What is a Customer Engagement Platform?
A customer engagement platform is an innovative — and crucial — tool that allows businesses to create streamlined, multi-channel interactions with their customers. This type of platform serves as a general hub for managing and optimizing customer relationships while enabling businesses to deliver personalized and consistent experiences.
Core Features of a Customer Engagement Platform
A comprehensive customer engagement platform offers several essential functionalities to enhance engagement efforts. Such a platform can:
- Engage with audiences on their terms: With a customer engagement platform, businesses can more easily engage with consumers through their preferred channels and tailor interactions to individual preferences and behaviors.
- Create personalized experiences: By leveraging data insights, a customer engagement platform allows businesses to craft customized experiences for each customer to improve satisfaction and loyalty.
- Deliver and coordinate across channels: Core channels include email, SMS and push notifications, as well as in-app messages and notifications on your website. The best customer Engagement platforms allow cross-channel coordination and preference management for these channels.
- Empower customer self-service: A customer engagement platform empowers customers to find solutions and information independently through intuitive interfaces and self-service options, which can improve efficiency and satisfaction.
- Integrate with existing software: A customer engagement platform should seamlessly integrate with a business’s existing software and systems, e.g. a Customer Data Platform (CDP). These integrations reduce connection disruptions and increase efficiency throughout a company.
- Enable easy setup: With user-friendly interfaces and intuitive setup processes, a customer engagement platform allows quick deployment and implementation, minimal downtime and accelerated time to value.
- Provide a complete customer view: By consolidating data from various sources, a customer engagement platform offers a comprehensive view of each customer, facilitating informed decision-making and targeted engagement strategies.
- Deliver detailed data analytics: Comprehensive analytical tools empower businesses with invaluable insights into their customers, including their preferences and behaviors. The ability to perform A/B tests and measure impact through control groups is essential for powering a culture of experimentation and enabling continued optimization.
- Promote easy adjustments: With flexible configuration options and real-time monitoring, a customer engagement platform allows businesses to quickly adapt and refine their approaches based on changing market conditions and customer feedback.
- Allow for automated communications: A customer engagement platform automates routine communications and workflows. This ensures timely and relevant customer interactions while freeing resources for more strategic initiatives.
The Benefits of Using a Customer Engagement Platform
Implementing a customer engagement platform can yield numerous benefits for businesses.
Enhanced Customer Experience
Businesses can create seamless, memorable customer experiences using data-driven insights and personalized communications, offering tailored recommendations and providing proactive support to build brand loyalty and consumer satisfaction.
Increased Customer Retention
Effective customer engagement is critical for building solid, long-lasting customer relationships. When businesses send out relevant and timely messages, they can keep customers engaged and interested, reducing churn and increasing retention rates over time.
Higher Conversion Rates
Delivering tailored messages to the right audience at the right time with highly targeted communication can significantly boost conversion rates. By customizing content according to the needs of specific audiences, businesses can effectively boost engagement and motivate users to take desired actions, like making a purchase or subscribing to a service.
Lower Customer Acquisition Costs and Boost Customer Lifetime Value
Investing in improving customer engagement can result in reduced customer acquisition expenses and increased customer lifetime value. By focusing on nurturing existing customers and fostering loyalty, businesses can increase repeat purchases and referrals, ultimately driving revenue growth and profitability.
How Airship’s Platform Stands Out
Airship’s Customer Engagement Platform offers several unique aspects and innovative capabilities that set it apart.
Airship features inside the app include:
- Push Notifications: Only Airship’s App Experience Platform can reliably deliver billions of push notifications in real-time from a centralized platform.
- In-App Messaging: Airship’s in-app messages are lightning-fast, and enable brands to display messages based on customer actions, attributes or behaviors from any system in your marketing stack. These can be used to show messages that relate to the content on a specific screen — like a request to opt into location services when a customer navigates to a list of store locations.
- Scenes: Airship Scenes lets you create Carousels and Stories in the platform itself and deploy them to customers in seconds, without needing development work or an app rollout every time. These are ideally applied during the mobile app user onboarding process.
- Embedded Content: The power of an in-app message, without any interruption for users. Seamlessly integrate content blocks into your app, then modify and personalize them without waiting for developer support.
- Surveys: Trigger surveys in real-time in direct response to customer behavior, gaining actionable customer feedback and zero-party data broken by audience segment.
- App Inbox: The Message Center allows you to create and populate an in-app inbox with personalized messages.
- Live Activities & Updates: Live Activities display real-time content from apps right to the lock screen, allowing brands to engage with customers in the most glanceable, effortless way possible.
- Preference Center: Design yours by channel or by topic. You can make updates to it in the Airship platform, without needing to touch code.
- And more.
Airship features outside the app include:
- App Store Optimization: Utilize state-of-the-art keyword optimization techniques and proprietary tools to pinpoint the ideal keywords to bolster your app’s discoverability and rankings.
- Email Flows: Create customer value across every stage of the customer lifecycle with enterprise-grade email for a mobile-first strategy.
- Web Notifications: Airship uses automated workflows, segmentation, A/B testing and incredible delivery speeds to help you use what you know about your customers — on any channel — to make your web notifications more useful and effective
- Mobile Wallet: With Airship, you can design, deliver and manage mobile wallet passes to create a convenient experience and foster customer loyalty. Airship lets you send wallet pass notifications to both Apple Wallet and Google Wallet passes.
- Feature Flags: Minimize risk and control the rollout of new features with Airship Feature flags. Airship lets you choose a select audience and align feature availability with targeted communications.
- And more
Why Customer Engagement Platforms Matter
As businesses partner with Airship, it’s essential to know how consumers are approaching a digital world and why our customer engagement platform matters more than ever.
- 60% of global e-commerce sales in 2024 come from mobile, and that number only continues to rise.
- The worldwide COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the e-commerce industry by five years, meaning businesses must adapt to thrive in these markets.
- More than half (53%) of Americans claim they use digital wallets more often than traditional payment methods like cash or physical cards.
- Purchase rate of omnichannel campaigns is 287% higher than single-channel campaigns, so businesses must make sure they are delivering an omnichannel experience to customers.
Implementing a Customer Engagement Platform
Implementing a customer engagement platform into existing systems requires meticulous planning and execution. Businesses should consider the following steps:
- Assessing current systems: Evaluate existing systems and processes to understand how the customer engagement platform will integrate with them. Have a look at Airship’s partner integrations here.
- Defining objectives: Clearly outline the objectives and goals for implementing the customer engagement platform to ensure alignment with business strategies.
- Researching and selecting platform: Thoroughly research available customer engagement platforms, like Airship, to choose one that best suits the business’s needs and requirements.
- Planning integration: Develop a detailed integration plan that outlines how the platform will be integrated with existing systems, considering data migration, user training and potential system disruptions.
- Testing and quality assurance: Complete in-depth testing and quality assurance to guarantee smooth integration and detect any potential issues.
- Training and rollout: Provide necessary training to employees and plan the rollout of the customer engagement platform to ensure a smooth transition and adoption.
- Monitoring and optimization: Establish processes for monitoring the platform’s performance and continuously optimize its usage to maximize its benefits.
Implementing a customer engagement platform is a significant initiative that can greatly impact customer interactions and overall business operations.
Success Stories: Airship in Action
Numerous businesses across diverse industries have achieved remarkable results by leveraging Airship’s platform. Here are examples by industry.
Travel
Finance
Food and Retail
Sports
Media
Telecom
Elevating your Customer Engagement
The world is becoming more digital every day, which means it’s more vital than ever to achieve meaningful customer engagement. Now that you know what a customer engagement platform is, it’s time to invest in a robust one like Airship.
When partnering with us, businesses can unlock new growth opportunities, drive customer loyalty and differentiate themselves in a crowded marketplace. As technology continues to evolve, embracing innovative solutions for customer engagement will be essential for staying competitive and thriving in the digital economy. Let’s talk!