In today’s highly saturated, digital first landscape, customer expectations are rapidly evolving. Tech-savvy consumers want their relationship with companies to be more meaningful, with direct access to human resources and support when and where they need them. Smart businesses have recognized this trend and are modernizing their engagement strategies to feature technologies that connect staff and customers. As a result, they are seeing a significant increase in sales, customer satisfaction ratings, and retention.
This article will help you to better understand how a customer engagement software platform can help your company to improve its strategy and provide you with guidelines to help you choose the right solution for your company.
What software tools should you onboard as part of your customer engagement strategy?
The best customer engagement technologies satisfy a wide range of business use cases. These applications automate the sales, support, and service appointment scheduling processes to help companies grow their sales pipelines, increase their marketing outreach and improve customer support response times. They tackle essential administration tasks such as lead/contact creation, CRM data integration, and analytics reporting. Most importantly, they integrate with existing technologies to create a seamless customer experience while improving operational efficiencies.
Let’s take a look at the 10 most important elements of a successful customer engagement platform.
Robust Automation
Independent studies have found that companies that have integrated customer engagement tools to their website and social media pages have increased their monthly customer interactions by over 70%. When polled, these customers stated that they are far more likely to interact with a company online vs traditional outbound marketing, telemarketing, or ad campaigns. They want the ability to visit a company’s website and to choose engagement options such as a quick virtual call with a customer service agent, schedule a one-on-one appointment with a sales consultant, or to attend a live product event. Applications such as SUMO Scheduler, a leading Salesforce native customer engagement platform, make it easy for companies to integrate these capabilities into their existing digital marketing platform.
Seamless Integration
An effective engagement platform offers simple, out-of-the-box integration with your existing customer relationship management system (CRM) to keep previously stored information untouched and secure. If you use Salesforce as your main CRM, choose a native Salesforce platform like SUMO Scheduler to seamlessly connect to your database via an API and ensure a smooth transition.
Single Panel View
The capability to recognize customer information across multiple communication channels and bring it together is an important element of a successful customer engagement platform. SUMO’s omnichannel approach brings data points and customer information gathered during the appointment and event scheduling processes directly into Salesforce without the need for a connector or integration. This powerful feature enables teams to make intelligent, data-driven decisions fast and takes the guesswork out of your engagement strategy.
All-in-One Calendar
In addition to leveraging Salesforce as a single source of truth, it’s important to see how your team interacts with your customers, and how often meetings get attended, rescheduled, or canceled. SUMO offers a powerful Multi Calendar that integrates with your Salesforce and organizes disparate team calendars into a single master calendar. With features like location selector, color coding, drag&drop rescheduling, no-show warning indicator, proximity search, and automated reminders, you can rest assured that your team has all it needs to effectively connect with your customers.
Ability to Self-Schedule in a 24-Hour Format
The ability to self-schedule is another useful perk that comes with automation. Look for a platform that lets your customers schedule calls with your team on their own time, from any device, and in any location. SUMO does it all for you. As today’s consumers choose companies that make interactions simple, the ability to book a meeting outside of normal business hours can drastically improve the number of customer interactions and allows your teams to become more effective in closing deals and engaging with clients.
Simple Integration with Online Conferencing Tools
In today’s world of anytime connectivity, it’s no surprise that video conferencing became an integral part of everyday business. According to SISCO, video will comprise 82% of all IP traffic by the end of 2022. Additionally, inadequate work conferencing practices can result in up to $34 billion in losses annually due to low productivity and lost time. Since video conferencing is not going anywhere in the near future, it’s important to ensure that a customer engagement platform you choose can integrate with multiple conferencing tools. SUMO’s recent release offers powerful integrations with Zoom and Microsoft Teams, so you can access all of your scheduled meetings right from your conferencing platform and connect with call participants faster.
User-Friendly Experience
How you make your customers feel determines the success of your engagement with them. A meaningful user experience where everyone enjoys interacting with your company keeps your following loyal and retention strong. A smooth user experience defines customer journeys that are conducive to your engagement strategy. With adjustable templates that match your brand’s look and feel, SUMO offers full customization and provides highly configurable admin tools to match your brand’s voice and appearance.
Ability to Scale
Depending on your business requirements, you want to be able to modify your customer service strategy by selecting only the tools and features you need so you can later scale them up or down depending on your company’s goals. This is important in order to retain the quality of your customer service during expansion without sacrificing operational efficiency. With SUMO’s customizable offerings, you can select necessary features and products and change them at a later time as your company grows.
Powerful Analytics Tools
Teams that utilize insights from their customer interactions to make educated, data-driven decisions have an upper hand in today’s market. Customer analytics not only decreases service costs but also helps firms personalize messaging and build a robust engagement strategy. With half-a-dozen out-of-the-box dashboards available in SUMO’s Analytics and Reports Builder, you can track staff utilization rates, appointment volume, and other trends grouped by specific location, region, or group of regions. Most importantly, SUMO’s advanced analytics capabilities allow your teams to understand if current efforts make a difference in your overall engagement strategy and what needs to be done to improve them.
Enhanced Security
In a world where consumers demand everyday convenience and protection, security must become an essential part of any new integration. People expect seamless experiences across all channels without having to worry about their personal data being compromised. SUMO takes privacy and security seriously. Our platform is fully compliant with ISO, HIPAA, and GDPR and ensures responsible data collection and distribution. We utilize a multitenant environment that protects your data from cross-pollination while maintaining maximum performance. We routinely back up your data at the server level and constantly monitor and protect it. Our staff is immediately alerted if any potential issues are detected, which allows us to proactively resolve any vulnerabilities before they are exploited.
Conclusion
As your business continues to focus on improving customer service, investing in an engagement platform like SUMO can empower your teams to deliver better results in terms of customer satisfaction and operational efficiencies. In the end, a happy customer and a productive team are the main cornerstones of business stability and vitality. A successful customer engagement platform can ensure that your company can thrive in any economic condition.
Ready to explore how SUMO can help you boost your customer engagement? Click here to learn more or book a free consult with an expert!
