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Customer Engagement Software and Strategies for Enterprises

October 27th, 2022 21 min read

Effective customer engagement is essential for any business. Large enterprises have more resources than smaller companies but need to engage their audience on a larger scale. Strong, positive engagement strategies can keep existing customers happy and help you attract new ones.

We’ll explore the features and strategies your enterprise should consider for customer engagement. We’ll also review some of the most popular customer engagement tools for enterprises. The tools we cover are:

  • Adobe Experience Manager
  • Braze
  • Iterable
  • Salesforce
  • Salesforce Experience Cloud
  • Salesforce Service Cloud
  • SAP Service Cloud

To learn more about the importance of customer engagement for your enterprise, check out our definitional piece: 

Customer Engagement Features for Enterprises

In our post on Customer Engagement Software for Small Businesses, we went over the main benefits you can expect from these platforms. For a small business, features like apps, loyalty programs, contact centers, or live chat may be the icing on the cake. If you’re an enterprise, these capabilities become indispensable for engaging customers.

Customer Engagement Platforms are essential when it comes to building a customer engagement strategy.

Promoting Customer Loyalty

Enterprises need to always look for new ways to keep their most loyal customers satisfied and maximize customer retention. In many cases, this means establishing and maintaining a customer loyalty program. Good loyalty programs partner with other organizations to offer perks, discounts, and even cash back. Better benefits mean incentives for loyal customers, and this will increase brand loyalty.

Customer Support for Enterprises

Customer support is important for any business, but the stakes are even higher for an enterprise. The larger a business becomes, the higher customer expectations will be when it comes to service quality and availability. Most of us naturally give smaller stores a bit of a break, but large corporations lose that benefit. They’ll expect to be able to contact your associates easily and hassle-free, and have very little patience for errors.  

Contact center and live chat tools can help you stay connected to customers. They can streamline both sales and troubleshooting. Chatbots have become more common, though many buyers would much rather talk to a live rep. These are key features for enterprises to look for in their customer engagement software. If used well, they’ll help your support team keep track of many accounts at the same time.                                  

Cross-Channel Customer Experience

Enterprises need to be prepared to interact with customers using a variety of touchpoints. These include:

  • Apps
  • Email
  • Social media
  • Live chat
  • Webinars
  • Websites         

As an enterprise, you need to optimize the customer experience on all your channels. Mapping the steps your buyers take throughout the customer lifecycle can provide insights that show how customers engage with your brand. This will help you identify bottlenecks in the user experience and optimize your ad spend.  

Customer journey analytics lets you track metrics like bounce rate and click-through rate. Compare conversion rates on your different channels to figure out the best way to use your marketing budget. This level of granular tracking is indispensable for enterprises. 

Personalize Your Communications     

Personalized messaging is key for bonding with customers. Customers should be mentioned by name as much as possible, and you should reference their service or buying history in your messaging. This will convey to customers that you’re paying special attention to their needs.

These customer interactions can be carried out through email, SMS, push notifications, or direct messages on your website. Customizable templates to tailor content to your target audience. The “customizable” is key in this, as customers can often spot a template email a mile away, especially those in B2B spaces. Make sure to make yours unique, with a relaxed tone and cliche-avoidant language.

This simplifies the creation of personalized messages within your email and in-app campaigns. sending out personalized messages within your email campaigns. Chatbots and live chat can use customer data and contact history to personalize responses.

All of this adds a personal touch to your interactions that will make your customers feel more valued. 

Enterprise Knowledge Bases

If you have many product lines or offer software with diverse capabilities, you need to be very clear about the solutions you can provide. Many customers do their own research before contacting sales or service reps. Offering a wide range of self-service options can cater to these customers in a way that not only matches their preference but saves your reps time. If customers can find what they’re looking for, their confidence in your brand will go up. 

A knowledge base is a collection of articles, guides, FAQs, and discussion boards where users can find answers about your products and the pain points you can resolve. Don’t be afraid to use social channels like Reddit and Twitter. Including links to articles and discussions by users, for users, can be extremely useful. Providing practical and accessible information will increase engagement and customer satisfaction. It also lowers customer service costs.

Engage Customers to Expand Market Share

Customer engagement has strong elements of sales and customer success, especially for enterprises. While a loyalty program does do a lot for customer retention, you’ll also need to reach out to clients and keep in touch with them more directly. That’s where having a strong CRM tool comes in. 

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Large enterprises tend to have a lot of clients, far too many for even the most over-achieving rep to remember every detail. Many of these customers can also be quite demanding. Enterprise sales are often big-dollar deals, and when paying such a price, customers expect rapid engagement and personalized attention. This is true no matter what you’re selling. 

Native CRM tools are frequently included in customer engagement software. If not, they should offer third-party integrations that have this capability. If they don’t, look at another software option, as this is a highly competitive space.     

For more insights on CRM, including a comparison of some of the best software available today, check out our review of the top 5 CRM software in 2022:

Customer Engagement Platforms for Enterprises

Some vendors offer enterprise plans alongside other packages with fewer features. Other software offers customized plans, with pricing that varies depending on selected features and scale of use. Here are 7 of the best Customer Engagement Platforms (CEP) on the market with reviewer feedback from enterprise customers on TrustRadius. We’ll take an in-depth look at each. 

ProducttrScoreProsCons

Adobe Experience Manager

7.9/10
Asset management
Headless content delivery
Content customization
Streamlined
Learning curve
Customer support
Price
Braze


8.2/10
Enterprise customer support
Customer communications
Integrations
User tracking and targeting
Campaign changes
Search functionality
Iterable


8.4/10
Customer segmentation
Drip email automation
Template personalization
Scalability
ReportingLanding pagesForms
Salesforce
8.0/10
Pipeline management
Ticket creation and submission
Conversation tracking
Learning curveThird-party integrationsPricing
Salesforce Experience Cloud
7.7/10
Web portals
Communities
Customization
Service process automation
Pricing
Out-of-the-box features
Salesforce Service Cloud
8.5/10

Interaction tracking
Ticketing system 
Collaborative workflows

Reporting
Learning curve
Customer support
SAP Service Cloud
9.4/10

Customer journey mapping
Customer communications
Purchasing pattern
Mobile app
Loading times
Data visualization

Adobe Experience Manager

Adobe Experience Manager is Top Rated on TrustRadius in 2022 for several use cases, as shown below. 

Experience Manager is a CMS software specializing in the storage and distribution of digital assets. This software is ideal if you produce or curate content on multiple websites or channels to streamline the user experience. Managed service providers also use this tool to build and maintain websites for their customers. It’s part of a large suite of products that integrate well with each other, though largely with separate licensing costs.       

Reviewers highlighted capabilities like the drag-and-drop interface, headless content delivery, and streamlined team workflows. Some reviewers mentioned that the software did have a bit of a learning curve, especially for development. Others found that support from the Adobe team was either lacking or a bit slow.        

Salesforce 

The CRM giant Salesforce offers three different software solutions for enterprise customer engagement. In addition to the vanilla version of Salesforce, the Service Cloud and Experience Cloud products have customer engagement capabilities that you’ll find useful. These complementary products use CRM data to improve customer service and the user experience.  

Salesforce ui

The standard Salesforce product was Top Rated on TrustRadius in 2022 for CRM and Customer Engagement. Primary capabilities include pipeline management, activity logging, and customer data storage. The Enterprise Plan also offers sales forecasting, workflow automation, and rules-based lead scoring. With the Unlimited Plan, you also get 24-hour customer support. 

TrustRadius reviewers gave high marks to the reporting, pipeline management, and prospecting tools. Customer service was also highly rated. Areas for improvement included a high learning curve, integrations, and price for those who need to have several users accessing the software.       

Salesforce Service Cloud

Salesforce Service Cloud is a Help Desk tool focused on providing enterprises with tools to offer great customer service. This software received 2022 Top Rated awards for both customer engagement and help desk software. 

You can use this software to integrate chatbots and instant messaging into your website. You can also log tickets, generate service requests, and track form submissions. The search features also help agents dig up customer information to resolve service requests much faster. Tickets can be opened directly from emails. Related tickets can be linked, facilitating collaboration workflows. 

Favorite features include instant messaging, user access controls, dashboards, templates, and interaction tracking. Several reviewers like this Project Manager also claimed to have improved account visibility with Service Cloud. There were mixed reviews for usability and deployment, with some buyers finding it tough to get started with the software. Customer support was also called out for needed improvements. This was also the case with reporting functionality, especially for historical data.         

Salesforce Experience Cloud

Salesforce Experience Cloud is a Digital Experience Platform that also won Top Rated Awards for Community and Customer Engagement. This tool seeks to help users improve connections to their customers online. It allows you to create, manage, and share content with customers. The platform offers low-code and APIs for apps, websites, and campaign landing pages. You can even set up personalized portals for both customers and employees.  

This software can also help you organize a knowledge base to give your customers resources for self-service. Enterprise users appreciate the flexibility to customize apps and processes via API integrations. 

TrustRadius reviewers particularly liked the web portals, communities, and service automation to deliver personalized communications. Some users found the pricing model to be expensive. Others felt Experience Cloud lacked some no-code out-of-the-box templates. These users reported requiring third-party integrations or a high degree of development to meet their needs.      

Iterable

Iterable is a Marketing Automation software that specializes in cross-channel marketing personalization. This tool centralizes customer data and catalogs content used to interact with customers. 

The Studio feature allows users to build automated omnichannel campaigns for personalized content. These campaigns can be executed through the app, email, SMS, and push notifications. Brand Affinity leverages customer sentiment data to optimize interactions on a personal level. 

Iterable ui

Reviewers highlighted several features. These include email automation, segmentation, template personalization, and the scalability of the software. Some reviewers also mentioned the inability to create forms and host landing pages, as well as a lack of reporting capabilities.    

Braze

Braze specializes in providing Mobile Marketing and Push Notifications solutions for customer engagement. In-app and email campaigns promote products or services and encourage customers to take action. Customer data can be tracked and user groups can be segmented and targeted based on their profiles.  

Braze ui

Reviewers liked the integrations, customer communications, customer support, and user tracking and targeting. Some critics pointed to the inability to change conversion events without re-launching campaigns. The search functionality also had some detractors. 

SAP Service Cloud

SAP Service Cloud is a Top Rated customer engagement platform that specializes in customer service and tracking cross-channel interactions. You can use SAP to interact with customers via calls, live chat, messaging apps, email, and social media. Customer identification is automated based on interaction history. You can also set up chatbots and self-service knowledge bases. This tool leverages AI for communications and support throughout the customer journey.  

SAP service cloud ui

Users on TrustRadius gave high marks to features like customer journey mapping, customer communications, and the platform’s ability to track purchasing patterns. Areas for improvement included the mobile app, data loading times, and data visualization. 

Customer Engagement to Improve Business Outcomes

Enterprises can expect many benefits from using customer engagement software. Improved engagement practices lead to increased customer satisfaction and retention. Over time, customer loyalty to your brand will also increase. Keeping your customer base satisfied will boost your long-term profitability and ROI.    

TrustRadius helps enterprises find the B2B software they need to stay on top. Product reviews can also provide powerful social proof from verified users and insights for product development. Visit TrustRadius to see what software buyers are saying about Customer Engagement Platforms. If you’ve used any of these tools, please leave a review! Your valuable feedback can help vendors improve their products and buyers make more informed decisions. 

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