If you don’t communicate with your customers, you’ll lose your customers.
You have to answer their queries when they don’t know what they’re doing, or reach out to them when you think they might want some help. You need to educate them about all the amazing things you offer that they might not know about.
Keeping your customers engaged is a full-time job.
In fact, it’s a lot more than that! Most companies have at least three departments dedicated to keeping their customers engaged: support, marketing, and sales.
Professional services firms aren’t always this lucky. Often elements of sales and support are folded into the daily work of the lawyers, architects, or financial advisors whose services are driving the business forward.
This can mean the extra marketing or support work is picked up by a small team of staff - often even an army of one! And it’s absolutely paramount that these heroes have the right software to make their jobs easier.
In this Lately article, we’re going to explore the different tools that can help you on your way to keeping those customers of yours happy, even if you’re an army of one. We’ll explore:
A customer engagement platform is a SaaS product that allows businesses to communicate effectively with their existing customers across a range of different channels. Customer engagement can be categorized in many ways: essential and non-essential, direct and broadcast.
Different tools claim different methodologies and approaches to how customers should be reached. However, a customer engagement platform typically intends to communicate to a customer through ways we would normally understand as modes of communication. That is to say, other forms of customer engagement through different UX patterns or non-verbal or textual approaches tend not to fall under the banner of customer engagement as it pertains to this category of SaaS.
Customer engagement can have many purposes. It can be for creating happier customers, dealing with unhappy customers, educating customers, or attracting new customers through programs that evangelize existing customers.
The category of customer engagement is more commonly occupied by companies that operate customer service or customer support software and want to branch out into other touchpoints. However, under the category of customer engagement software, many marketing software solutions exist. These solutions are often more mature in dealing with the broadcast side of engagement, large-scale personalization, and the analytics attached to it.
Other software that can fall into this category might be infrastructural, providing the means to engage with customers rather than it being the core outcome of using their service.
Whether you need a specialist customer engagement tool or an all-in-one customer engagement platform depends on your purposes and use case. Some platforms may be heavily oriented around customer service and customer success, for example.
Many enterprise SaaS products provide services like white-glove onboarding and very attentive customer support. This is a value-add which they provide with their product, and it's a great way to make sure customers are getting the most value out of the product. For a use case like this, an all-in-one customer engagement platform could be very useful in being able to be customer-first with communications, both internal and external.
Alternatively, a large enterprise organization may find itself in the position of having completely opposite motivations and incentives. An organization like that might want best-in-class specialist products for each team to use, with customer service using the best customer service tool and marketing using the best marketing tools.
There are some platforms that will perform very well against benchmarks across multiple product lines, but there will be gaps in their offering. What your organization needs is unique to you, but that doesn't mean it's completely unique. There's a good chance if you're small and want to keep your tool budget low, that you'll be able to find an all-in-one platform that can perform most of, if not all, your needs.
However, if you're growing and trying to achieve a little bit more, or you're trying to get the maximum efficiencies out of software because you are low on staff, then you may want to incorporate more specialist tools to help you overcome those challenges and achieve different results where all-in-one tools don't have the complexity to help you do so.
For the inclusion of specialist tools, it’s important to select tools that allow you to do things beyond the capabilities of all-in-one platforms. There’s no point recommending a standalone tool that is limited or less capable than other comprehensive options. At that point, your choice comes down to price or individualized differentiators like the UX you prefer or whether they provide customer support in your language.
Instead, it’s much more worthwhile for us to focus on specialist tools that provide something a little bit different. We'll come to my favorite all-round tools a little bit later on.
First off, Lately combines neuroscience with AI to fill your social channels and maximize your efficiencies. Lately's AI performs a number of complicated tasks on the back end. One of these is to develop an effective voice model where Lately's AI can understand your brand voice, allowing you to replicate that voice as it produces content for your socials.
You can then go in and edit those posts if you wish to before scheduling them. Lately can handle both the writing and the scheduling of the posts. It then analyzes those posts, figuring out what went well and what went poorly, and learns from the posts it has made. In doing so, it can improve future posts and optimize your social media channels for success.
\On top of this, Lately can take multimedia assets and turn them into effective social posts. You can add a video into Lately, and it will analyze the content of the video to identify the most effective social clips, which it will extract and prepare for your socials. If you are happy with them and approve them, it will then write posts to go with them and schedule those posts across your social channels.
Lately turns one ambitious marketer into a full media and social team. In doing so, Lately provides a broadcast channel to your existing customers and new prospects that can educate and inform customers with high levels of efficiency and low resource commitment.
This sets Lately apart from the rest of the field and gives it something that other all-in-one platforms cannot provide. Lately's in-house AI has been optimized over multiple years, even before ChatGPT entered the scene. It’s particularly popular with small professional services firms, and other lean marketing teams that want to use AI to accelerate their social.
For a broadcast tool for your customers, check out Lately.
Next up in our specialist customer engagement platforms is Help Scout. Help Scout is a tool for customer service that focuses tightly on providing the right customer support tools to support SaaS companies in reaching their users. It provides live chat functionalities, classic customer support, and the common help and support functionality that you'd expect from this space.
The reason Help Scout makes it into this list is because it has a very intuitive user experience and easy setup. It is typically a specialist option for SaaS companies and has pricing tiers that start at the lower end of the pricing range. This is an important consideration, as many of the most effective all-in-one customer engagement platforms, particularly the ones we're going to look at in this list, begin their pricing more in the mid-tier range.
All-in-one platforms are able to charge higher amounts of money to support such a complex array of different features executed at a high level. However, Help Scout's software focuses on being the best customer support software it can be, and it unlocks the ability to do more with less. So, if you're a startup or a smaller firm and you're price-conscious, it's very worthwhile to have a strong option in a more affordable bracket.
For me, Help Scout is a powerful choice for that segment of the market.
Third in the specialist set of customer engagement platforms is Telerivet. Telerivet occupies an area in this space alongside platforms like Twilio and Vonage. These platforms provide the communications infrastructure to enable you to connect with your customers, staff, or any other stakeholders. These tools are more aligned with the category of developer tools; they provide the connectivity that makes good software functional.
If you are an enterprise company and you use a lot of fairly customized internal systems, you don't want to plug a walled garden software product into your internal operations. Instead, you may lean on existing tools in the market but incorporate them into a stack customized for your purposes.
The reason I include Telerivet in this article is because it offers connectivity completeness. Telerivet allows you to either use its inbuilt communication options to send text messages, make voice calls, or use other forms of connectivity, or it allows you to use Telerivet as a kind of command and control center. You can use connectivity from different providers and combine them all together, using Twilio, SMS, the WhatsApp API, Viber, and a range of other more specialist niche communication channels.
This is useful for large companies that operate across many geographies. Connectivity presents a significant challenge. Pricing for SMS, calls, or other channels is not consistent from country to country. You need to connect with local providers and manage local systems and services. This often means having to create and recreate communications logic and build each of these providers or services independently into your tools. This is a huge resource uplift and presents a significant challenge for large organizations.
With Telerivet, you simply connect all these providers into their platform and manage them through a single dashboard. When you create a campaign for one, you can roll that campaign out across every other channel.
While specialist tools are good, an all-in-one tool can be even better. It depends on your use case and your situation, but there is a reason the following tools are some of the biggest software companies in the world.
Many organizations find that the full suite of features not only provides a high level of functionality for a company but also determines and shapes an approach, a methodology, and a set of best practices. Choosing certain tools to use also defines and determines how you are going to use those tools, how you are going to structure your organization, and how you are going to do the work.
That said, using an all-in-one tool is not completely distinct from using specialist tools. A common approach with software like this is to use an all-in-one tool as the general architecture of that side of your business and to incorporate specialist tools into that communications architecture where they can add value and where it's important to your business.
An obvious example would be for a company that uses HubSpot throughout its stack to manage marketing, customer support, and sales functions, to also use the specialist provider Lately, which integrates seamlessly with HubSpot, to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of its broadcast communications.
HubSpot is one of the leading customer engagement platforms, offering a vast, multifunctional suite capable of achieving many things for your business. What makes HubSpot different from the other tools in this list is its central function: marketing.
HubSpot initially tried to do many things, but it was when they focused on the needs of marketers that they exploded as a company and soared to a position of market dominance. Of course, you can use HubSpot for marketing, sales, and customer support. You can use it for building landing pages, managing social media, and running email campaigns. HubSpot does almost everything you want to do to at least a basic level, and for some things, it truly is the best tool on the market.
That said, HubSpot starts at a higher price point, and its price per contact in the system can seem prohibitive to some smaller companies, especially those with low margins versus the size of their reach. An example here is that HubSpot will likely be better value for a company with an enterprise focus versus a company that operates on a freemium model selling low conversion rate consumer software.
The unit economics of a platform like HubSpot in its pricing likely favor companies with a more enterprise sales motion and customer type.
Intercom enters into our list of the top three all-in-one customer engagement platforms as the platform centered on customer support. Intercom can be used for many things and many purposes, but its primary function and guiding direction have always been customer service and customer support.
Intercom is more affordable for larger numbers of contacts and records compared to other platforms. It is also more price-friendly for the lower end of the market, though it can get expensive as it scales. Both the price points and the UX of the platform lend themselves to slightly smaller companies. Intercom is intuitive to use, allowing users to figure things out on their own, and any issues can be quickly resolved with a chat with their customer success team.
Intercom is not an overly complicated platform, but it is powerful and can do many different things. If your need for an all-in-one customer engagement platform is centered around customer support with less need for a broad array of inbuilt marketing or sales capabilities, then Intercom could be a very strong choice.
I first used Intercom 10 years ago when I had to fill in for level one customer support at the startup I was working at remotely. I was in a time zone separate from the rest of the company, alone with little to no training, and with Intercom in front of me. I survived the six hours until New York logged on. I figured it out, found the answers to questions within the saved replies, and navigated the interface easily. Since that moment, I have had a soft spot for Intercom. I cannot possibly imagine the chaos that would have ensued had I been using a different tool instead.
Salesforce makes up the final entry in our list of the top three all-in-one customer engagement platforms, predictably centered around the sales function.
Of course, Salesforce has long gone beyond the niche of sales. The kind of databases you can build within Salesforce provide so much complexity, power, and integration capability with other tools, platforms, and systems that, if you had to, you could run an entire software company off Salesforce, barely needing to bring in other tools.
Salesforce is the big daddy of the list. It's the most long-established, has the biggest skyscraper, and is the most valuable of the companies mentioned. To say Salesforce is a customer engagement platform feels like an understatement. Salesforce is much more than a customer engagement platform, but it can function as one. If used properly, Salesforce is probably the best sales software in the world, and you could pass the same praise down through many of its other functions, use cases, and features.
The difficulty with Salesforce is that it is expensive and complicated. There is a giant ecosystem of Salesforce consultants, engineers, and other specialists who you will need to turn to in order to get the most out of the platform. This is a comprehensive tool that provides many benefits if you use it, but it's a major investment in both money and time.
If you're just starting out, it's likely a tool for you to build up to—a tool for which, if you are successful, you may eventually oversee a large-scale migration rather than starting off using it with a small team.
Salesforce can, either independently or integrated with other systems, basically do anything you're thinking of. It's almost pointless to go through the entire feature set or list of functionalities or use cases. If you can think it, you can do it.
But the real competitive advantage of Salesforce, to me, feels like its data product. You can gather so much data, analyze it, and bring in data from so many different sources that you can increase the effectiveness and efficiency of your activities all the way through the funnel—from exposure and reach to conversions and sales. That's where the value of Salesforce lies.
Welcome to Lately, the world’s first Deep Social platform, powered by Neuroscience-Driven AI™. Lately is one of the fastest growing social media tools within the professional services sector, and has users from so many more verticals too. But why do wealth managers, interior designers, and legal firms all love Lately?
Lately instantly creates a unique, customized voice model needed to reach any target audience, on any channel, in any language or regional dialect.
Lately automatically predicts top highlights of any text, video or audio and clips them up into dozens of pre-assembled, high-performing social posts.
Lately IDs, adapts and schedules for peak performance times, optimizing for individual social platform algorithms – days, weeks or even months in advance.
Lately means 1200% more engagement, 200% more leads, and 40% more sales.
Try it now for free here or contact us to book a demo.
