Having the best products or delivering the best services doesn’t give your customers enough of a reason to continue doing business with you. Beyond simple transactions, customers need a specialized and personalized message that makes them feel valued and engaged — which is why today’s leading organizations are increasingly relying on customer engagement tools.
A customer engagement tool offers several features — like email marketing, communication tools, live chat, chatbots, and data analytics — to help businesses create a seamless dialogue with customers, build relationships, and otherwise enhance customer satisfaction and loyalty.
By investing in customer engagement tools, you can optimize your approach to handling the 4 Ps of customer engagement.
What are the 4 Ps of Customer Engagement?
The 4Ps of customer engagement shift the focus from the traditional 4Ps of marketing from the company to customers and their experiences. By understanding the 4 Ps of customer engagement, you can increase the chances that your business has more productive and engaging conversations with customers and prospects alike.
Personalization
Personalization helps to create a sense of value and relevance to customers by tailoring messages, experiences, and offerings to each customer based on their unique preferences, needs, and wants.
Proactivity
Proactive participation fosters a sense of ownership and involvement. By anticipating customer needs before they arise — as well as offering solutions to their problems — businesses display a high level of attentiveness and foresight, which translates into trust and satisfaction.
Promotion
Offering occasional incentives and discounts keeps customers loyal and engaged, encouraging them to reach a little deeper into their wallets to take advantage of a good deal.
Proximity
Building a collaborative relationship with customers by being accessible and available helps the business grow, since customers will have a seamless and convenient customer journey.
Customer Engagement Tools to Know
Customer engagement tools come in all shapes and sizes. For the purposes of this piece, we’ll examine some of the more popular categories:
- Messaging and communications platforms
- Email marketing and campaign management software
- CRM and sales engagement tools
Messaging and Communications Platforms
Messaging and communications platforms are digital tools that enable individuals and businesses to streamline internal collaboration, connect with customers in real time, and automate recurring workflows. These platforms support various communication channels (e.g., WhatsApp, SMS, and live chat) and collaboration tools (e.g., Slack and Microsoft Teams).
Twilio
Twilio is a cloud-based communication platform that supports multiple channels (e.g., email, WhatsApp, and SMS) by providing application programming interfaces (APIs) to developers that enable them to add functionalities to their communication and messaging applications programmatically.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Automate email communications | 1. Create an interactive voice response (IVR) tool with voice APIs | 1. Deliver a scalable communication solution |
| 2. Send and receive text messages globally | 2. Accelerate customer communications by offering a medium they prefer to use | 2. Seamless integration with support tools and CRM, with two-factor authentication (2FA) for stronger security |
| 3. Embed communications functionalities into the app with the help of APIs | 3. Automate notifications, such as appointment reminders | 3. Enable businesses to reach their customers effectively |
| 4. Manage phone calls programmatically | 4. Customer support via voice calls or through WhatsApp | 4. Support for multiple carriers, giving customers the freedom to choose whichever they prefer |
Slack
Slack is a channel-based team communication tool that enables real-time messaging, file sharing, and project management.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Screen sharing and huddles | 1. Internal team communications | 1. Enhance productivity |
| 2. Organize discussions by topic, project, and team | 2. Project management | 2. Streamlines internal collaboration |
| 3. Integrates with popular tools like Microsoft 365, Google Drive, and Dropbox for easier file sharing of documents and other files | 3. Customer support coordination by collating and sharing customer feedback with relevant teams | 3. Accelerates decision-making |
| 4. Search functionality that enables you to search for past conversations, links, and files | 4. Knowledge base | 4. Reduce email clutter by structuring conversations that are easily searchable |
Freshchat
Freshchat (by Freshworks) is a modern and dynamic conversational messaging system designed for customer engagement that allows businesses to interact with customers in real-time on mobile apps and their websites.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Targeted campaigns | 1. Proactive lead generation | 1. Engaging potential customers early on |
| 2. Combine multiple messaging platforms like WhatsApp, social media, and email in one inbox | 2. Real-time customer support across channels | 2. Unified inbox for all customer interactions to minimize context switching |
| 3. Converts chats into support tickets | 3. Post-sales engagement | 3. Ensure customer success |
Email Marketing and Campaign Management
Email marketing and campaign management is a digital strategy that involves planning, executing, tracking, and analyzing emails sent to prospects and customers to share news or nurture leads.
Campaign Monitor
Campaign Monitor is an easy-to-use and intuitive email marketing platform that helps businesses and marketers manage subscribers by automating email campaigns and making them easy to track.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Analytics to, e.g., track open and click-through rates | 1. Abandoned cart recovery by automating a reminder email with product images and discounts | 1. More revenue |
| 2. Design a professional email without coding experience. | 2. Webinar promotion with a targeted email campaign | 2. Powerful analytics and reporting for continuous improvement |
| 3. Connect with CRM tools and ecommerce platforms. | 3. Audience segmentation | 3. Personalization |
Zoho Campaigns
Zoho Campaigns is used to manage email marketing campaigns and audience segmentation. It’s an accessible yet powerful tool for businesses — especially those already part of a broader Zoho ecosystem — to help create, send, track, and analyze email campaigns.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Advanced segmentation | 1. Promotional and sales campaign | 1. Scalability and growth |
| 2. Marketing automation | 2. Personalized communication at scale | 2. Improved engagement and ROI |
| 3. List management | 3. Lead nurturing | 3. Drive more sales |
Marketo Engage
Marketo Engage is a powerful marketing automation and part of Adobe Experience Cloud that integrates seamlessly with other apps to deliver data-driven and personalized marketing campaigns.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Enables businesses to interact with prospects and customers across multiple channels | 1. Meeting reminders | 1. Higher conversion rate |
| 2. Capture and nurture leads | 2. Send automated reminders to customers who left items in their cart | 2. Improved customer targeting and conversions |
| 3. Seamless integration with popular CRM systems like Salesforce for synchronizing data between sales and marketing teams | 3. Engage customers with tailored offers and discounts based on their purchase histories | 3. Enhanced customer loyalty and retention |
CRM and Sales Engagement Tools
CRM tools are designed to track customer interactions throughout the sales cycle to help sales teams build productive, long-term customer relationships. Similarly, sales engagement tools focus on streamlining the sales process while providing insights into customer engagement efforts.
Pipedrive
Pipedrive is a powerful tool designed to help small and medium businesses manage their sales processes by automating repetitive tasks.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Visual sales pipeline for users to see where deals stand with drag and drop | 1.Sales forecasting | 1. Scalability and growth |
| 2. Real-time reporting on sales cycle length, sales performance, and win rates | 2. Analyze performance based on history and deal progress | 2. Data-driven decision-making |
| 3. Custom integration with many apps with APIs for custom integration | 3. Get notified in real-time about key updates and activities | 3. Operational agility |
Zoho CRM
Zoho CRM is a comprehensive CRM solution that manages customer relationships and streamlines sales, marketing, and customer support processes.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. AI-powered sales assistant for regular insights | 1. Customer support and service | 1. Increased customer retention |
| 2. Good customization | 2. Workflow automation | 2. Build the perfect tool for the job |
| 3. Strong automation for lead scoring | 3. Sales automation | 3. Increased operational efficiency and better sales outcomes |
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a leading customer relationship management (CRM) platform that enables sales teams to track progress, forecast revenue, and gain a 360-degree view of customer interactions. It focuses on lead management, pipeline visibility, and sales automation.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Accurately predict future sales based on historical data and AI-powered insights. | 1. Pipeline forecasting | 1. Predictable revenue |
| 2. Capture, nurture, and track leads using automatic lead scoring to prioritize the most promising prospects | 2. Sales automation by nurturing and following up on leads | 2. Excellent customer relationships |
| 3. Sales engagement tools | 3. Track sales performance with a dashboard to understand where bottlenecks exist in the sales process | 3. Improves sales productivity |
HubSpot CRM
HubSpot is a cloud-based powerful CRM designed for managing customer interactions. Businesses, ranging from small- to medium-sized businesses to large enterprises, use HubSpot as an all-in-one marketing and sales platform to scale their businesses.
| FEATURES | USE CASES | BENEFITS |
| 1. Customizable to match your preferences | 1. Pipeline forecasting to track sales and deals | 1. Scalable |
| 2. Ability to store unlimited contacts | 2. Lead generation and running campaigns | 2. Excellent documentation & customer support |
| 3. Set reminders for calls, meetings, and schedules. | 3. Managing customer feedback | 3. Feature-rich platform |
Workato allows automation and synchronization of data by offering an integration between HubSpot and Braze. Using Workato’s integration, you can connect HubSpot and Braze to trigger campaigns, sync contacts, and enrich profiles.
Importance of the integration
- Automate personalized campaigns
- Improve lead nurturing
- Avoid manual work.
- Closed-loop reporting
- Real-time data sync
How to Choose the Right Customer Engagement Tool
While customer engagement tools can transform your business, not every solution is the same. As you begin searching for tools for your business, consider your business goals, customer touchpoints, and the type of experience you aim to create.
Here are some steps to follow as you begin narrowing down your options:
- Define your goals. The first step is to define your business goals by clarifying why you need a customer engagement tool for your business in the first place. Answering questions — such as what you want to achieve, how to improve customer satisfaction, and how to boost sales conversion — will help you make the right decision.
- Understand your audience. Knowing your audience will help you pick the right customer engagement tool. By understanding your audience, you’ll know things like where they hang out online the most and whether they need real-time support, which will help your decision-making.
- Budget. You might stumble across the best tool in the world, but if you can’t afford it, what good does that do? Study how much each option costs to make sure it fits into your budget.
- Try before you commit. Take the finalists you’re considering for a test drive by trying out the free version of the tools before signing a contract.
Wrapping Up
Implementing a customer engagement tool is a great way to ensure that your exceptional products and services are well-received by customers and prospects — and that your bottom line stays healthy.
By offering features like live chat, personalized messaging, chatbots, and data analytics, customer engagement tools help in building a long-lasting and viable relationship between businesses and customers. In an age where the customer experience is more important than ever before, these tools are indispensable for driving satisfaction and staying competitive.
Workato is an integration platform that offers pre-built connectors and recipes that facilitate the seamless flow of data between the customer engagement tool Braze and HubSpot. By integrating Braze with your CRM, you can improve sales and marketing, enhance personalization, sync customer attributes, unify your marketing and sales data, and streamline workflows — all of which enables you to sell to and engage customers more effectively.
Learn more about how you can connect Braze and HubSpot using Workato.
This post was written by Kamaldeen Lawal. Kamaldeen is a frontend JavaScript developer that loves writing a detailed guide for developers in his free time. He loves to share knowledge about his transition from mechanical engineering to software development to encourage people who love software development and don’t know where to begin.
