreciation for them as individuals.

The durable brands that are winning the hearts and loyalty of customers today move away from focusing purely on conversion metrics based solely on one-off customer transactions. One of the main benefits of a customer engagement platform is that brands can shift their customer engagement strategy to focus on growing customer loyalty by providing more of a trusted advisory relationship. When companies have the customer at the center of the relationship, know their preferences, and understand their needs—as well as other customers like them—they can effectively coach the customer along on their journey, creating a deeper, more trusted customer relationship.

2. Deliver unique customer experiences anywhere, anytime

It’s important for a brand to be able to see and understand every customer interaction across every channel in order to build a true customer profile. However, many CRM tools aren’t designed with that flexibility. Plus, they’re struggling to catch up with the explosion of digital channels—and the data that drives them—ultimately failing to deliver the unique experiences that customers want, expect, and need.

By utilizing CPaaS technology, businesses have a complete set of customer engagement channels at their disposal. And when CPaaS technology is integrated with a modern customer engagement platform turbocharged by a powerful customer data platform, customers can choose how businesses engage with them across various channels, including SMS, email, and WhatsApp.

This is one of the biggest benefits of a customer engagement platform. After all, over half of companies’ engagement with consumers is digital, and it’s expected to rise by 21% globally over the next three years.

When CPaaS technology is integrated with a modern customer engagement platform, customers can choose how businesses engage with them across various channels.

3. Provide unrivaled personalization and insights for customers

Personalization is the cornerstone of all good digital customer engagement. In fact, according to Twilio’s 2022 State of Customer Engagement Report:

• 88% of companies reported personalization as being extremely or very important to their customer engagement strategy.
• 98% of companies say that personalization increases customer engagement, and 83% of consumers agree.
• 75% of companies claim to provide good or excellent personalized services, yet less than half of customers agree.

Among the most important benefits of a customer engagement platform is that it gives companies the power to increase relevance at every touchpoint with unrivaled personalization and insight. It also allows companies to engage customers precisely however and wherever they prefer. By tracking customer data and customer interactions with digital channels on one platform, companies can create highly personalized journeys at scale.

Additionally, a customer engagement platform grants teams across an organization the same understanding of a customer by showcasing their customer data across channels. When a colleague in marketing has access to the same data and insights as a teammate in customer service or sales, they can communicate with the full picture in mind. This makes the customer feel truly understood because they’ll see their interactions with the brand as one unified experience, solidifying a strong, trusted, and engaging relationship with them.

4. Build stronger brand loyalty

With sweeping shifts in privacy and transparency, it’s important now more than ever for companies to be able to collect trusted first-party and zero-party data. Modern customer engagement platforms use Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) to securely gather zero-party and first-party customer data from different sources into one unified customer view and platform, no matter the scale or infrastructure. From there, a CDP will analyze and activate the data to help create a more personalized experience across communications channels for each customer.

Although 95% of companies believe consumers trust their ability to protect data, only 65% of consumers actually do trust these companies. One of the most significant benefits of a customer engagement platform is that companies can collect both zero-party and first-party data at every touchpoint to truly understand their customers, eliminate business silos, and become good data stewards.

5. Lower customer acquisition costs with better targeting

With targeted personalization enabled by a customer engagement platform, companies can also potentially reduce customer churn by knowing their customers’ interests and purchasing patterns. This can also help them create the right campaign to target customers with, ultimately decreasing customer acquisition costs while increasing lifetime value. Since an LTV:CAC ratio is often the equation that measures the strength of a digital business and indicates how durable they are, this is especially significant.

Companies that are investing in personalized customer engagement are seeing results. In fact, 60% of today’s consumers are likely to become repeat buyers after a personalized experience.

Take digital customer engagement to the next level

Customer loyalty can make or break a business. A modern customer engagement platform can help businesses stand out by placing their customer at the center and providing flexible, personalized, and trusted customer engagement solutions—while also being cost-effective and easy to use.