Mia Jacobs — January 15, 2019 — January 15, 2019
janeb13 / Pixabay
At its core, customer success is simple: take care of your customers and they’ll take care of your business. Nurture relationships, and not only will customers receive excellent service and well-supported products, but your enterprise will be financially healthy in the long-run. Customers will see the value in their purchase, and you’ll grow a more valuable brand. Everyone wins.
But how can you keep a close eye on each step of a customer’s journey in order to see where engagement is needed and connect in a positive way? Success in the customer-centered economy can be a lot to wrap your arms around, especially for large enterprises with multiple brands or complex market segments. Many companies still use “old school” methods of customer growth and don’t know how to update their customer engagement platforms and practices. And for those who are looking to modernize in order to compete in today’s customer-centered economy, there are a lot of customer engagement platforms to choose from.
So, what features does your customer engagement platform need? And what new capabilities are available? The customer success platform you adopt should make onboarding, escalation, adoption, and renewal easier—everything you need to track and manage customer relationships. In short, the ideal platform identifies key points along the customer relationship lifecycle and gives you the functionalities you need to shape and nurture that relationship at every stage.
What the Perfect Customer Engagement Platform Looks Like
Since your enterprise runs in a digital world that centers around customers, you need a platform that can help you adopt and operationalize customer centricity across every level of your organization.
You’re an expert at providing the quality SaaS and subscription products your customers love. So, pick a customer engagement platform that frees you to focus on doing what your customer success team does best—creating and delivering excellent products and services.
The perfect customer engagement platform should be easy to use. It should enable you to be more responsive to your customer’s changing demands. It should offer the visibility needed to gauge each stage of the customer journey through KPIs, dashboards, analytics, and best practices. And it should work seamlessly with your CRM solution to support your sales pipeline.
Does this sound like a tall order? Maybe, but not for an outstanding customer engagement platform focused on the new customer-centered economy. And you should only invest in the very best. Here are the top four features to look for when selecting a digital customer engagement platform.
Feature #1: Tools That Simplify Complex Customer Relationship Portfolios
It’s hard enough to get a handle on customer relationship hierarchies, but if you’re managing multiple brands or long product lines, you’ve got another layer of complexity to wade through. A quality customer engagement platform helps you personalize communication with different customer segments. Choose one that enables you to visualize customer relationship hierarchies across accounts, product lines, and channel partners. A quality platform will offer a panoramic view of customer portfolios and monitor specific engagements via customer health scores.
Feature #2: Easier Account Management
Lots of customers mean lots of accounts to manage. Some customer engagement platforms give you the means to view the specifics of each client relationship so your customer success team can personalize their responses. Look for one that has automation and workflows that speed up key business processes like customer segmentation and revenue forecasts. It should be able to help you build a predictable engagement workflow. With automation, you’ll have help maintaining the quality of your responses, ensuring consistency across the board.
Feature #3: Metrics that Bring Customers’ Revenue Value Into Focus
The ability to pick out high-value customers can significantly help you increase sales. It offers guidance, showing you who to spend more time and resources on. As such, pick a platform that offers a clear picture of your customer base. It should let you identify customer portfolios and segments and compare revenue values with churn, renewal, upsell and other metrics. A good customer engagement platform can track adoption success across multiple products. That’s what you need to get a handle on the individual client relationships that benefit your enterprise the most.
Feature #4: Support for Your Sales Pipeline and CRM
Your customer engagement platform should enhance the initiatives you’re working on today. Select one that can custom-integrate with your enterprise systems. Make sure it works with Salesforce or any other customer relationship management software you use. Remember, a good platform can help you anticipate customer experiences and offers views of existing customer engagement hierarchies.
You Can Always Get What You Want—in a Customer Engagement Platform
By nurturing customer relationships, you can ensure your enterprise remains healthy for many years to come. Don’t waste resources hunting down new customers; instead, focus on retaining the ones you have. The right customer engagement platform will make it easier to nurture a more engaged, loyal customer base.
If you pick a platform that delivers the visibility needed to gauge performance at each stage of the customer journey and optimize your customer operations, you will see results fast. It’s an investment that will offer worthwhile returns for both you and your customers.
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