Customer engagement has become quite a buzzword for businesses. Sending messages to interact with customers is crucial for the success of any brand, irrespective of the industry. Customer engagement platforms serve as a medium that allows you to manage all your messaging from a centralized hub.

In the past, customer interaction software used to be pretty straightforward. They had mainly email and chat support for helping customers with problems. Now, the landscape has completely changed. You'll find everything from comprehensive multi-channel systems to specialized tools designed for particular departments or communication strategies.

There are various types of customer engagement platforms. For example, multi-channel platforms represent the most flexible options available. Think of them as central command centers where your different departments can all manage customer conversations across numerous channels from one location.

With so many options out there, picking the right platform can feel overwhelming and eat up a lot of time. That's exactly why, in this guide, I’ll walk through the top customer engagement platforms and what makes each one useful. But first, let's establish what these platforms actually do, how they operate, and why companies invest in them.

What are customer engagement platforms?

Customer engagement tools are systems built to help brands communicate with their customers more effectively. Their goal is straightforward, i.e., to make customer experiences better while keeping communication organized and efficient.

These systems let companies reach customers through whatever channel works best, such as WhatsApp, email, text messages, live chat, or push notifications. The idea is making sure every interaction matters, happens at the right time, and actually helps the customer. When done well, this creates personalized experiences that boost both sales and customer loyalty.

This centralization does more than just make work easier. When everyone operates from the same platform, they're all looking at the same customer information and the same needs. This shared understanding means customers get consistent messages no matter which department they're talking to or which stage they are in the sales pipeline.

Why should you use a customer engagement platform?

It is a fact that managing customer relationships is a challenge, in particular when your team is based in various departments or you have a large internal structure. That is what customer engagement platforms are for. See them as background players who work silently to track all those contact details like names, preferences, past interactions, which you don’t have to keep in your head.

Imagine you are at that point in the onboarding of a new customer, and after you’re finished with the information transfer, the platform sends out a greeting message via WhatsApp, which in turn makes the customer feel less like a name in the system and more like a part of the community. It is these little personal touches that really make people feel seen.

Also, you should stay on top of your customer engagement efforts, which include looking at key analytics and tracking customer behavior. As you choose a customer engagement tool, go for the one that comes with in-depth reporting dashboards that best fit your needs.

Another benefit of a customer engagement tool is that all of your channels are in one place, which means your team has to switch between apps a little less and also doesn’t lose track of what is going on in other conversations. You will spend less time checking into each separate inbox and more time actually engaging with your customers.

At the end of the day, what customers want is personalized interaction. The right engagement platform is what enables you to provide that every time, which results in you being ahead of the competition that hasn’t caught up yet. With that out of the way, let’s look at the top customer engagement tools.

Best customer engagement tools for streamlined interactions

Understanding what customer engagement is and knowing how it is advantageous for your business, now it’s time to explore some of the top customer engagement platforms that each come with their pros and cons to help you hit your engagement goals, starting with Zixflow.

Zixflow

In terms of customer relationship management, we at Zixflow bring to the table a set of very powerful AI-powered tools to help you improve your customer engagement campaigns.

What sets Zixflow apart is its AI-first platform, which, in turn, makes it simple for you to use the platform without putting in a great deal of manual work to run your customer engagement campaigns. Zixflow does not treat AI as an add-on feature; instead, we have put AI at the core of the platform.

For example, the AI framework constantly learns from your customer interactions to allow you to identify patterns and craft the strategies that best fit your business. Once you add in contact information, Zixflow’s AI segments these contacts based on matching characteristics and behaviors. The platform does an excellent job of putting all your customer communications in one organized space. Rather than using separate tools for email, SMS, WhatsApp, RCS, push notifications, and more, which can be a pain, with Zixflow, all of that is organized in the same place.

This centralized approach gives you the full picture of each customer’s relationship, which the AI puts together for you to leverage to get quick sales. Also, your team may start a conversation on one channel and easily pick it up on another based on what the customer prefers, while maintaining the full context of past interactions. Customer engagement automation is another aspect of customer engagement that Zixflow does best. We provide you with the required tools that allow you to put together complex workflows that run and respond to customer actions automatically.

For example, if a customer takes an action like downloading a resource, cart abandonment, or hitting a milestone in their journey with your brand, Zixflow can set in motion the right follow-up messages without any manual input.

Moreover, these are not a set of fixed responses at all. We have put in place a personalization layer that sees each automated message is tailored to the individual customer’s data, making each interaction relevant and not robotic.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an in-depth social media management platform for brands that aim to improve their digital presence across social media. This tool is mainly used by marketing teams and social media professionals to manage many social accounts at once, see how their audience is interacting with their posts, and analyze which of their content is performing best. Sprout Social provides in depth social media analytics which show you how your audience interacts with your content, thus giving you the insights you need to improve your approach. Also, its scheduling function allows you to automate the following:

• When posts go live
• Ensuring your content reaches people at the best possible times
• Designing a content calendar to track which content to create next

Sprout Social has a standout social listening feature, which reports on your brand mentions and also what is happening in your industry as events unfold to keep you informed of the conversations that matter to your business.

Drift (by Salesloft)

Drift has adopted a customer-first strategy to marketing, which gives you the tools to engage customers in real-time through interactive, two-way exchanges that lead to practical actions. The tool values timing or the conversations, which is why they let you engage with users at the point of interest to make capturing and lead nurturing that much easier. Through live chat and AI-powered bots, you may engage with your website visitors in real time to qualify leads, answer questions, and see conversions right from your site.

Additionally, the live chat, which is integrated with AI-powered bots that will qualify leads, answer most commonly asked questions, and in the process of that get them to convert all without ever leaving your site.

This conversational sales approach turns interest into action by weeding out the promising leads and passing them along to your sales team. You can also set up meetings as soon as you identify a lead and tailor the experience for each visitor based on what they are doing in real time on your site. Braze Braze is a customer engagement platform that lets you send targeted, relevant messages via a digital platform that customers prefer. It’s a good choice for companies that require reaching out to users using push notifications, in-app messages, and also to run cross-channel campaigns. Braze comes with an in-depth method to interact with users. For example, when sending outreach messages, you can tailor them based on their activities, thereby making mobile engagement timely as opposed to random.

Braze AI optimizes your campaigns automatically by taking into account what works and adjusting accordingly. You can test different variations of your messages across all your engagement channels to see what resonates best with your target audience.

Netcore

Netcore is a customer engagement platform that puts a lot of emphasis on connecting with customers via numerous channels, which include email, text messages, WhatsApp, push notifications, and in-app messaging. What makes Netcore stand out is its AI, which analyzes customer behavior to predict which customers might leave in the future and ways to improve your campaigns. Netcore’s analytics suite offers great depth for teams that want to get into the details of what is really going on. The sales funnel analysis allows you to see where people drop off, and RFM segmentation to identify your best customers.

The tool provides journey advice to give you insights into how people move around and revenue attribution, which measures the real business value of your retention and lifetime value initiatives.

Whatfix

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that you can put to use for user onboarding and employee engagement. It’s a platform that both brands and employees can get started with software easily and continue to use it to engage users over time effectively. Whatfix presents interactive walkthroughs that guide new users through the product as they get to know it. It also provides relevant information at a time when the user is most receptive. Plus, it is great for training remotely or work-from-home employees.

LivePerson

LivePerson serves businesses that are looking to transform how they have digital customer interactions with the help of AI that scales as your business grows without a trade-off in quality. What sets them apart is in the area of asynchronous messaging, which means that conversations do not drop when a person stops conversing for a while. As you look to improve agent workflow efficiency or to personalize across thousands of interactions, LivePerson we provide the infrastructure for better and faster support consistency.

The platform’s AI-based conversations, which are designed to handle complex customer questions, enable you to improve your customer engagement efforts over time via machine learning. With its intent detection to figure out what the customer is really trying to do, you identify patterns across interactions and automate appropriate responses with very advanced natural language understanding.

MoEngage

MoEngage is a customer engagement tool that is developed as a personalized solution for crafting customer journeys and engaging customers across multiple channels, depending on their preferences. The platform is built for marketing teams that are dedicated to better engagement and retention. At its core, MoEngage focuses on using real-time data to tailor interactions to how each customer really acts and what they prefer.

AI, which powers its identity management system, looks at present-time data to help you design precise customer journeys. Using this data, you can send personalized messages across channels to maintain high engagement. You also get the cross-channel marketing features, which engage customers at the key points in their journey.

Outreach

Outreach is a customer engagement solution for sales-oriented businesses that is designed for better control of customer touch points and measuring the performance of your internal reps. The platform also excels in sales automation, putting together outreach sequences and report generation for sales performance. Companies that are using external voice communication tools may also integrate with Outreach, which in turn allows sales reps to make a call to any prospect with a single click. Also, the real-time call transcriptions from these tools can be reviewed for monitoring on how various sales approaches performed and to improve your strategy.

Intercom

Integrated into the fabric of customer engagement and service solutions, Intercom also happens to have AI at its core. The platform’s chatbot features, which can be utilized very thoughtfully to drive that engagement. Intercom supports multiple languages along with numerous out-of-the-box features for effective customer engagement. For example, Intercom’s Fin AI, which is the intelligent assistant, can handle multi-language support, extending to the industry you operate in. Also, all chat interactions from various channels go into one unified inbox to keep things very organized.

Plus, the seamless transfer of conversations from the AI to the human, Fin AI, as it passes out routine work in favor of closing deals faster. As soon as the AI hits its resolution limits, the tickets go to human agents, who also at that point have full context of the issue.

Twilio

Twilio is a cloud-based communication platform that provides companies with services for their customer interaction via SMS, voice calls, and other messaging channels. Companies turn to Twilio when they are looking to get out timely updates, alerts, or personalized offers through the communication channels their customers prefer.

On top of that, the platform’s flexibility to send out very targeted messages at precisely the right time is another factor that is preferred by large corporations. Furthermore, the two-factor authentication is what Twilio uses mainly for secure customer interactions. It put in place verification methods, which include sending verification messages using SMS, voice calls, or within-app notifications that protect the user accounts and ensure that the customer experience is smooth.

Also for marketing, Twilio has what it takes in terms of sending targeted messages via its custom APIs, which in turn allows you to get in touch with customers with relevant offers to improve engagement rates.

Buffer

Buffer has a suite of tools for businesses handling content planning, publishing, and analysis on what may be called out to be more niche social media networks in addition to the large ones. As for user engagement, Buffer allows brands to track key social media actions, determine which conversations take precedence, and reply to issues as soon as they come up. The platform uses machine learning in combination with filtering to determine if a post is negative or if it is related to a purchase. Then your sales teams can follow up on these interactions and route them properly across your sales pipeline.

Vonage

Vonage is a leading cloud communication platform that specializes in unified communications for teams and businesses. The platform supports customer interactions via more than one channel across devices and platforms. Whether providing customer support or executing marketing campaigns, Vonage offers an uninterrupted, integrated experience that engages the customer. The voice and video communications APIs allow teams to integrate these features directly into their apps, facilitating one-to-one personalized customer interactions.

For messaging campaigns, Vonage offers SMS and other message types so that you can send targeted promotions, notifications, and updates to reach customers where they're most likely to view them.

Choosing the right customer engagement platform for your business

Perhaps it doesn't need to be said, but customer engagement platforms aren't created equal. The right tool does more than simply send messages. It'll enable you to interact with your customers (at scale).

Making sure everything connects

Discovering software that plays well with your CRM solutions, such as Zixflow, is more important than you can imagine. Likewise, linking up to whatever sales, marketing, and support tools your teams already use.

When systems communicate with one another in the right way, information no longer gets stuck in siloed pockets throughout your organization. This integration makes sure that all members of your team have the same view of every customer interaction, and everyone is working from the same knowledge.

Knowing what is working

Operating engagement initiatives in the absence of strong data is truly guesswork masquerading as strategy. Strong platforms reveal to you what is occurring in real time and how your campaigns are faring.

You'll be able to see directly who's active, who's slipping away, and which strategies are working. Having that insight allows you to make informed decisions promptly instead of taking weeks to know what's happened.

Heavy-hitting intelligence

Over seventy percent of customers now demand experiences influenced by their own unique requirements. With the AI abilities available today, delivering on that promise has become truly within reach rather than a dream.

Quality customer engagement platforms employ artificial intelligence to comprehend behavior patterns and cluster like-minded customers, to send out automated messages based on what actually matters to each individual.

This translates to product suggestions that feel appropriate and not robotic. For sales reps, intelligent algorithms can determine who among satisfied customers is best for reference calls or testimonials and pair reps with the right folks at the right moment.

Meeting your customers where they are

Your customers aren't reading the same channel for your messages. The top tools acknowledge this fact by allowing you to respond across popular channels like email, live chat, text messages, social media channels, and even WhatsApp, all from one dashboard. This unified approach keeps your messaging consistent regardless of where conversations begin.

Elevate interactions by selecting a suitable customer engagement platform

Engaging with your customers takes work, and that's a fact. It encompasses every aspect of the customer journey, from their first exposure to your brand through the sales conversation and into customer support.

The platform types I’ve reviewed in this article are not just software purchases. They are meaningful investments towards building true loyalty and creating connections that matter to grow your business.

So, the question is which platform to go for? Ask yourself whether the current customer engagement tools you use actually set you up to provide the experience your customers deserve.

With the right platform, you gain more than organized communication channels and a centralized hub to manage incoming conversations effortlessly. Together, these capabilities form the basis of a customer experience that distinguishes you from others in your market.

That said, leveraging an AI-first customer engagement platform can let you automate most of your engagement activities. Zixflow, being that solution, gives you access to an AI infrastructure that understands your customers and assists you in making the right decisions.

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