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It’s true that call centers or contact centers are not connected to the rest of the organization in the way businesses would like. The lack of disconnect feels even starker when we see how more customer engagement channels emerge on the horizon on a regular basis.
And when there is no synergy between marketing technologies and departments, customer service suffers. Therefore, a need is felt for integration between all customer communication channels and departments so that a connected experience is offered to customers.
This is where the Customer Engagement Hub (CEH) enters the scene – it’s basically an architectural framework that can tie multiple systems together for seamless customer service.
With a CEH, an enterprise can look to engage customers across all channels and through personalized engagement.
In this blog, we will discuss what is next generation customer engagement hub, why is it important for organizations, and how to build one for any enterprise.
What is Customer Engagement Hub (CEH)
The customer engagement hub (CEH) is a technology-powered framework for customer engagement. Its utility lies in tying multiple communication systems together across channels and ensuring contextual customer engagement.
The real purpose of a customer engagement hub is to connect all departments or enable a sync of different key processes such as marketing, sales, and customer service. It can also integrate call centers or contact centers into a seamless journey and unlock their full potential.
One of the major plus points of a customer engagement hub technology is to help enterprises minimize the ever-present technology and data fragmentation and allow them a clear view of their customer’s needs and wants. This is how the CEH proves helpful in delivering value to the empowered omnichannel consumer of modern times.
Why Do Businesses Need a Customer Engagement Hub Technology?
Customers always expect a great experience with the brand. They want the flexibility to contact a business from the channel of choice and get consistent service. However, there is always a disconnect between what customer expects and what is being delivered to them. Thanks to a customer engagement hub, a business can easily strike a balance between diverse aspects of service delivery and ensure value to customers.
There are many reasons why a modern business today may need customer engagement hub technology.
- To minimize the disconnect between channels – In an attempt to boost customer service, many enterprises make the mistake of bringing in too many technologies or channels with no integration roadmap. This dilutes the delivery of service. A customer engagement hub can minimize such a disconnect and ensure a perfect balance between diverse technologies and channels.
- To ensure a seamless experience to customers – Most businesses fail to achieve value with customer interactions despite having the right resources and technology in place. The real problem is that their marketing solutions lack consistency in the way they engage customers or collect data or store data. A CEH can ensure all the systems and solutions maintain a synergy so that a seamless experience is delivered to customers.
- To provide multi-channel support – No business can provide multi-channel support unless it improves the marketing technology and data fragmentation challenges. This is also the reason why marketers fail to get a clear understanding of customers’ needs and want. With a customer engagement hub, it will be effortless to offer context-driven and personalized offers across channels.
Benefits of Next Generation Engagement Hub for Customers
Building a customer engagement hub may look like a challenge at first, but its presence can literally transform the way customer service is delivered. It will not only improve the ROI on the technology framework but can also enhance the experience that is offered to customers.
The benefits of a customer engagement hub are many and some of them include –
- Analyze customer journey – Much of the success of your customer service will depend on how much you understand customers and their journey with your brand. Due to the CEH, it will be easy to connect all solutions and channels and get the analytics in a single place.
- Gain new customers – When there is a customer engagement hub, a business will have complete integration and control of data. And by leveraging the data, personalized offers can be delivered which often results in the form of new customers.
- Retain existing customers – The real value of a CEH is to keep the different parts of the marketing technology framework together. That can help businesses a lot in knowing the sticking point in the customer journey and improving the value of service.
- Offer personalized experiences – A next-generation customer engagement hub can sync all your marketing, sales, and customer service processes, therefore making it easier to get a view of customer analytics and deliver personalized offers in tune with the stages of the customer journey.
5 Key Tips to Build a Customer Engagement Hub
A customer engagement hub needs to be ideal for the purpose. It should integrate every channel and enterprise application with the aim to enhance the customer experience with the brand. And since each organization is unique, it’s important to design a CEH keeping in mind the business philosophy and end goals.
Some of the key tips to building a customer engagement hub technology include –
1. Bridge the Gap Between People, Process, and Technology
It’s important to know that 88% of companies prioritize customer experience in their contact centers. Despite that, there is no sure-shot way to get your customer experience strategy right. Since your business is unique, there has to be a uniquely different method to deliver value to customers across the journey stages.
However, many enterprises are unable to bridge the gap that exists between what customers want and what is delivered to them. These gaps are largely caused by a lack of synchronization between people, processes, or technology, or due to poor service design processes.
So, when such a gap exists within your organization as well, the first priority should always be to fill them before moving ahead with the CEH design. Once the loopholes are fixed, it does not take long to enhance the customer experience strategy for the business.
Tips to align customer service technology
- Never rush to add the latest channels or technology to your customer service design and rather a first attempt to achieve a synergy between the existing ones.
- Take the help of proven CX methods and tools to design future-ready CEH and always maintain pace with the changing times
2. Connect Multiple Channels to Core Enterprise Systems
It’s true that 73% of marketers have a multichannel strategy in place. However, having multiple channels for customer service delivery ceases to be an advantage unless they are all tied together in a technology framework. And if they are not tied, your business will always find it tough to get a complete understanding of customers and their problems.
Even more important thing is the integration of these channels with your core enterprise applications such as a CRM. This is how customer-centric data does not get lost in transition and teams stand a chance to utilize it.
So, as a customer-driven organization, your priority should be on having the ideal analytics platform to get the kind of data it needs for quality support.
How to get your strategy right for analytics?
- Make sure you have an analytic platform that is capable of integrating data from diverse channels and enterprise systems.
- Focus on getting a complete view of the key contact center metrics so that offering personalized service to customers is never a challenge.
3. Adopt an Omnichannel Approach
Customers have a tendency to keep switching between channels for communication with a business. They also expect the business to be available on whatever channel they choose and ensure a consistent and seamless experience.
Maybe for that reason, customer retention rates are some 90% higher for omnichannel compared to a single channel.
From a business point of view, maintaining a multi-channel presence is easier said than done as it involves considerable resources. And even those who do provide that kind of support often fail to manage a sync between channels which ultimately negatively impacts the service performance at many levels.
What is the way out then?
Well, a business should seriously think of investing in an omni-channel customer experience platform to better understand the journey. This will not only help optimize the journey but also ensure value at each stage of the way.
Tip to maintain an omnichannel presence
- Always look for an omni-channel platform that has tons of advanced customer engagement tools such as live chat, chatbot, video chat, etc, and also the integration of data from them all together across channels.
- The platform must ensure personalized and contextual customer experiences across channels and that too, at the right time.
4. Take Advantage of the Service Delivery Management
Delivering a great customer experience is never that easy for any big organization. After all, there are plenty of things to do together, like having a sync between the people and processes, keeping pace with the ever-changing customer’s expectations, and also managing the cost.
With so many operational challenges along the way, only a handful of truly resourceful enterprises can handle the demands of customer service delivery. For the rest, they either fail to deliver value or settle with their limitations.
There is however another way to tackle this challenge head-on – by leveraging managed services and ensuring focus on key operations.
When your business decides to benefit from the service delivery management model, it basically frees itself up from the hassles of operational issues and rather devotes the entire energy to customers.
So, you too can get the most out of the customer engagement hub if you’re ready to experience the different available models of service.
5. Automate Customer communication
Communication is always the key when it comes to engaging customers. If you don’t interact, how can you engage? More importantly, some brands now adopt a proactive approach to reaching out to customers as they believe that engagement starts from the conversation.
For that reason, you should first decide on the channels of choice for customers and then plan the communication in a way that engages customers. Be it social channels or emails or messaging, any medium can be fit for communication as long you’re available.
And when it comes to being available, the best route is to automate and ensure a 24×7 presence for customers. You can make chatbot and live chat as part of your customer service delivery strategy and take a solid step towards winning the trust of prospects.
Best practices for automating customer communication
- Use an omnichannel engagement platform so that you get top-class and AI-powered tools for delivering amazing customer service.
- Automate and streamline all customer communication and ensure that support is available round the clock.
- Ensure a hybrid support structure that automates everyday common questions with a chatbot and keeps the live chat software for handling complex conversations.
Use REVE’s Omnichannel Platform for Building Engagement Hub Technology
Your business needs the support of a quality omnichannel platform if it wants to build a resourceful customer engagement hub. And finding such a platform is not that easy unless you’re ready to research a bit.
With the REVE platform, all your worries are about to end – it has every engagement tool your business needs to deliver value across the customer journey.
You can build an AI-powered chatbot with zero-coding knowledge and take a solid step towards the CEH.
You can also benefit from other amazing tools such as video chat, co-browsing software, etc., and add to the overall experience of the customers.
Plus, our platform helps you offer hybrid support in the form of combining live chat software with a chatbot.
Make Your Engagement Hub Future-ready with the REVE Platform
Customer expectations keep changing with time and businesses that take this important aspect into consideration always perform better than the rest.
Your business too should build the customer engagement hub with a vision for the future as you don’t want a mismatch between what customers want and what you deliver.
With REVE, you get a whole range of powerful engagement tools to ensure amazing service to customers.
You can start a free trial of our top-class tools and see how it fits into your specific needs.
