Customer Engagement Software | Top 5 Platforms in 2021
Since 2008, ScienceSoft has been rendering CRM services to help businesses select and implement suitable software for customer engagement.
Schedule a call
Customer Engagement Software: the Essence
A customer engagement platform is software that helps businesses create and manage customer experiences through personalized interactions via various communication channels. Such interactions are enabled by personalized customer journeys that can be managed, analyzed, and optimized via a platform.
Key Features of Customer Engagement Solutions
360-degree customer view
- Multi-channel personal and transactional data collection.
- Customer interaction history.
- Automated updating of a customer profile with new information after each interaction.
Customer conversion and retention
- Multi-channel interactions (web, email, phone, social media, etc.).
- Advanced customer segmentation based on demographic, transactional, firmographic and other factors for interaction personalization.
- Targeted marketing campaign creation tools (design tools, content blocks, etc.).
- Customer journey management:
-
Creating rule-based interactive customer journeys;
-
Generating activities based on a journey or its stage (e.g., a phone call, a contextual message);
-
Customer journey visualization and analysis.
- Automated customer surveys.
AI, analytics and reporting
- Customer data (including feedback) analysis.
- Customer behavior and preferences analysis.
- Customer sentiment analysis.
- CSAT scoring.
- AI-driven recommendations to agents on personalized customer interactions.
- Customizable reports and dashboards.
Customer self-service portals
- Communities/forums to find a way to solve the problem.
- Chatbots for customers’ support without a human agent’s intervention.
Top 5 Customer Engagement Platforms
In this comparison, we highlight the strongest features of 5 platforms to streamline customer interactions with existing clients. The vendors of all the listed products are recognized leaders in Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for the CRM Customer Engagement Center (CEC) 2020.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Best for: advanced multichannel customer engagement
Description
- Customer digital engagement via multiple channels (email, web, chatbot, social media, IoT sensors, etc.).
- Dynamics 365 Customer Insights to capture and analyze behavioral customer data for personalized and relevant customer experience.
- Microsoft Forms Pro to create post-interaction surveys.
- Analysis of positive, negative or neutral customer sentiment with Power BI.
Pricing
- Professional: $50/user/month.
- Enterprise: $95/user/month.
- Virtual Agent add-on: $1,100/tenant/month (for 2,000 user-bot interactions).
- Customer Insights: $1,500/tenant/month.
- Customer Voice: $100/tenant/month (for 2,000 survey responses).
Salesforce Service Cloud
Best for: AI-driven customer engagement management
Description
- Einstein AI to provide recommendations for customer service agents to make customer experience more personalized and increase customer satisfaction.
- Customer engagement with chatbots on real-time communication channels like live chat, and messaging apps like Facebook Messenger and WhatsApp.
- Service Cloud Voice to bring personalized phone experience with voice transcription via pre-integrated Amazon Connect.
Pricing
- Essentials: $25/user/month.
- Professional: $75/user/month.
- Enterprise: $150/user/month.
- Unlimited: $300/user/month.
- Einstein AI & Analytics add-on: $50/user/month.*
- Service Cloud Voice: $75/user/month* (for 750 minutes).
*Requires an annual contract.
Oracle Service
Best for: highly personalized customer interaction
Description
- Unified customer profile based on the info from a wide range of data sources (back-office application data, and second- and third-party data sources).
- Engagement Engine – for capturing customer data and invoking rule-based actions for personalized customer journeys.
- Oracle Intelligent Advisor to deliver AI-driven next-best action recommendations for agents.
Pricing
Prices are available by direct request to Oracle.
Pega Customer Service
Best for: agile customer engagement processes
Description
- Unified messaging to handle interactions across digital channels (live chat, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, Apple Business Chat, WhatsApp, and SMS).
- Customer Empathy Advisor to analyze customer interactions, determine the level of customer empathy, and automatically assess which actions cause the most trust from customers.
Pricing
Prices are available by direct request to Pega.
Zendesk Support Suite
Best for: omnichannel customer engagement
Description
- Social engagement - customers can engage with a brand from the favorite messaging apps (e.g., WhatsApp, WeChat, LINE, Facebook Messenger, and Twitter Direct Messages).
- Customer context – relevant details from the customer interaction history, which allow for personalized customer service.
- Zendesk Talk to help customers over the phone.
Pricing
Prices are available by direct request to Zendesk.
Implementation of Customer Engagement Software
Customer engagement software consulting
- Defining an optimal feature set for a customer engagement solution.
- Recommending the most suitable platform.
- Suggesting necessary customizations and integrations.
- Drawing up the implementation plan.
- Estimating implementation cost and time.
Customer engagement software implementation
- Analyzing your customer engagement needs.
- Selecting fitting platform-based customer engagement software.
- Customer engagement platform configuration and customization, OR
- Custom development of a customer engagement solution.
- Integration with other systems (e.g., ERP, CRM, business intelligence, etc.).
- User training and after-launch support.
About ScienceSoft
ScienceSoft is a global IT consulting and IT service company based in the US with 34 years of history and a team of 750+ IT professionals on board. We help our customers implement CRM software and offer a full cycle of relevant services, from consulting to post-launch support. Contact us to know more about customer engagement software.