Many small businesses rely on a phone line and the occasional email to communicate with their customers. But today's consumers expect more: Different channels to interact with brands, personalized conversations, and fast response time.
Consider these customer engagement trends:
- 78% of people respond to texts in 10 minutes or less.
- SMS has 98% open rates and 45% response rates, making it an effective channel for reaching prospects and customers.
- 66% of consumers want the ability to message with brands.
- 74% of people have more than five apps open at once.
Customers want to interact with brands via various digital channels, such as text, mobile apps, web chat, and social media messages, and expect the ability to switch among platforms seamlessly.
If you still rely on a phone line as the primary customer communication channel, you could miss out on many opportunities to nurture customer relationships and drive sales.
But piling on disparate tools isn't the answer. Many small businesses have a scattered tech stack that drives up IT costs while hampering productivity with complex workflows. If the tools don't talk to each other, inconsistent communications can make you appear unprofessional and create a frustrating customer experience.
The good news is you can now deliver seamless customer communications that rival big brands without reinventing the wheel by implementing a customer communication tool. It allows you and your team to communicate with customers via multiple channels, including phone, text, social media messaging, web chat, in-app messaging, and more from one app.
Why you should use a customer engagement tool
Customer engagement is the name of the game in today's competitive marketplace. In fact, 65% of businesses are increasing their customer engagement spending in 2023. The right tool can help you meet consumer expectations and stay ahead of the curve. Here are the top benefits of adding a customer engagement tool to support your external communications:
1. Simplify communications to turn conversations into conversions
A streamlined customer communication process makes it easy for your team to respond promptly to customer requests and inquiries and engage with them when their buying intent is the highest.
By consolidating all correspondences (e.g., voice calls, SMS, web chat, social media messaging, etc.) into one platform, you can continue the conversations across different channels to deliver a seamless experience and accelerate the sales cycle.
You can also schedule communications (e.g., birthday greetings, appointment reminders, re-order prompts,) personalize content based on past purchases and interactions, deliver timely customer support, and manage your outreach campaigns efficiently to improve marketing ROI.
2. Meet your customers where they are to improve the brand experience
Nobody wants to jump through hoops to communicate with brands. Your customers may switch to your competitors if they can't contact you via their preferred channels, such as SMS, web chat, and social media messaging whenever they want.
A customer engagement tool centralizes all communications into a single inbox. Your staff can easily handle customer interactions via multiple channels without logging into different tools and experiencing an increased workload.
You can manage customer contacts, history, tags, and notes all in one place. A shared inbox allows team members to pick up the conversations where their colleagues have left off without missing a beat to deliver a seamless customer experience.
3. Streamline deployment and maintenance to lower IT overhead
Not all customer engagement tools are created equal, especially for small businesses with limited resources. Your staff is probably already wearing many hats, so you need a tool that's easy to deploy and use so they can make the most of it.
For example, GoTo Customer Engagement is built for SMBs with small teams and a limited budget. Unlike enterprise-focused solutions, you can set it up quickly without complicated custom integrations or assigning dedicated staff to manage each communication channel.
Thanks to our add-on infrastructure, you only pay for what you need when you need it to scale up as you grow. You don't have to buy expensive capabilities upfront or be hamstrung by the limited functionalities of cheap, scattered tools.
Moreover, our built-in analytics capabilities can help you gain in-depth customer insights without investing in additional tools or hiring analysts to build models and generate reports. You can stay ahead of consumer trends and make accurate data-driven decisions based on your customers' needs.
Deliver a modern customer experience without the high price tag
GoTo Customer Engagement combines a world-class phone system with all the communication tools you need to manage customer relationships across multiple digital channels.
It's designed specifically for small businesses — we carefully curate essential features to meet specific use cases, so you only pay for what you need to deliver a top-notch customer experience that rivals big brands at a fraction of the cost.
Learn more about GoTo’s top-to-bottom customer engagement toolset to see how we can help you optimize your customer journey and capture more market share.