The days when high-quality products are enough to successfully position themselves in the market are long gone. With powerful developer tools and cloud technology available today, new products can be launched in no time. Because of the strong competition and rapid dynamics prevailing in the market today, efficient marketing is a determining factor for success. The proliferation of new marketing channels, the emergence of new platforms - mainly social and mobile - and the adoption of new analytical methods are revolutionizing the way companies currently handle their customers and market their products.
However, in recent years, the task of the sales and support team has changed significantly. These departments need to respond to changes in digitalization and meet rising customer expectations. They face more workloads and new challenges that cannot be overcome with email, Excel, or the first innovative SaaS service ten years ago.
Customer orientation and effective customer communication are very important in this field. Effective in this context means handling your customers in the right place and at the right time with the right message (marketing and sales) and always there for them when they have questions or need help (support). Telephone, email, and traditional contact forms are no longer sufficient to effectively form customer dialogue at whatsapp, chatbots, and co. As a result, leading companies are turning to sophisticated solutions that not only streamline customer communication on traditional channels, but allow workflows that are completely new and more efficient.
In the following, we introduce some of these tools for various application scenarios that benefit not only large companies, but also startups and SMEs.
Intercom: Complete inter-departmental inter-departmental solution
Intercom is one of the best examples of how modern customer communication works, especially for Internet companies who call their customers' users. This is a comprehensive, all-in-one series consisting of several sub-products: a platform for user analysis, personalized sales and marketing campaigns, an inbox for direct email and chat support, and other articles to create a help center. This allows the software to cover all of the company's interactions with customers at each stage of the customer's life cycle - the key to customer involvement. Using various SDKs (Software Development Tools), Intercom can be integrated into any web, desktop and mobile application. The developer can specify in the code exactly which user actions (registration, login, purchase of a product, newsletter registration, etc.) must be recorded. The data captured enables companies to segment their customers and reach them in the right channel at the right time - via email, push or notifications in the application using direct messenger similar to Whatsapp. Practical: With the chatbots offered, some companies can automate their marketing, sales, and support workflows. For example, if a customer requests certain product features, bots can suggest matching articles from the default help center. Push notifications or in the application use a direct messenger that functions like whatsapp. Practical: With the chatbots offered, some companies can automate their marketing, sales, and support workflows. For example, if a customer requests certain product features, bots can suggest matching articles from the default help center. Push notifications or in the application use a direct messenger that functions like whatsapp. Practical: With the chatbots offered, some companies can automate their marketing, sales, and support workflows. For example, if a customer requests certain product features, bots can suggest matching articles from the default help center.
Zendesk Chat: Supports in real time and more
Another professional customer communication solution is provided by Zendesk Zendesk Chat, a customer service specialist who has successfully positioned himself in the market as a reliable solution. According to the company, more than 100,000 companies from more than 100 countries are already among its customers. Similar to Intercom, this service allows e-commerce vendors, software vendors, and website owners to integrate chat widgets directly into their own websites that allow them to interact directly with Web visitors. Very easy integration. All you have to do is enter the JavaScript code snippet into the homepage you want. If you use popular online stores like Shopify and Magento or open source CMS solutions like WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, you can count on special plugins that simplify the chat widget configuration. Other advantages:
Customer.io: Automatically send personalized messages
Customer.i allows companies to automatically send transactional messages as well as personalized marketing campaigns via email, SMS and push notifications. Customers can be professionally segmented using triggers, customer attributes, and filters. Here's how: After integrating the tracking code, similar to Google Analytics, into their website or application, relevant user actions are recorded, which can then be used as triggers or filters. For example, every customer who has just registered can automatically send a welcome message tailored to certain profile attributes, such as country of origin or industry. In addition to the tracking code, Customer.io also provides an API that developers can use to create arbitrary logs, event parameters and customers on the platform. Other benefits: Email and newsletter content can be easily created by the marketing team using the rich text editor integrated in the online dashboard.
Home application: Central inbox for the whole team
Although good old e-mail is seen as the number one productivity killer in corporate internal communication, it is still important in external communication with prospects, customers and partners. This is where the front of the cloud service comes into play. Since its founding in 2013, startups from France have been able to reach nearly 80 million US dollars for expansion. And by VC and famous business angels such as Point Nine Capital from Berlin, founder of Slack Stewart Butterfield and startup incubator Y Combinator. This application allows businesses to optimize external communication with their customers. This allows them to manage various email addresses such as contact @, sales @ and support @, as well as other communication channels such as SMS, Twitter, LinkedIn and telephone centrally on one platform. Fronts focus on high usability and practical tools that enable collaborative processing of customer questions in a team. With front chat In addition, live messenger for websites is available, which functions not only in terms of functionality as an Intercom, but also visually imitates almost identically from market leader solutions.
