Choosing the best customer engagement platform for your needs can make a massive difference in the success of your SaaS business. Knowing how your customers feel and what they’re thinking is essential for their satisfaction and your revenue growth. The best way to gain this information is through customer engagement. Onboarding is one of the first times your customer engages with your business. The right customer engagement software can optimize your onboarding process and help promote experiences that lead to customer renewal.
In this blog, we’ll provide a guide to choosing the right digital engagement platform for your business needs. First, we’ll look at what customer engagement systems do and why you need one. Then we’ll consider what to look for in an engagement platform. Finally, we’ll look at six of the best customer engagement tools and how you can use them to promote better interactions with your customers.
Why You Need a Customer Engagement Platform
Customer engagement platforms are automation solutions that help you monitor, manage and optimize your client interactions. They can be used to collect valuable data and share practical information with customers. They can take several forms, including:
- In-app guides
- Video tutorials and transcripts
- Learning management system (LMS) platforms
- Customer support platforms
- Customer success software
These various tools help facilitate interactions between you and your clients by enabling you to monitor customer activity, letting you carry on conversations and helping you deliver support. This lets you keep a pulse on what your customers are doing, how they’re feeling and what they may need help with. In the onboarding stage, this can be particularly helpful for assisting customers through common onboarding issues.
What to Look for in a Customer Engagement Platform
When exploring customer engagement systems, here are a few key features to consider:
- Customer data coverage: does the platform support the communication channels you need covered (email, in-app communication, web, video, social media, etc.)?
- Ease of use: how user-friendly is the platform?
- Automation efficiency: can the platform be used to automate repetitive tasks, such as triggering support messages and emails when customers encounter issues?
- Customer support: what kind of support does the provider offer?
- Integrations: does the platform integrate with other tools you’re using to engage customers, such as your live chat app or email autoresponder?
- Price: how does the cost of the platform stack up against other options and your return on investment?
Use this checklist when considering customer engagement options. Depending on your needs, you may have other customized criteria in addition to these.
Six of the Best Customer Engagement Platforms for Onboarding
During the onboarding process, several categories of tools can help you engage customers as they learn how to use your product and encounter frequently asked questions. Some of the most important tool categories and representative providers include:
- In-app guides: Whatfix
- Video tutorials: Vidyard
- Video transcripts: Trint
- Learning management system (LMS) tools: Lessonly
- Customer support: Zendesk knowledge bases
- Customer success software: Totango onboarding tools
Here’s how each of these tools can help you deliver a smoother onboarding experience.
1. In-app Guides: Whatfix
In-app messaging tools deliver notifications to customers while working in your mobile or desktop app. They can be configured to provide contextual notifications targeted to communicate with users engaged in specific actions. This can be useful for delivering information to help users with onboarding issues they’re currently experiencing. In-app support can be provided through tooltips, pop-ups, task lists or live chat.
Whatfix is one of today’s leading in-app guidance platforms. It uses artificial intelligence to analyze customer use of apps and help content. The platform also allows you to build and publish help content. Help content then can be delivered through in-app notifications as well as tutorials and on-demand contextual support.
2. Video Tutorials: Vidyard
Videos offer an efficient way to convey visual information like screenshots combined with auditory guidance. This can be invaluable for guiding customers through the onboarding phase and delivering ongoing support.
Vidyard provides a platform designed to help sales teams record and send videos as well as analyze user video engagement patterns. While geared toward sales teams, this also can be useful for customer support and success teams as they deliver assistance during the onboarding phase.
3. Video Transcripts: Trint
Through transcripts, video content can be repurposed into other formats, such as knowledge bases. Trint is an automated transcription platform that allows users to convert video and audio content into text that can be searched, edited, and shared.
4. LMS Tools: Lessonly
Learning management system platforms are apps used to share educational content, provide digital classroom environments, administer tests and track learning progress. They are used in both academic and business contexts. They can serve as valuable tools for delivering onboarding training.
One of the leading business LMS platforms is Lessonly. It allows content to be delivered through screen sharing, audio and webcams. Learners can engage in practice exercises and receive certifications. Lessonly provides solutions specialized for customer service, sales, talent management, remote work and enterprise users.
5. Customer Support: Zendesk Knowledge Bases
Knowledge bases allow you to provide users with online content they can use to learn about product features and find answers to frequently asked questions. This can assist your onboarding process by giving you resources that new users can turn to and consult for self-service.
Zendesk is a customer support platform that includes knowledge base features. Templates and rich formatting make it easy to create readable articles which can be searched and referenced on community forums. Analytics and feedback tools allow you to monitor how customers are using your knowledge base so you can make improvements.
6. Customer Success Software: Totango – Manage Onboarding Projects [SuccessBLOC]
Customer success platforms help you automate the delivery of outcomes that align with your client’s goals. Totango’s customer success software offers pre-built modules, called “SuccessBLOCs,” that are based on customer success best practices. Totango’s SuccessBLOCs are designed to help you design, build, run and measure your entire customer journey in real time.
With a SuccessBLOC dedicated entirely to helping you Manage Onboarding Projects, Totango enables you to create a smooth and efficient onboarding experience for customers, which will have positive impacts on product adoption, CSAT, retention, advocacy, and ultimately, revenue.
Totango’s Onboarding toolkit sets you up for success right away. Stages during the onboarding journey are already identified for you, and you can easily edit them to customize to your needs. You also get full access to recommended goals and KPI’s to help you track your onboarding progress, customer segments to break down users and accounts, SuccessPlays that trigger workflows to address a variety of scenarios, and campaigns so you can design and manage automated email communications throughout the onboarding process.
Choose the Best Customer Engagement Platform for Your Needs
Customer engagement platforms help you monitor and manage client interactions, facilitating communication and cooperation between you and your customers for a smoother onboarding experience. When choosing customer engagement software features to evaluate, include data coverage, user-friendliness, efficiency, support, integrations and price. Important categories of tools include in-app guides, video tutorials, video transcripts, learning management systems, customer support software and customer success platforms.
