Think about all the things vying for your customers’ attention daily. They’ve got an overflowing inbox, social media notifications, and an unending stream of online content.
How can you capture their attention when you’ve got such stiff competition? The first step is to act immediately when they express interest. Delay even a little, and you may lose them forever. That’s where real-time customer engagement comes in.
Need help executing a seamless customer engagement strategy? See how Coffee + Dunn’s customer engagement services can help you leverage real-time data to nurture leads and drive conversions.
What Is Real-Time Customer Engagement?
The traditional way of engaging with customers is obsolete. Attention spans are diminishing, and the number of channels customers use to interact with brands continues to grow. Even so, your customers expect personalized, immediate engagement.
Real-time customer engagement helps you solve this unique problem. It helps you connect with your customers when they show interest in your product/service or need help.
Moreover, with an omnichannel marketing strategy, you can do this through the communication channel that’s most convenient for them, eliminating a lot of friction in the process.
That said, real-time customer engagement isn’t just about speed or convenient channels. The most significant lever is understanding the context of the interaction and instantaneously nudging the customer towards the next best action.
With a fine-tuned next-best action strategy, you can proactively push more of your pipeline towards actions consistent with your business goals, e.g., conversion optimization goals.
Benefits of Real-Time Customer Engagement
Is mastering and deploying real-time customer engagement worth the time and financial investment? Absolutely.
Let’s look at some of the benefits your business stands to reap.
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- Actionable customer insights: Real-time customer interactions (messages, clicks, downloads, etc) give you data on customer intent and preferences that you can act on immediately.
- Close business gaps faster: You can spot trends and opportunities faster with real-time granular customer engagement data. For instance, a recurring customer frustration could be due to an information gap you can easily solve with an explainer or FAQ.
- Ability to build accurate predictive models: Continuous real-time engagement helps collect the data you need to predict the next best action. You can anticipate customer needs before they ask, increasing conversion rates and significantly reducing churn.
- Enhances your market competitiveness: You need a way to differentiate yourself from the competition. Superior customer engagement can give you the edge to stand out, build loyalty, and generate word-of-mouth promotion.
- Improved customer satisfaction: Instantaneous, personalized attention and problem-solving give your customers immediate validation and gratification. Your customers feel listened to, helping improve conversions and reduce churn.
You stand to gain a lot from real-time customer engagement. If you’ve been looking for a customer-centric strategy to lift your revenue without a massive capital outlay, you may just find it with the help of real-time customer engagement platforms.
Key Channels for Real-Time Engagement
As with most businesses, the best channel for real-time engagement depends on your market and the tools your demographic commonly uses. You will find overlaps, though.
The following are the key channels:
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- Live chat features (AI-powered chatbots are increasingly becoming popular)
- Social media direct messaging, e.g., Facebook Messenger and Instagram DMs
- In-app messaging (targeted messaging within your own app)
- WhatsApp Business API
- SMS or text messaging
- Phone support
What’s important to know is that you must create a cohesive customer experience. You want to build real-time engagement that benefits from increased speed and enhanced contextual data and information.
You don’t want the channels to operate in blind silos. With the help of services like Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement, you can integrate these channels to create personalized customer journeys.
Your team will then be able to engage with every customer exactly where they are on their journey, even if they switch communication channels.
Strategies for Effective Real-Time Customer Engagement
Now that you understand the value of real-time customer engagement, it’s time to utilize it in your business.
At Coffee + Dunn, we’ve seen several implementations of customer engagement tools across many industries. One thing that stands out is that the organizations that get it right always understand that the real-time engagement philosophy and tools must permeate every customer-facing aspect of their business.
You don’t have to learn by trial and error, though. Here are some of the proven strategies you can implement immediately.
Data Personalization at Scale
Context is king when it comes to real-time customer engagement. For this reason, you want information and data that helps you understand your customers in real time.
Personalized data helps you push relevant offers and sales assets. For existing customers, you can anticipate needs based on behaviour or where the customer is on their journey, and act accordingly.
You will need a robust data platform to unify customer touchpoints data. Examples of the data include website visits, downloads, social media interactions, purchase history, and support tickets.
You can use Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement apps to collect and unify the data.
Omnichannel Integration
When you communicate with leads and customers through different channels, seamless integration is what holds everything together. You want a system that ensures consistent messaging and eliminates the likelihood of customers repeating themselves.
As such, you must have a platform where customers can initiate and continue conversations on different platforms without your team losing context.
For instance, someone booking an event might start on a live chatbot, proceed to email, and confirm attendance via phone call, and your team will have the entire interaction history in your system. More importantly, the data should be visible on one dashboard.
Predictive Analytics and Models
How can you tell you really understand your customers? There’s one reliable way – when you can reliably predict their next action before they take it.
Luckily for you, real-time customer engagement data eliminates the need to react; you’ll anticipate. You can, for instance, take the following proactive actions:
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- Personalize product or service recommendations based on past behavior or purchases.
- Set behavioral triggers, e.g., if someone visits a specific ‘help’ page, send an automatic email letting them know free set-up is available.
- Predict churn, e.g., when usage (log-ins, session time, etc) reduces, have re-engagement offers ready to go.
Taking such a proactive approach lets you take control of the customer journey in an environment where most of your competitors have completely lost control.
Real-Time Customer Engagement Tools
You likely now appreciate how important integration is for a business that wants a 360-degree view of the customer. You will need tools that can unify sales, marketing, and customer service. You can find these capabilities in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.
Dynamics 365 CE offers the following tools for real-time customer engagement.
Dynamics 365 Customer Insights – Journeys
D365 Customer Insights – Journeys is the power tool to deploy when you want to visualize and design customer journeys in real time.
You will have greater control of your interactions with customers as you can create dynamic paths pegged on customer actions/inactions. Such paths allow you to send personalized offers in real-time when customers are most engaged.
With D365 Customer Insights – Journeys, you also get real-time segmentation, ability to integrate your app so you can send personalized in-app/push notifications, and A/B testing plus optimization capabilities.
Dynamics 365 Sales
Sales cycles can be long. However, that doesn’t mean your team can’t have real-time customer engagement strategies baked into your sales strategy.
Dynamics 365 Sales comes with several capabilities to ensure your sales team engages with prospects, leads, and customers optimally in real time. For instance, you can:
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- Track engagement signals like landing page visits, downloads, email replies, etc.
- Design “next best actions” so your sales team knows exactly what to do/recommend based on the above tracked signals.
- Follow up with prospects based on real-time interest signals, e.g., when a lead checks your Plans or Pricing pages.
With the help of AI, you can also analyze various interactions and score leads so you can allocate more sales resources to your hottest leads.
Dynamics 365 Customer Service
Dynamics 365 Customer Service has a suite of capabilities to help you know your customers better, personalize customer service, take requests from several channels without losing context, and significantly improve agent productivity.
It supports live chat with human agents and AI-powered chatbots, so you are always on top of your real-time customer engagement goals.
Also, integration with social media (e.g., Facebook Messenger, Instagram DMs, X DMs, etc.) provides the omnichannel experiences you need to engage with your customers in real-time on the platforms they love.
Pro Tip: Having the right technology isn’t enough. You also need a sound customer engagement plan, as well as effective implementation of the technology, to marry the plans with your new tech infrastructure.
At Coffee+Dunn, we help organizations correctly map customer lifecycles and effectively implement MS Dynamics 365 solutions. Learn more about our Dynamics 365 solutions.
Common Challenges and How to Overcome Them
Implementing real-time customer engagement infrastructure in a business isn’t always smooth sailing. Some headwinds are to be expected, but you can easily overcome them if you plan ahead.
Here are some of the challenges you are likely to face.
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- Data unification hurdles: You will need complete and up-to-date customer data. If your legacy systems relied on manual entries or fragmented systems, data integration will be challenging and time-consuming.
- Internal resistance: Some people are resistant to change. You must get everyone onboard, especially because you’ll need your sales, marketing, and customer service departments to collaborate.
- Tech infrastructure and aptitude: The solutions you deploy must be configured properly to cope with the volume of data being collected and shared as well as the number of real-time engagements. It’s best to rely on experts like Coffee + Dunn to set up the system well from the onset.
Without proper training, you are also likely to have skill gaps which could make implementing and managing real-time engagements difficult. To avoid overreliance on external consultants, you’ll have to spend the time required to upskill your team.
Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)
Got more questions about real-time customer engagement? Let’s answer some of the common queries we get regarding use cases, costs, and benefits.
How Do Real-Time Engagement Strategies Differ Across Industries?
You will do well with real-time engagement in most industries if you understand customer journeys. Customer expectations and journeys differ by industry.
For instance, your customers will likely have the following expectations if you are in these industries:
- E-commerce: Personalized recommendations, easy checkout, seamless returns, fast refunds, etc.
- Financial services: Personalized advice, confidentiality, security, fast issue resolution, etc.
- Events: Personalized real-time updates, seamless registration and ticketing, session reminders, etc.
- Other B2B and SaaS: Personalized solutions, seamless onboarding, project status updates, ongoing support, etc.
Given the varied expectations and journeys, you must take a bespoke approach. Nonetheless, the core aspects of real-time engagement, such as speed, personalization, and integrated channels, still apply.
What Are the Initial Costs and Setup Requirements?
Initial costs for setting up real-time customer engagement infrastructure vary widely. This is true for those using Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement as well.
Microsoft licenses the various modules within Dynamics 365 separately, so you can buy only what you need. Dynamics 365 Sales, for instance, costs $65 or $105 or $150 per user per month (paid yearly), depending on the plan.
You may also need to budget for hiring a Microsoft Partner like us to help you implement the solution effectively.
How Can Small Businesses Benefit from Real-Time Engagement?
We’ve found real-time engagement to be valuable for businesses of all sizes, especially mid-size and enterprise organizations looking to retain personalized interactions as they scale.
Customers want to be treated like individuals. Real-time customer engagement technology makes this possible.
Without proactive customer engagement measures, you’ll see erosion in personalization, agent continuity, and support responsiveness as your company scales.
Conclusion
Customer expectations have never been higher. Your customers want you to personalize every experience and do so speedily on the platforms they are already active on.
You can only do this with a customer data platform with real-time engagement capabilities already baked in. Microsoft’s Dynamics 365 for customer engagement is the way to go.
Talk to our team today to learn how we can help you create personalized experiences with the help of Dynamics 365 solutions that give full visibility into how your customers interact with your business.
