Written By: Raviteja Dodda, CEO & Co-Founder, MoEngage
Post-pandemic there’s a rush to make up for lost time and business. Consumer brands are constantly striving to improve their North Star business metrics and also trying to achieve seamless operational excellence. This is a tough balancing act and sometimes companies are faced with the questions of which one to prioritize and whether one will lead to the other.
In such a situation, companies cannot underestimate the need for a robust customer engagement framework. However, while building a tech stack with the right software solutions for customer engagement, brands have to make a choice: opt for multiple technical point solutions or deploy a broader integrated platform.
Differences between integrated and multiple point solutions
Point solutions are built to resolve single functional gaps specific to a channel by using best-of-breed features. They target specific consumer problems that can be resolved only in silos. Point solutions are specific to one department and cannot be deployed across the organization. An integrated platform, on the other hand, solves multiple use cases and can be accessed and managed by different business functions. It targets a wider scope of issues and automatically offers solutions.
Benefits of an integrated platform vis-à-vis multiple single-point solutions
- Flexible and scalable: An integrated platform offers a high degree of convenience and usability, unlike point solutions that focus on solving a single problem, wherein usability is restricted to resolving the issue that emerges. An integrated platform offers the ability to innovate and adapt to changing market trends.
- Simple and hassle-free: Multiple points solution solve one-off issues in a specific area. But if pain-points pop up in other areas, the company has to buy several new solutions to tackle these. This means managing various vendors and their solutions constantly, leading to complex management and needless complications. So, isn’t it better to choose a platform vendor who can integrate all solutions into a consistent, coherent and integrated tech stack?
- 360-degree view of customers: When companies add more and more point solutions, valuable data may get lost in silos and become less actionable. With an integrated stack, all kinds of customer data is available on a unified dashboard for the benefit of teams and business functions across the organization, thus providing opportunities for upselling and cross-selling. An integrated tech stack offers a simplified approach to cross-channel reporting and analysis.
- Customer-centric: In a competitive marketplace, brands need to talk to consumers in the same language on different channels. An integrated platform enables personalized promotions and relevant messaging t across different channels. This results in a meaningful experience for the consumer. In a multiple points solution, varied messages are sent out to the customer, whether they are relevant to the customer or not, making the whole process ‘campaign-centric’ as opposed to ‘customer-centric’. In today’s landscape, consumers want a unified and connected experience across all touchpoints with a brand. The siloed approach could result in a flashpoint, ultimately leading to a marketing disaster.
- Cost-effective: Although the initial price of point solutions is usually lower than that of a platform, it comes with additional costs of add-on licenses and growth tiers. On the other hand, in an integrated platform, there are inbuilt integrations and implementations, thus reducing costs significantly. Pricing is also more predictable and fixed in an integrated platform. Implementing point solutions also means running multiple training programs for teams handling different solutions, thus increasing cost and effort. This is almost a non-issue in the integrated platform.
Use cases
Let’s try to understand why an integrated approach works better with these use cases.
A fast-growing consumer brand company wants to explore SMS as a communication channel because of its wide adoption among consumers. The company will assess all available SMS delivery vendors and pick one. But, as the company scales up, it would need other customer engagement channels, like push notification, for example. Now integrating the new engagement channel into the SMS solution is not possible; so the company has to opt for more systems or solutions. This means dealing with more vendors. More the vendors, more are the complexities around managing them. An integrated stack works better in such a scenario, as it has built-in implementations and solutions and allows the company to scale up as and when the need arises.
Now let’s take the case of an online retailer that wants to provide a great user experience, thus attracting and retaining customers and generating profits. Consumer delight can be achieved when the retailer’s webpage loads are faster, the response to queries is swift, there is always-on availability, and the entire online experience comes with stringent safety features. An integrated platform enables all this and more by offering a bundled stack of communication, performance, security, and availability solutions.
Tailpiece
Market trends change dramatically, sometimes even overnight. An integrated system has the ability to innovate and adapt to these dynamic shifts. Consumer brands that wish to provide a delightful customer journey must look at an integrated tech solution in the right earnest. It will help them analyze how customers engage with the brand, forecast their behavior, and create hyper-personalized micro-moments, which ultimately result in improved conversion rates, customer loyalty, and better business outcomes.
