Social media and other communication channels have changed how brands engage with customers. Omnichannel is the new buzzword for client communications, with 41% of customers expecting websites to offer live chat services.
While 47% of marketers still consider email a good channel for nurturing leads, 75% of internet users prefer social media to learn about products and brands.
Our increasingly interconnected world demands that brands be actively present in these various communication platforms to reach maximum customer engagement. Brands must also provide customers with personalized experiences that address their unique buying needs.
Customer engagement platforms integrate these various customer touchpoints, so you can interact with customers at their convenience. They are designed to provide automated workflows to help your team seamlessly manage customer interactions, increase customer satisfaction, and drive conversions.
Here are 12 customer engagement platforms that enterprises need to boost their customer engagements.
Top Customer Engagement Platforms for Enterprises
Check out these platforms designed to increase customer engagement.
Brand24 is a powerful media monitoring tool designed to help businesses track and analyze online mentions across various platforms. While not exclusively a customer engagement platform, Brand24 offers several functionalities that enable direct and effective engagement with customers. By monitoring social media for brand mentions, companies or individuals can connect with users, address feedback, and foster positive relationships. Brand24’s sentiment analysis is a cornerstone of its platform, providing detailed insights into how customers feel about your brand. By classifying mentions as positive, neutral, or negative, Brand24 helps you understand customer sentiments better. This analysis allows you to focus on the context of feedback, providing an opportunity to engage with customers meaningfully. Positive feedback can highlight what customers love, while negative feedback can reveal areas for improvement. Engaging with customers based on their sentiments can significantly enhance their experience and satisfaction. In the Barbie project, Brand24’s sentiment analysis helped identify emerging trends and customer sentiments efficiently. This enabled timely responses to market shifts, enhancing strategic decision-making. “The Anomaly Detector pinpointed the cause of the buzz and overall public sentiment, allowing us to quickly adapt our strategies,” noted the Barbie marketing team. Barbie sentiment share Sentiment analysis The platform’s real-time monitoring capabilities ensure you are always aware of what is being said about your brand. Brand24 collects mentions from various sources, including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, discussion forums, review sites, and blogs. This real-time data collection allows you to respond promptly to any issues or capitalize on positive mentions, ensuring that you maintain a proactive approach to customer engagement. In a case study with Chilli Fruit, a web agency focused on link-building and online PR, Brand24 significantly boosted their personal branding efforts. By tracking mentions related to clients’ names and companies, Chilli Fruit discovered up to 1,500 unnotified mentions in reputable publications like Forbes and Yahoo Finance. “Brand24 has been with us forever,” says Jan Suski, Content & Outreach Specialist at Chilli Fruit. This real-time monitoring helped them assess the effectiveness of their efforts, enhance guest posts, and identify new link-building opportunities, filling 10% of the client’s backlink requirement through Brand24’s media monitoring efforts, as shown below. Chilli Fruit case study Another critical feature is the identification of the most active social media authors. This list reveals individuals who frequently mention your monitored keywords, providing a starting point for building relationships with key influencers. Engaging with these active users can help you cultivate brand ambassadors who can advocate for your brand within their communities. This organic advocacy can lead to more authentic and effective customer engagement. In a case study with dfusion, a marketing firm specializing in public relations, Brand24 played a pivotal role in identifying niche influencers. The agency used Brand24 to monitor over 20 active projects, targeting niche industries and solutions. “Brand24 helps us efficiently identify specialized opinion leaders or influencers,” says Kamil Gołdy, Account Director & Head of Digital at dfusion. By leveraging these insights, dfusion successfully streamlined operations, reduced employee workload, and boosted overall efficiency, leading to more effective and targeted influencer collaborations. Lists influential profiles Brand24 also offers a comprehensive metrics table that provides detailed numerical insights into your social media performance. Metrics such as estimated social media reach and interactions, including likes, comments, and shares, allow you to assess the effectiveness of your engagement strategies. By continuously monitoring these metrics, you can refine your approach to maximize customer interaction and satisfaction. Social media metrics Brand24 offers a range of pricing plans to suit different business needs, all billed annually with a free 14-day trial available. The Individual plan, at $79 per month, is ideal for tracking a small brand, providing 3 keywords and 2,000 mentions per month for one user. The Team plan costs $149 per month, perfect for startups and small businesses, offering 7 keywords, 5,000 mentions per month, and unlimited users with hourly updates. The Pro plan, the most popular choice, is $199 per month, tailored for growing businesses and small agencies. It includes 12 keywords, 25,000 mentions per month, unlimited users, and real-time updates with advanced AI features. For enterprise businesses and large agencies, the Enterprise plan is available at $399 per month, providing 25 keywords, 100,000 mentions per month, unlimited users, and real-time updates with advanced AI features. Brand24 pricing information Birdeye stands as an eminent customer engagement platform tailored to offer seamless social media management and online reputation tracking for businesses, irrespective of their scale. This tool is architectured to centralize and streamline social engagement across various locations, bringing into play advanced tracking, alerts, and messaging capabilities. Birdeye equips businesses with a unified dashboard that keenly monitors social interactions across multiple channels, ensuring they’re always attuned to critical engagements. This platform provides a comprehensive view of follower interactions, thanks to custom streams and reports. The immediacy of custom alerts, combined with a centralized ‘Social Inbox’ ensures swift responses to all forms of engagement, from likes to shares. Businesses can effortlessly craft and distribute posts for all their locations while the platform’s robust analytics empowers them to refine their strategies. Pricing: Birdeye provides a flexible pricing structure, featuring three distinct tiers to cater to different business needs. These tiers are strategically priced, with the costs spanning between $299 and $399, allowing potential users to choose a plan that best aligns with their requirements and budget constraints. EngageBay is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that combines the features of CRM software, marketing automation, helpdesk software, and live chat software in one. It’s built for small businesses to enjoy a comprehensive, affordable, scalable solution. With EngageBay, you can run an email marketing campaign, create customer segmentation, build a landing page, manage tasks, schedule social media posts, create automated workflows, and send SMS broadcasts and push notifications. You can also test A/B landing pages, track milestones, generate custom reports, and access in-depth web analytics. It’s free for the first 15 users and integrates with popular apps like Shopify, DocuSign, Xero, QuickBooks, Stripe, and others. Pricing: Starts at $0 per month for 250 contacts and 15 users Intercom is an all-in-one communications platform that prioritizes strong customer relationships for sustained business growth. It’s trusted by over 25,000 companies, including Atlassian, Amazon, Meta, and Microsoft. Intercom connects marketing, sales, and customer support on one platform, so customers can receive seamless engagement at every stage of their buying journey. Intercom provides live chat, real-time messaging, chatbots, and self-service options. You can also segment consumers and create automated workflows to offer a personalized experience for each customer. They have also been named a Forbes Cloud 100 Honoree for six consecutive years. Pricing: Starts at $74 per month (billed annually) and comes with a free trial LiveChat is a customer service platform that integrates all your customers’ communication channels in one place, making it easier to manage and respond. You can engage with customers during their consideration stage and show them products they’re most likely to purchase right within the chat box. Custom forms and AI automation help you qualify customers and create an automated workflow with the right preset responses. Smart customer segmentation lets you automatically route which teams are best suited to answer a customer query. LiveChat integrates with over 200 tools, so customers can reach you from your website, social media profiles, and anywhere across the internet. Pricing: Starts at $20 per month (billed annually) The Zendesk Support Suite has various products designed to build the best customer experiences. There’s Zendesk Sunshine, which lets you manage customer conversations across multiple channels by integrating it on a single interface that you can customize with the integrations you need. If you need a ready-built solution, there’s Zendesk for Service, which has built-in AI and bots to determine customer intent and guide them to the proper automated workflows. Zendesk is an industry leader in customer engagement and is trusted by top customers like Mailchimp, Uber, Tesco, and Siemens. They are a service-first CRM company committed to developing robust software solutions to meet the needs of any business. Pricing: Starts at $49 per month per agent (annual billing) | Comes with a scaled-down $19 per month plan Zoho CRM Plus helps you engage customers across multiple channels at every stage of the buying cycle. You’ll receive real-time notifications about customer interactions, so you can resolve complaints and close sales. It uses AI to predict trends, identify customer sentiments, and optimize campaigns. The AI tool helps determine when your team can call a customer or nudge them to the next stage of the funnel. It allows you to build automated workflows to bring together your sales, marketing, and support teams. You can also use Zoho to create a knowledge base, support ticketing system, and a built-in chat support interface. Pricing: $57 per month per user (billed annually) | Comes with a 30-day free trial Twilio uses data to help enterprise businesses boost customer engagement. With the power of native customer data that the platform collects, it builds personalized interactions with each customer and reaches them across an omnichannel platform. Your business can connect with customers on their preferred channels and offer timely solutions to make them feel like VIPs. This results in increased trust, better relationships, and lower customer acquisition costs. Twilio is trusted by brands like Lyft, Deliveroo, DoorDash, and Allergan. Pricing: Modular pricing lets you pay only for what you use i.e., SMS, Omnichannel Conversations, WhatsApp, Programmable Video and Messaging, etc. Froged’s goal is to help companies onboard customers quickly and seamlessly, so they can increase their customer retention. They achieve this by providing a dynamic and flexible platform that enables you to engage customers proactively. The platform is scalable, so it grows with your business, and is customizable, so you can add your brand’s personality. They are popular with cybersecurity, fintech, eLearning, gaming, and cryptocurrency companies. Their solutions are designed to enhance customer experience by letting you create extensive knowledge bases, intuitive communication widgets, and personalized customer segmentation. Pricing: Free Limited Plan for 1 Seat | Paid Plan starts at 66 EUR for 3 seats Userlike is a live chat software designed to engage customers at every stage of the buyer journey. They have smart chat features that understand customer signals when a customer expresses buying intent, abandons their search process, is ready to buy, and others. Userlike integrates with major messaging apps like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, and countless other channels. It also allows you to have a website live chat app and use SMS features. You can also add chatbots to automate some of the most basic customer queries and help your agents become more efficient. Pricing: Free Plan for simple website chat setup | Paid Plan with multiple messaging channels starts at $90 per month (billed annually) SmartKarrot is an intelligent customer engagement platform that extensively uses AI to create automated workflows, provide in-depth analytics, and intuitively segment customers, allowing B2B companies to grow and retain their customers. The platform allows you to assign engagement scores and various rules for the customer journey, so you can know when a customer will potentially churn and receive real-time alerts to re-engage with a customer. It also supports multi-channel campaigns from email and pop-ups to push notifications and ads. Pricing: 3 Tiers available, but pricing is upon request Engati is an automated consumer engagement platform that allows you to set up your own chatbots using little to no codes. You can even set up chatbot rules that answer the most complex customer questions, saving your service reps precious time to attend to more significant issues. Their fully integrated platform combines multiple messaging channels under one roof, so customers can have a seamless conversation experience with your brand. Sales are closed quickly and customer satisfaction increases. Pricing: 3 Tiers available, but pricing is upon request 1. Brand24
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2. Birdeye
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3. EngageBay
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4. Intercom
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5. LiveChat
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6. Zendesk Support Suite
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8. Twilio
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9. Froged
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12. Engati
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Factors to Consider When Choosing the Best Customer Engagement Platform
The following factors will help you evaluate and choose the best platforms for your needs.
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Self-service option
81% of customers expect businesses to provide self-service options, so they can resolve matters on their own. Today’s customers are more tech-savvy than most companies realize and prefer to find their own solutions before connecting with an agent.
That means that your customer engagement platform must have a way to provide extensive knowledge bases and customizable smart chatbots that respond instantaneously.
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Communication Channels
Customers are all over the internet, and there are dozens of ways they can use to reach your business. Look for a customer engagement platform that offers the most communication channels, even if you’re not currently using them. More is better, and you don’t want to limit how customers engage with you.
Having multiple channels will also allow for more personalized segmentation, so you can create better-targeted campaigns and increase customer conversions.
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Live Chat
Live chat converts website visitors to paying customers since you can quickly engage with them and answer their immediate questions. Having a live chat feature on your site leads to a 40% increase in conversions and a 10% increase in average order values. Customer satisfaction increases by 92% when you use live chat software.
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Customization Options
No two businesses are alike, and you’d want a platform that adapts to your team’s needs. Customizable options—from no-code workflows to intuitive reporting dashboards—will help your team turn a platform into a tool that makes their work easier.
Look for a platform they can quickly customize, even if they have little to zero coding experience.
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Value for Money
Investing in a customer engagement platform is a long-term commitment that should generate ROI. Carefully evaluate a platform’s pricing in comparison with the features offered. Some platforms charge higher for certain advanced features, so consider your needs before locking in with one.
Final Thoughts
In a highly competitive digital world, a customer engagement platform is a must. Traditional ways of connecting with customers are no longer enough to meet growing customers’ demands. If you don’t invest in one now, your competition will sooner or later drive you out of the game.
Big brands and small businesses alike use the platforms listed above. Check them out and choose the best one that will boost engagements, increase conversions, and drive revenues.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is a customer engagement platform?
A customer engagement platform is a powerful tool that helps businesses better engage with their prospects and customers and build stronger relationships with them. It’s a central place for customer data, allowing companies to track customer interactions and get insights into customer behavior quickly.
It’s a command center that integrates customer engagement touchpoints like email, chat, SMS, phone, and more.
What are examples of customer engagement?
There are various ways to engage your customers, such as:
- Running a social media campaign
- Building an omnichannel communication flow
- Providing live engagement for website visitors
- Collecting customer feedback to enhance user experience
- Launching an email nurture campaign series
What is the best customer engagement platform?
The best customer engagement platforms offer multiple omnichannel integrations, AI-powered automation, in-depth analytics, and personalized segmentation. These features will help you create customized campaigns using automated workflows that nurture customers through the buying funnel.
Our top picks include:
- Brand24
- EngageBay
- Intercom
- LiveChat
- Zendesk Support Suite
- Zoho CRM Plus
- Twilio
- Froged
- Userlike
- SmartKarrot
- Engati
