10 Customer Engagement App Options (plus How to Create One) |
The women's clothing brand Oiselle sought an opportunity to engage with its customers, it created something powerful called a mobile app for customer engagement. The end result was Oiselle Volee which was a brand-name application that combines an online community of customers with classes and events. The app brought together more than 3,500 users to get inspired, meet new people as they shared their journeys to fitness.
When they created the app, Oiselle discovered that their customer engagement community did more than connect users. The app also provided useful insights on what consumers desired from their brands and they received an immediate feedback loop as well as concepts for products they may not have considered otherwise.
It's a customer-engagement app that paid off.
If you are building a brand, engagement with customers is a crucial part of creating trust among your customers. An analysis by Salesforce found that 95% of their customers claim to be loyal to companies they trust. It also found that 84% of consumers say they will offer their services to a business which treats them with respect. name-not a number.
It makes engagement with customers a central part of your brand's growth strategy. But it can also difficult and daunting to create real engagement with your customers and to keep it up when you grow.
In this post we'll look at ways to improve customer satisfaction using applications. We'll discuss 10 customer engagement apps every brand should know about, and we'll even guide you on the steps to create your own like Oiselle has done.
Test these out for size, and watch your real connections with customers increase customer satisfaction, sales, and even retention.
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What is the term "customer engagement"?
Customer engagement is the process of creating lasting relationships between brands and its clients. It could mean offering the value of a brand to new customers, offering more to customers already in the market, or communicating with customers who have been there. Good customer engagement means taking into consideration customers as much more than just a sale transaction and focusing on building relationships with them over time instead.
Customer engagement is closely related to a concept called "Customer life-time value" - it recognizes that the value of a consumer is more than the value of one transaction and that repeat business and/or retention of customers are an essential aspect of any brand!
Making connections with your customers via engaging with them is an essential part of great marketing. This helps brands increase awareness and to better understand their customers. Like the legendary Peter Drucker once said, "The aim of marketing is knowing and comprehend the consumer so well your product fits them perfectly and sells itself. Marketing's goal is to make selling superfluous ."
10 customer engagement app options
1. Mighty Pro
Best for customer communities
Mighty Pro builds powerful customer community applications under your name. It is able to integrate options like community course, commerce and more. And Mighty can also let you provide live streaming of live events, discussions forums, short and long-form material, as well as more.
The best part is that Mighty empowers your community using an array of tools that are like no other, including our AI community engine: Mighty Co-Host(tm) which gives you powerful engagement tools like automatic landing pages, invite messages, and an Infinite Question Engine to keep the conversation going.
Mighty Pro is perfect for those brands that are currently pushing it out to get attention through social media platforms such as LinkedIn or Twitter, or trying to run a business Facebook page or group. It transforms your social media efforts into a powerful customer engagement device for your company. You can stop fighting the algorithm, stop yelling in the face of social media and actually make real connections with your customers.
We've developed B2C applications for customer engagement, such as brands like Oiselle, that we mentioned in our opening. However, we've also created engagement apps for B2B communities including Mindbody which has a 1,600-member community that is focused on learning their program for health and wellness entrepreneurs.
Using a community for customer engagement is an awesome method to allow customers to connect to each other and create a community to practices, and become proficient with a new product.
2. Salesforce
the best CRM platform
Salesforce isn't a user-facing application, but it's still one of the most effective customer-engagement apps out there. This is due to the fact that Salesforce is a client relationship management (CRM) platform which helps you track every aspect of your relationship with customers such as marketing, sales customers, support and customer service and even the purchase history of your customers. It does all this using a cloud-based platform that you can access from anywhere.
When it comes to building relationships with customers in the first place, the best Salesforce tool is the Sales Cloud, which gives businesses the capability to keep track of leads, automate part of their sales process and gain insights that aid in generating more sales. Create databases of customers, rank leads according to the probability of success and monitor deals-giving you a one-stop shop to understand how customers interact and the way they transform into sales.
The Service Cloud is also a powerful customer engagement tool for the other side of the journey-managing relationships with current customers. The Service Cloud lets you perform cases management, track current customer support requests as well as creating a knowledge base that addresses common issues. Service Cloud is also used to build self-service platform for customers to increase the number of users and improve your customer service even further.
In the end, Salesforce is a user-friendly customer engagement application that a lot of companies will benefit from.
3. Birdeye
The best choice for user monitors of experience
Birdeye provides a reputation and customer experience platform designed specifically for local brands and businesses. Birdeye platform can bring customer experience together with reputation management. Businesses utilize Birdeye's platform as well as app to control online reputation, connect to potential customers via digital channels and gather information about customer experience to boost the sales of their business and grow.
Offering a variety of tools for tracking and improving your online visibility, it's an excellent option for any business who would like to increase good customer experience online, especially with Social Media.
Birdeye is able to perform things such as monitoring social media, meaning that you know what's happening to your company online (and hopefully, engage). Additionally, it lets you control your reviews, and even gives you tools to proactively create positive reviews from satisfied users with things like automated emails or SMS messages.
Finally, Birdeye brings your messaging channels from the social media platforms. It can be used to monitor customer interaction across different platforms. Additionally, it provides the necessary analytics as well as consumer report on sentiment to know the significance of engagements.
Birdeye is a great customer engagement app because it helps you manage your online reputation on social media channels and review sites, and that's valuable.
4. Podium
Local experience for customers monitoring
For those looking for alternatives in the wake of Birdeye, Podium is a excellent choice, though with a local bend. It's a complete consumer experience and communications platform with several feature cross-overs in common with Birdeye.
Like Birdeye like Birdeye, it comes with an automated review system that lets you monitor online reviews, monitor new reviews, and respond to reviews. The program also offers messaging capabilities to a variety of methods, such as Facebook and SMS, which let you deal directly with customers on those platforms.
The software also comes with the option of using native tools for gathering feedback, which means you can get feedback through surveys as well as gain valuable feedback on areas to improve products and services. In addition, it includes a calling tool built in, so you can make phone calls and offers payment options as well.
In the case of a small local business seeking a software that manages your customer experience on the web, Podium is an excellent choice.
5. Reputation
Best for data driven customer experience
As we continue to discuss the tools to manage reputation for better customer engagement, Reputation is one last option. It has reputation management tools and mixes them with an extremely powerful tool for data aggregation to study the experiences for both your brand as well as your competition.
As a result, Reputation generates a ton of feedback from customers, either directly or indirectly, and you can feed these into your business processes. These are then translated to your Reputation Score, and Customer Satisfaction Score, which gives you valuable insights to make business improvement.
Some of the other functions are similar to other reputation management tools. Review and rating tracking on the internet. Involving customers in the creation of feedback and ratings. Monitoring social media. The thing that distinguishes Reputation distinct is the capability of comparison tools to understand your competition as well as the fact that they can create massive customer listening the scale of large corporations.
This is what makes Reputation an effective tool for and understanding the customer's engagement and responding to customers via telephone, SMS, or social media channels.
6. Zendesk
Best customer service app
Leaving the reputation management software behind and focusing on Zendesk. Zendesk is an online customer service platform that lets brands manage customer relations over a wide range of channels. With Zendesk assistance, you'll be able to respond to support queries via email, chat as well as social media. Zendesk supports built-in messaging as well, so your agents can engage directly with customers via the application.
Zendesk allows you to create tickets and monitor the replies to them, thus providing a single-stop solution for customer support. It also allows you to record these, assign them to your team and then mark them as solved once they've been dealt with. There are also lots of automation features built in to help you serve customers efficiently, and you get important information on issues like your agents' customer service performance and customer satisfaction.
7. Pendo
Best for improving user engagement
In terms of customer engagement apps that track the user's experience as well as how they engage with your applications and products, Pendo is a really cool app to help you engage with your customers. It basically offers actionable insights on how your customers utilize your services, and you can gather information and feedback from it. It also includes user-specific feedback collection.
Digital and brand-owned businesses may make use of Pendo to create survey and feedback tools, as well as targeted messages and product walkthroughs. Customers are also separated, which means you are able to send specific groups of customers at once.
8. Amplitude Analytics
Best for product experience data collection
Amplitude Analytics is a customer engagement tool that concentrates on analytics. It looks at how consumers use your digital offerings and services, and monitors engagement, actions, and events to help to make informed decisions regarding your offerings.
One great feature is that it comes with a funnel analytics tool that is built into it, that will help firm understand its customer purchase journey using the data. The data can be used to find bottlenecks, potential opportunities for things like upsells or even downsells. It could increase conversion rates while mapping your customer journey.
Similar to a number of different tools listed above Amplitude offers data visualization and reporting options with a variety of charts and graphs to help you visualize the customers' travels.
An application like this is perfect for boosting customer satisfaction particularly because it is able to identify areas in your funnel that are not performing and may require additional interactions.
9. Hubspot
The best way to integrate a CRM with marketing tools
HubSpot is a top-rated Customer Relationship Management (CRM) platform that mixes an extremely functional CRM and marketing tools and customer service. If you integrate your CRM data with your marketing activities this has the capability to completely transform customer engagement.
By using the CRM, you'll have the ability to manage the customer journeys of your clients and track interactions, sales, and activities. Inbound marketing tools allow you to create contents that are able to convert and link to your Sales Hub. The Marketing Hub lets you develop a website and control your content, integrated with your social media accounts and email marketing. There are many complementary tools here for things like lead generation and automation-basically letting you create a wrap-around user journey.
When a lead has been passed to your sales team, they'll be able to utilize Sales Hub to track contacts with them, meetings, and also to track analytics. The Service Hub even gives you a set of customer support tools that allow ticketing, live chat support and sharing your knowledge collection, as well as taking feedback as well as running surveys.
With all the complex features, Hubspot is relatively easy to use with a clean interface and user-friendly. For a CRM that also can run campaigns for marketing, track tickets, and manage prospects at once, Hubspot is one of the best.
10. Help Scout
Best for Email Based Customer Support
We're going to round this list out with an tool for email engagement that comes with customer support built in. Many brands have made the use of email a component of customer support, and there's the place Help Scout is userful. Businesses who wish to be in their customers often It offers you a variety of ways to build email.
As an example sharing inbox functions will allow your team to collaborate on responses and inquiries, team members can collaborate to monitor the status of tickets, assign tasks and add notes to the customer's files.
On top of the shared mailbox, Help Scout also includes other tools for communication, such as live chats and in-app messaging. This is a great instrument to your team in managing the engagement of customers. The tool also links nicely with your database of knowledge, which means it's easy to link your clients to information to help solve their issues.
Like many of these programs they also offer the tools for evaluating things like the speed of response, satisfaction with customers, and productivity.
Steps to build an app that engages customers
A lot of the applications on this list are amazing tools for managing your customers' engagement. But there aren't many which let you establish strong relationships with your customers in person.
This is the reason why Mighty Pro is unique. In case you're planning to build a customer community application that is your own and observe your customers' engagement grow, here's the steps to create your own.
1. Plan a kickoff conference. We'll demonstrate some of our amazing user-generated apps for engagement with customers that we've created and guide you to identify the features you're searching for. Then we create a plan of action to work with you.
2. Making the app. We'll take care of this portion. Bring your logo and we'll build the app, adding things such as splash screens, logos as well as your own branding features.
3. Training on the product. Our team will train your employees on how to be successful with your app, including issues like moving members around and comprehending analytics.
4. Applications are complete. Once your app is done, we'll help you populate it with content that is compatible with the brand you're trying to establish.
5. Develop a strategy for launching. While your app is in the process of being developed and you are getting ready for launch-this might include things like sharing on social media or inviting existing customers via emails.
6. Day of Launch we will take care of making your application live on the App Store and Google Play Store. It is possible to see the first users begin to join.
7. Ongoing VIP support. We aren't content to just develop your application. We are there for you with regular strategy calls and help with any issues that could come on your behalf and assisting you in being proactive on product training.
Ready to start?
If you're looking to create an online community for customers under your brand name, and in which you make customer engagement a reality contact us. We'll demonstrate how a customer community on Mighty can be unlike any other.