Refresh MarTech for digital customer engagement
By : Flytxt
Around a decade ago, customer engagement was limited to a handful of ways. Today, with the growth of social media and numerous other digital channels, enterprises have to look at customer engagement in a new way. Engagement is always on.
Enterprises used to converse with customers mainly via sales representatives or customer service personnel. In those days engagement was discrete and mostly initiated by customers.
In the initial years of the mobile revolution, SMS was the major medium marketers used to communicate with their customers. Emails and voice calls were used in certain situations however email was prominent in a B2B scenario. Nevertheless, the communication was often broken at many points and hardly helped the enterprises to develop a unified customer engagement strategy, leading to delayed, irrelevant communication and inconsistent customer experiences across channels.
The scenario started changing with the growing adoption of digital channels, such as social media channels, chatbots, mobile apps, and other digital channels. This opened up a huge opportunity for enterprises to stay with consumers more, look into their buying behavior and sentiments, analyze them and respond in a timely manner with relevance.
Chatbots and voice devices like Google Nest are the latest ones added to the growing list of new digital channels. AI-enabled chatbots are currently used more as self-help tools for improving customer service. Enterprises wish to use chatbots for improving customer experience and generating more sales as well.
Advantages of customer engagement through multiple digital channels
Modern customers expect consistent, seamless experiences when interacting with enterprises, regardless of the channels they use. They want a unified experience that makes it quick and easy to get consistent information. As enterprises use multi-digital channels to derive a customer-centric view and to engage with customers, it helps in meeting their customers’ needs.
- Customer-centric 360-degree view: Customer data along with the digital interactions across multiple digital channels helps the enterprises to build a holistic comprehensive view of the customers – their usage/purchase behavior, preferences and predicted needs. This, in turn, helps to profile and segment the customers for effective engagements even at an individual level. Advancements in AI and machine learning helps enterprises to analyze data at scale and derive such useful insights to take more informed decisions and actions.
- Omnichannel digital experience: With multichannel digital engagement, enterprises are able to deliver consistent, personalized customer experiences throughout each journey and across all channels and touchpoints. This is possible, as the customer interactions at multiple channels are getting consolidated to derive a customer-centric view.
Update your MarTech for digital customer engagement
The key factor for success is to provide excellent and seamless customer engagement across each and every channel. Highly personalized and relevant customer engagements are possible with a deeper understanding of customer’s behavior and contextual needs as well as real-time multi-channel engagement capability.
Enterprises rely mostly on Martech solution providers to come up with sophisticated AI, analytics and automation capabilities to support customer engagement on these new digital channels. For example, vendors should help enterprises leverage AI and machine learning to identify the next best offer or preferred engagement channel for each customer. Enterprises need vendors who can unify customer engagement and allow them to strategize and execute different marketing actions across channels from one interface.
A few MarTech solution providers have upgraded their solutions by integrating ‘digital channel management’ capability. Flytxt’s flagship intelligent MarTech product NEON-dX has an add-on module Digital Plus designed to help marketers engage with customers over digital touchpoints like social media channels, web applications, mobile apps, etc. Moreover, customer data from these channels can be integrated and analyzed for deeper customer profiling and engagement.
