Enterprise Checklist for Buying a Customer Engagement Platform (CEP)

A Customer Engagement Platform (CEP) serves as a unified hub for managing, enhancing, monitoring, and evaluating all customer interactions across various touch points during the customer journey. It enables brands to offer a customized and enjoyable experience by facilitating customer communication, tracking behavior patterns, analyzing data, personalizing and testing campaigns, and guaranteeing maximum customer engagement. Additionally, this platform assists in making account-based revenue teams more efficient by boosting effectiveness in areas such as customer acquisition, retention, and upselling.

By streamlining workflows, improving collaboration and automating repetitive tasks, Customer Engagement Platforms allow your marketing and customer service teams to focus on strategies that drive long term growth. In the absence of a Customer Engagement Platform, your teams end up spending a great deal of time and effort on optimizing engagement activities. By simply integrating an engagement platform, you can improve your team’s efficiency to make data-backed decisions and boost engagement metrics multi-fold. You can drive efficient revenue growth, deliver seamless customer experience, improve loyalty, increase subscribers, arrest churn, shorten purchase cycles, improve cross/up-sell opportunities, and carve unique brand recognition.

When considering the advantages and disadvantages of adopting a customer engagement platform, remember to include potential revenue losses due to overlooked sales chances, the strain of manual data entry and processes, the collapse of teamwork across departments, and the failure to deliver a tailored, specific experience to every customer. If you recognize any of the following issues, it’s crucial to put in place a customer engagement platform:

• Business processes that are ineffective and yield low productivity
• Poor collaboration and responsibility among team members
• A deficiency in data analysis and actionable insights
• Unexploited potential for sales and market opportunities
• Doubtful levels of customer satisfaction
• The possibility for business expansion and growth

The primary distinction between a point solution and an integrated platform lies in their capacity for adaptability and expansion. Point solutions focus on addressing a specific functional deficiency within a particular channel through the use of top-tier features. Conversely, an integrated platform tackles various scenarios and can be deployed across different operational areas of the business.

The issue with employing a point solution for your omnichannel engagement is the potential creation of organizational compartments that restrict comprehensive access to customer information and processes that span across channels. In the current business environment, where both consumers and companies value a seamless and cohesive experience throughout all touch points, the compartmentalized approach provided by point solutions is inadvisable.

Implementing any new tool can be a task in itself. For a customer engagement platform, once the core capabilities are identified, it’s important to look at the implementation plan that will be put in place. Inside the checklist, you will find a list of steps and questions to consider regarding implementation.

The choice should be made after careful evaluation of aspects such as the total cost of ownership, the frequency of update releases, and the level of support provided, among other considerations. Opting to ‘build’ may appear less expensive initially, but over time, the cumulative costs of development, integration, and infrastructure can mount, resulting in a higher total cost of ownership. On the other hand, choosing to ‘buy’ can lead to considerable savings due to a predictable licensing fee structure. The ‘build’ approach often leads to slower update cycles due to internal dependencies, while the ‘buy’ option can rapidly bring your product to market thanks to the pre-existing, ready-to-launch platform. Additionally, third-party solutions typically offer specialized IT and marketing support, along with other service offerings.