Why You Need a Customer Engagement Platform

TL;DR:

• A customer engagement platform (CEP) is software designed to unify data so that marketers can make decisions and create personalized customer experiences in real time.
• While there are some similarities, the main difference between customer relationship management (CRM) software and customer engagement software is that CRMs are more sales-oriented, whereas CEPs unify all types of data from across all channels.
• For an enterprise-grade CEP, start with BlueConic as a foundational platform that allows you to aggregate multichannel data so that you can drive personalization.
• You can leverage Jebbit as part of your CEP stack to create engaging interactive experiences that help you gather the customer insights needed for personalization.
• If you need added functionality for your CEP, apps like Braze, Yotpo, and Shopify all offer integrations so that you can make the most of your data.

Basic product pushes simply don’t work anymore, not in today’s competitive marketplace. That’s why modern marketing teams are leaning on customer engagement strategies. When you can engage your customers, you can stand out from the crowd and build the kind of loyalty that keeps them choosing you over the competition.

Building engagement is no easy feat. To do it well, you need access to vast amounts of customer data so that you can drive personalization campaigns that serve up the things that individuals want and need. 

And that’s where customer engagement platforms (CEPs) come in. These platforms are becoming a necessity for enterprises that want to retain existing customers while attracting a steady flow of new customers. Below, we’ll show you what a CEP is and provide recommendations of the software stack that can uplevel your brand’s customer engagement.

What Is a Customer Engagement Platform?

A customer engagement platform is software designed to bring together customer data so that brands can use it to create a better, more engaging customer journey. The key idea behind a CEP is unity. No matter what CEP software you use, it needs to unify and centralize data from multiple channels, including social media, your website, your brand’s mobile app, email marketing, and elsewhere.

The benefits of using a CEP can have a cascade effect. Here’s how that can look:

• Marketers gain the ability to create unified customer profiles using data from multiple sources.
• This allows for a better real-time understanding of customer behaviors, needs, and preferences.
• Marketers can leverage this understanding to create instant, personalized customer interactions that build engagement and keep customers feeling connected to the brand.
• This results in a personalized customer journey that fosters higher rates of loyalty and improved customer retention over the long term.

How Does a CEP Differ From a Customer Relationship Management Platform? 

If you’re a marketer, at least some of this probably already sounds familiar, and you may wonder what the difference is between a CEP and a customer relationship management platform (CRM). Here’s one way to look at it: CRMs tend to focus on only one part of the customer journey (the sales aspect), whereas CEPs can handle every aspect of the customer journey — across all channels and in real time, no less.

It’s a difference in both scope and scale. CRMs are great tools for customer support or sales teams because they allow you to track customer interactions, store contact information, manage leads, and monitor the sales pipeline. 

However, enterprises will also have data coming in from a variety of other sources. CDPs can aggregate data from CRMs and elsewhere to truly unify omnichannel data. From there, you can conduct real-time data analysis or enable personalization across the entire customer journey.

How to Create the Ideal Customer Engagement Platform Software Stack

Some apps and software companies bill themselves as a complete customer experience solution. However, the truth is that for enterprises, there usually isn’t a one-size-fits-all solution. 

Actually, the best customer engagement platforms are typically software stacks composed of multiple tools that integrate seamlessly so that you can streamline workflows across marketing, sales, customer support, and other departments to create a fully optimized user experience at every touchpoint. Below, we’ll show you our recommendations to help you create the ideal CEP software stack for your brand.

Build a Foundation With BlueConic

BlueConic is a customer data platform (CDP) that can help you build a solid foundation for your CEP software stack. Data is the lifeblood of modern business and marketing — and with BlueConic, you can aggregate data from across all channels in one centralized place. 

Even better, this solution leverages marketing automation to resolve identities and normalize data, creating effortless customer profiles that you can use to drive personalization. BlueConic also lets you easily segment your audience for marketing campaign optimization.

Speaking of personalization, BlueConic features a native personalization engine. With it, you can create customized web and app experiences in real time based on collected customer behavior and preference data.

Gather First-Party Data With Jebbit

Once you have a CDP in place, you’ll need a variety of data sources to create rich customer profiles for your personalization efforts. Every touchpoint along the customer journey presents an opportunity to collect data — but many of these touchpoints, like your website and social media, will provide a lot of basic data like browsing information.

To get the deep insights that can drive personalization most effectively, you need to add a customer engagement solution to your CEP. Jebbit is that solution. With Jebbit, you can create any number of highly engaging customer experiences that will help you enrich your customer data. Quizzes, surveys, browser games, Pinterest board builders, chatbots — your imagination is the limit. 

These experiences can be launched across all platforms, including your website, social media, mobile apps, and more. Use them to engage customers and help them learn more about your brand’s products — and along the way, customers will reward you with key first-party data points about their needs, preferences, interests, and more. 

Best of all, since Jebbit integrates with BlueConic, you can easily centralize the data collected via Jebbit experiences on the BlueConic CDP.

Add Additional Functionality With Integrations

When it comes to customer engagement tools, every brand has slightly different needs. If you’re working with Jebbit and BlueConic as essential components of your CEP software stack, then the good news is that you can add even more functionality through integrations. Check out some of the apps below to discover how you can round out your software stack.

Braze

Need to supercharge your email marketing efforts or send out customized SMS notifications to get your customers’ attention? Braze integrates with both Jebbit and BlueConic — and you can use it to streamline communication channels. This app lets you synchronize contact information and attributes between Jebbit and Braze via an API so that you can automatically send out customer communications. 

Yotpo

For many brands, loyalty programs are a crucial way to build customer loyalty and boost customer satisfaction. If you’re looking for an app that will integrate with Jebbit and offer an easy, self-service way to manage a loyalty program, Yotpo is the answer. This app lets you create earnings rules — including rules that trigger and award points when users complete Jebbit experiences. 

Shopify

E-commerce brands need a powerful sales platform — and for many, that means Shopify. But how do you add data from Shopify to your CEP? If you’re working with Jebbit and BlueConic, it’s easy since Shopify integrates with both. 

Through the Jebbit-Shopify integration, you can send the data you collect from interactive experiences back to Shopify. If BlueConic is the foundation of your CEP software stack, you can import data from Shopify to the BlueConic CDP to create customer profiles, drive personalization, and more.

Start Building Your Customer Engagement Platform Today

When it comes to optimizing the customer experience, CEPs have lots of use cases. They’re essential for aggregating data so that you can create comprehensive customer profiles and audience segments — and those are assets you can use to drive personalization efforts and improve marketing campaigns. All together, with a CEP, you can improve every aspect of the customer journey.

Even better, we can make it easy to build out the ideal platform software stack for your brand. Start with Jebbit’s interactive experiences to gather data and engage your customers — and be sure to leverage our partner BlueConic for a customer data platform that can unify all of your data. From there, you can get added functionality through any number of integrations.

To learn more, schedule a strategy call with a Jebbit Experience Expert.