Combine Your CRM with an Digital Engagement Platform
for the Best Results
“What is the difference between a CRM and a Digital Engagement Platform? Why do I need to have both?”
This question is very common when we meet with customers. Let us explain why you should combine these systems to achieve the best result and customer experience.
CRM platforms often comes with some basic customer interaction feature, such as chat. At a first glance, you might think that’s enough for your current needs, so why also buy a Digital Engagement Platform?
In 2019, offering your customers a basic chat is not good enough if you want to deliver a great CX
Let’s define “engagement needs”. Just offering your customers a chat channel is not what we define as modern digital engagement. It’s just another channel and doesn’t take advantage of visitors’ digital journey’s, customer profiles, business potential or the different skills and availability of the people in your organization.
To get the most out of your customers digital journey’s, you need to track and analyze their behavior in real time to understand what the best action and way to interact is for that visitor, at that moment. You also need to understand what tools to use in your digital engagement platform for that specific customer and journey is…. It might be chat but it can also be a booked digital meeting, video, screen sharing or Co-Browsing, features that you won’t find in a CRM.
Different Solutions Work Best for Their Designed Purpose
Below is a simple explanation:
A CRM is a “System of records”, it’s meant to handle and process customer data, history, transactions etc.
A Digital Engagement Platform is a “System of interactions”, it’s meant to monitor and analyze customer journeys, and offer digital support in the most efficient way.
Combine Your CRM with a Digital Engagement Platform for the Best Results
Integrating your Digital Engagement Platform with your CRM will give you great possibilities to prioritize and enrich your customers digital experience and also understand when and why to interact proactively with a customer. The combination of your CRM and Digital Engagement Platform is very powerful and something we really recommend. Conversely, the Digital Engagement Platform populates the CRM with customer data.
No CRM solution is 100% focused on digital journeys and interactions. Therefore, a CRM will never be able to support a great digital experience in the same way as a dedicated Digital Engagement Platform can. A mentioned before, a Digital Engagement Platform provides advanced interaction tools, such as co-browsing, video chat, shared documents, screen sharing, proactive rule engines (triggers), real-time site visitor monitoring, etc.
Change the Control from IT to Marketing and Customer Support
Changing engagement setups in a CRM often requires the involvement of IT departments resulting in long handling time and missed opportunities.
A Digital Engagement Platform is much faster to re-configure so that it reacts to new customer behavior, campaigns or A/B testing in real-time and can be handled by marketing or customer support departments making “on the fly” changes possible.
Sudden market changes or temporary campaigns makes it necessary for the marketing or customer support departments to be able to configure triggers and interactions quickly on your website, without IT involvement.
