How to Build a Future-Proof Customer Engagement Stack

Modern customers expect expedited experiences.

Today’s customer expects to be informed the instant their goods ship with tracking information, a confirmation of delivery, and promotional incentives that encourage them to make a repeat purchase.

People have come to anticipate that if they start watching a program on their TV and then switch to viewing it on their smartphone in bed, the app will remember not just the show they were watching but also the exact episode they were watching and resume playing from that point. On the same note, donors want a personalized acknowledgment of their generosity rather than a generic call to action.

It hasn’t always been simple for enterprises behind the scenes to provide consumers with a seamless, individualized experience that responds to their specific behaviors and activities rather than treating them as a homogeneous bunch. However, with the development of current customer interaction technology stacks, tailored engagement has become more operationally and financially viable for medium to large organizations.

That’s one of the reasons why companies now use marketing, social media, and brand initiatives to win over their customers. When you’ve put in a lot of work and made a financial investment to earn your clients’ confidence, it’s understandable to want to keep them.

75% of marketers say the best engagement occurs at the middle or end stages of a marketing funnel. That’s why it pays to put a premium on keeping existing customers happy.

The retention rate of a business directly correlates to the quality of the customer service they provide. Everything a client goes through in their mind or heart due to interacting with your brand is part of the client’s customer experience. A buyer’s loyalty to a brand may be affected by the quality of the company’s customer service and other front-line contacts, such as the speed with which support tickets are resolved or the clarity with which the brand conveys its values.

Why Is Customer Retention the Lifeblood Of Companies?

Achieving first-time customers is generally more expensive than keeping your current customers happy. An article published in the Harvard Business Review found that acquiring a new customer can cost 5 to 25 times as much as keeping an existing one.

No major capital outlay is required for promotion, advertising, or sales contact. Converting one-time buyers into repeat buyers is simpler if the buyer is already familiar with and trusts your brand. However, it might be more challenging to close the deal with a new client.

Loyal customers are more likely to refer your company to others. They are also more likely to refer the business to their peers and acquaintances without you providing any additional incentive. One method your organization can foster client loyalty for long-term success is by creating a cycle of retained customers and buzz marketing.

Keeping repeat customers is crucial to any company’s long-term success for several reasons.

• Cost Savings: It’s more economical to keep an existing clientele than to get new ones.
• Positive Word-Of-Mouth Marketing: Successful word-of-mouth advertising relies on the positive recommendations of satisfied customers.
• A Better Bottom Line: An improvement in retention rates of 5% may enhance earnings by 25% to 95%.
• Loyalty from Clients: Customers that are dedicated to your brand are less likely to buy from your rivals, are more likely to promote your products to their peers, and spend more money overall.
• Increased Customer Spending: More money is spent by customers because loyal buyers are more likely to make repeat purchases and spend more each time.

The level of interaction between brands and their customer base has evolved dramatically in recent years. Because of this, it’s more complicated than ever for marketers to decipher behavior and communicate effectively. Your customer engagement stack may blame you if you struggle to create engaging, interactive, and loyalty-driven consumer experiences.

What is a Customer Engagement Stack?

Simply put, a customer engagement stack is a group of related technologies that enables a business to find, connect with, keep, and monetize its target audience. The purpose of these stacks is to allow organizations to power end-to-end customer experiences in a unified, collaborative ecosystem by bringing together the most effective customer interaction technologies, such as data analytics, location and customization tools, and engagement technology.

Different technologies may collect different types of behavioral data, and different systems can store and reward customers differently depending on that data. However, there is one element that all components of the customer engagement stack must have to fully support in-the-moment customer interaction: the ability to communicate with one another and transfer data and insights back and forth in real-time.

Getting Past Obstacles to Win Long-Term

Coordinated Incompetence

A lack of coordination and segregated efforts is cited by almost half of businesses (44%), who also see it as one of the main hurdles to effective customer interaction. Customers usually end up footing the bill when divisions fail to coordinate their efforts, communicate relevant data, and assess the company’s strengths and shortcomings. Customer service, sales, and marketing teams should all develop a collaborative work environment to provide a seamless and satisfying consumer experience at every stage of the purchasing process.

Lack of Consumer Insights Powered by Data

The failure to disseminate data-driven consumer insights across the firm was highlighted by 32% of businesses as another reason why customer engagement attempts fail. Having data on customers that is segregated or challenging to draw insights from was chosen by 32% of businesses as the second most significant obstacle to customer engagement.

Data Silos and Ineffective Teamwork 

It’s not hard to see why ineffective teamwork, inadequate knowledge sharing, and data silos are at the top of the list of obstacles to customer engagement. Because of the cloud, it’s become simpler for every division to create and deploy their own apps, leading to a disjointed IT architecture with many isolated data repositories. It’s not uncommon for data to be spread across many databases or departments, each overseen by a distinct set of administrators.

All this essential information is lying in silos throughout the organization. Companies often err in their data management when they fail to integrate data properly and distribute it judiciously according to employee roles and responsibilities. However, as the borders between sales, marketing, product, and support continue to blur, it is more important than ever that all departments share information about their customers.

Limited Information about Customers

Customer engagement professionals have found that many businesses limit access to information about customers, customer data, and research results to the sales and marketing department or to select members of the company’s management. However, businesses must ensure that all employees have access to and can use consumer data by making customer insights more widely available.

Technological Limitations

A lack of qualified personnel and cutting-edge tools is another barrier to maximizing the benefits of client involvement. Almost a third of businesses (30%) see a lack of in-house knowledge or experience in customer interaction as one of the main problems in customer engagement. Indeed, three-quarters of businesses either “strongly agree” or “somewhat agree” that their company needs personnel with knowledge and skill in customer involvement. Despite this, 56% of businesses had trouble locating the appropriate employees to oversee their customer engagement initiatives, a problem expected to endure in light of the current record-breaking labor shortage.

Given the importance of having the correct equipment, it’s not surprising that 29% of businesses believe they cannot achieve their goals because they lack effective customer interaction tools and technology. Employees’ attempts to contact consumers in a timely and customized way might be hampered by a technology stack bloated with obsolete systems, unreliable tools, and separate apps.

How Modern Customer Engagement Stacks Work

Those days are behind us when your customer interaction strategy could be handled by a single provider or platform. The most successful businesses now use various niche products and services to choreograph their unique approach to marketing and customer interaction. Technology solutions in today’s customer interaction stack are adapted to each brand’s specific goals and the nuances of each customer’s situation.

A business might, for instance, use any number of the following technologies:

• Customer Engagement Platforms: Software that enables you to track, manage, and interact with your prospects and customers.
• Customer Data Platforms: They create a unified, comprehensive profile of each consumer; it gathers and integrates first-party data from many sources.
• Analytics Platforms: Data modeling, analysis, exploration, sharing, and management are all made possible by analytics platforms for non-technical users.
• AdTech Platforms: Adtech is used by advertisers to purchase, manage, and analyze digital advertising campaigns. 
• Location Data Providers: Enables you to access geolocation resources from several data providers in a unified interface.
• Recommendation Engines: A software that uses data analysis to propose content to a website user. 
• Loyalty Program Software: Software for running loyalty programs that aim to increase consumer loyalty may help businesses greatly.

Methods for overcoming obstacles include customer-centric criteria, spending money on the appropriate people, emphasizing employee engagement, employing technology, and cultivating a culture based on their involvement in the company’s success.

Customer Messaging + Analytics Lead to Effective Real-Time Lifecycle Engagement

Marketing, growth, and engagement teams need a detailed understanding of consumer preferences and behaviors to communicate with customers across the user lifetime successfully. To achieve this goal, companies must equip themselves with custom messaging and behavioral analytics solutions that can operate in tandem to enable personalized, real-time, customer-lifecycle-driven, cross-channel marketing campaigns.

According to Memory365’s CEO,

“One of the most important skills a marketer may have is the ability to monitor campaign results and follow customers as they go through the sales funnel. Cooperative Computing empowered Memory365 to do this using customer engagement systems by determining crucial client demographics, offering corresponding customized marketing, and tracking the success of these redoubled efforts. We need flawless data synchronization so that we can execute the campaign we want and insightful analysis so that we can learn from our results.”

An effective customer interaction stack helps break down barriers between departments and technologies. In addition to streamlining processes for both internal teams and customers, seamless customer experiences are produced by contemporary customer engagement stacks, leading to satisfied customers that are more likely to get involved.

Conclusion

A company’s customer engagement stack is one of the most effective ways to communicate with your customers. However, in the context of the digital journey of today, it may not all be genuine participation. You can make your potential and existing customers more invested in your products and services by allowing them to participate in discussions about those topics that matter to them. The act of participating itself can foster trust. Ultimately, it’s all about making genuine connections with your target audience. And that’s why a robust customer engagement stack is a crucial instrument that can help organizations deliver on the promise of meaningful engagement, which is what will keep customers coming back for more.

Cooperative Computing develops comprehensive customer engagement solutions that make it easier for your teams to serve your customers. We provide omnichannel solutions that give your clients a wide range of options for getting in touch with you, from phone calls and text messages to emails and live chats.