Best Customer Engagement Platforms for Small Businesses
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Bright Pattern provides an AI-powered omnichannel contact center software. With the purpose of making customer service, sales, and marketing brighter and faster, Bright Pattern offers an advanced omnichannel cloud platform with embedded AI. Bright Pattern’s platform can be used on…
SAP Service Cloud helps deliver customer value and protect the brand with intelligent customer service. It enables the user to engage with customers at their convenience, connect service with the value chain and deliver greater profitability.
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell…
Verint Community (Telligent) is a community and collaboration software platform developed by Telligent Systems and was first released in 2004. Telligent's focus was on offering a platform that can be integrated and extended, but this requires technical expertise. Verint acquired…
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Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell…
Text-Em-All, headquartered in Frisco, delivers personalized, informational, emergency mass text messages and phone calls, whether they’re going to five people or 50,000.
The Zendesk Support suite is a cloud-based customer support software built for better customer relationships. Designed to improve customer satisfaction and to support customers on any channel: text SMS, web, mobile app, phone, email, social media. The vendor states more than 200,…
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Jotform Enterprise is a digital workspace productivity tool that provides a platform for organizations. The aim of Jotform Enterprise is to give companies an easy-to-navigate tool that makes reaching out to customers, collaborating with coworkers, and collecting e-signatures and…
Conversica provides lead management software for marketing, inside sales and sales groups.
Adobe Experience Manager is a combined web content management system and digital asset management system. The combined applications of Adobe Experience Manager Sites and Adobe Experience Manager Assets is offered by the vendor as an end-to-end solution for managing and delivering…
Twilio offers a CPaaS and CCaaS solution, with the combination of its programmable Voice, Video, and Messaging APIs, as well as the Twilio Flex cloud contact center. Additional capabilities include Twilio's Elastic SIP Trunking, as well as API for WhatsApp.
Iterable is a growth marketing and user engagement platform. It is designed for B2C markets and supports all types of marketing campaigns (blast, lifecycle, transactional) across all messaging channels (email, web, mobile push notifications, SMS).
Zoho Corporation offers Zoho CRM Plus, a customer experience management platform that features a virtual AI assistant, process automation and business rules engine, and customer behavior analytics.
Salesforce Marketing Cloud Engagement (formerly Salesforce Experience Cloud or Salesforce Community Cloud) is an online forum powered by Salesforce that enables businesses to connect with their employees, customers, partner organizations, and prospects. Designed to help facilitate…
AppsFlyer helps brands make good choices for their business and their customers through innovative, privacy-preserving measurement, analytics, fraud protection, and engagement technologies. Built on the idea that brands can increase customer privacy while providing exceptional experiences,…
Bright Pattern provides an AI-powered omnichannel contact center software. With the purpose of making customer service, sales, and marketing brighter and faster, Bright Pattern offers an advanced omnichannel cloud platform with embedded AI. Bright Pattern’s platform can be used on…
Dialpad Ai Contact Center is an inbound or outbound call center platform and solution, that helps companies connect with customers across all channels and skip the repetitive questions, retaining reviewable conversations and context history.
Solutionreach is patient relationship management and appointment system dentists office, with reputation management, marketing features, and a patient portal. Solutionreach is headquartered in Lehi, Utah.
Exceed.ai is an AI sales assistant and chatbot featuring dynamic lead nurturance and lead qualification process support, meeting scheduling, two-way conversation via chat, and other features.
Zoho SalesIQ is an AI-powered live chat and analytics platform that promotes proactive customer engagement. It offers sales, marketing, and support teams a tool, with features to communicate with visitors throughout the customer lifecycle. Zoho SalesIQ can be used by businesses…
Emarsys is a customer engagement platform that allows users to automate personalized campaigns across channels, based on each individual consumer’s behavior. The suite's capabilities include marketing automation, email marketing, customer engagement, customer intelligence and predictive…
Customer.io is a customer engagement platform that enables marketers to build sophisticated automated messaging campaigns. With access to real-time behavioral data, users can create personalized and relevant messages to engage and retain customers. This includes sending emails, push…
CleverTap is a mobile marketing solution that helps marketers create differentiated customer engagement strategies that are designed to drive growth. The vendor’s value proposition is that thousands of brands continue to build valuable relationships with their customers using CleverTap’…
Simplify360 is a Social Business Intelligence company headquartered in Carrollton, Texas with global clients & operations. Simplify360 is an integrated enterprise solutions provider; offering Social Marketing Suite for agencies, Social Contact Center for BPOs and Social Command…
ContactPigeon is a marketing automation solution for eCommerce. It combines email marketing, dynamic pop-ups, segmentation, automation flows and real-time analytics for marketers to maximize results when it comes to visitor remarketing. It enables eCommerce and B2C businesses to…
Pobuca Connect is a cloud app that turns multiple, overlapping and non-connected business contact lists into one unified company address book that’s easy to access from everywhere and ready to share with co-workers or business associates. It also includes the built-in Pobuca Bot,…
Vonage APIs (formerly Nexmo and TokBox) help growing startups and agile enterprises enhance customer experience and realize new business outcomes at scale. With a comprehensive suite of communication channels, a global platform, and expert support, users can abstract the complexity…
Retainly is an automated engagement platform that helps businesses maximize customer retention. The app enables users to automate emails, web push notifications, and SMS messages to retain customers and drive lifetime value. Retention & LTV: Increasingly business leaders are…
SendBird is a packaged messaging-as-a-service that is designed to help developers build and manage messaging function in less than 5 minutes. SendBird says it strives to build the whole messaging SDK and backend from the scratch to help developers save time and resources in order…
Customer Engagement Platforms TrustMap
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Learn More About Customer Engagement Platforms
What are Customer Engagement Platforms
The customer engagement space is relatively new and still emerging as a solidified market. Currently, it encompasses a few different types of software applications. Certain customer engagement platforms have grown out of functionally different types of software solutions. Below is a list of common ‘software ancestors’ for modern customer engagement platforms:
Though not all customer engagement platforms look the same, the primary goal of customer engagement platforms is constant across different types of solutions: to help businesses create a seamless and integrated customer experience across digital channels and touchpoints. Essentially, these platforms allow businesses to interact with their customers or subscribers wherever they are—via channels like email, webchat, SMS, social media channels, etc.
Core capabilities of customer engagement platforms include the ability to orchestrate, personalize, and optimize customer journeys across channels. Therefore, customer engagement software by default supports multichannel or omnichannel customer interactions. Another core competency of this type of software is customer engagement analytics. Many market-leading customer engagement platforms use artificial intelligence (AI) technology to run predictive customer engagement analytics and provide personalized content recommendations.
Most customer engagement platforms have a centralized database that tracks customer interactions with things like content assets, marketing campaigns, social media posts, etc.
Customer Engagement Platform Features
Though the exact set of features can from product to product, most customer engagement platforms will have the following capabilities:
Support for omnichannel customer interactions across
Email
Push notifications
SMS and messaging apps
Social media channels
Live chat
Webchat
Customer self-service
Customer contact & interaction database
Customer engagement analytics
Content personalization
Behavioral targeting capabilities
Audience segmentation capabilities
Customer journey mapping
Customer journey orchestration
Customer journey optimization
AI-based recommendations
Data ingestion from third-party sources
Customer Engagement Platform Comparison
Before investing in a new customer engagement platform, consider the following key factors:
Price: How much have you budgeted for a customer engagement platform? Solutions designed for use by small and midsize businesses will be less expensive than enterprise-grade customer experience platforms. For example, large legacy cloud vendors like Oracle, Adobe, and Salesforce provide products designed to meet the needs of enterprise teams.
Use case: Which departments and/or roles at your company will use the platform the most? Will customer service reps be the main end-users, or marketers, customer success, or sales reps? Certain platforms may work better for specific use cases. For example, Outreach started by offering a sales engagement platform and now also offers a customer engagement platform. Therefore Outreach may be easier for sales reps to use than another type of platform, like ServiceNow.
Pricing Information
Pricing for customer engagement platforms can vary based on the type of software application, the number of users, and the range of features included. Most vendors charge on a monthly or annual basis, typically per user license.
Pricing can start as low as $15-$50 per month per user and increase up to multiple hundreds of dollars per month.
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Frequently Asked Questions
What do customer engagement platforms do?
Customer engagement platforms allow businesses to create integrated and frictionless customer experiences across digital channels. Most platforms include the following core capabilities:
- Support for omnichannel customer interactions
- Customer journey mapping
- Customer journey orchestration
- Customer journey management
- Customer engagement analytics
- Content personalization
- Behavioral targeting
- Audience segmentation
Use cases for these platforms can range from customer service teams, to sales and account managers, to marketing teams.
Customer engagement platforms vs. CRM software
Many customer engagement platforms have grown out of customer relationship management (CRM) software. CRM systems include foundational infrastructure for customer engagement platforms, including having a contact database that can track customer interactions across channels over time.
Customer engagement platforms are, in this sense, the next evolution of CRM platforms. They layer features like customer engagement analytics, AI-based recommendations and optimization, and personalization features on top of traditional CRM capabilities.