What is a customer engagement platform?

According to the 2025 Global Customer Engagement Review, 39% of surveyed brands that missed their revenue goals used disconnected point solutions to send messages across channels. That's a real risk for teams that are struggling to deliver campaigns that feel personal and relevant across an ever-expanding range of channels.

Building credibility and impact has never been more important, and customer engagement platforms help teams respond to higher levels of customer expectation. Learning how to leverage AI and orchestration to get the most out of your tech stack is the best way to stay ahead of the curve.

Let's take a look at how your brand could move beyond outdated marketing and create the kind of best-of-breed solution that our mobile-first, real-time world now demands.

Customer engagement platform definition

A customer engagement platform (CEP) is software that supports real-time, cross-channel customer engagement, so teams can deliver relevant experiences that fit into their existing tech stack.

That means taking what customers do (and don’t do) and turning it into messaging and journeys that keep pace. A CEP typically supports orchestration across channels like email, web and mobile push, SMS, mobile inboxes, and in-app messages, from a single interface.

​​Is customer engagement software the same as a customer engagement platform?

Not exactly. “Customer engagement software” is describing a broad category, while a customer engagement platform is built specifically for real-time, cross-channel orchestration and messaging, from one place.

How a customer engagement platform compares to customer relationship management and marketing automation platforms

These tools often sit next to each other in a stack, but they solve different problems.

• CRMs are built to manage customer and account records, plus relationship workflows (often tied to sales and service). They’re great for tracking who someone is and what’s happened, but they’re not built to coordinate cross-channel messaging in real time.
• Marketing automation platforms are built to plan and run campaigns. They help teams automate communications through scheduled programs and rule-based journeys, but they can be harder to adapt on the fly as behavior changes across channels.
• Customer engagement platforms are built for orchestration. They connect customer data to action across channels, so teams can coordinate experiences and respond quickly to customer signals, without rebuilding their whole stack.

If your team uses a CDP, it can complement a CEP by unifying customer data. The CEP is where that data becomes orchestrated engagement across channels.

Why customer engagement platforms matter today

Disconnected experiences cost brands customers.

Customers want consistency across channels, which needs more than a human touch and yet they also want messaging that feels human, timely, and relevant to what they’re doing in the moment.

That changes what “engagement” looks like in practice. Instead of building a calendar of campaigns and hoping people line up with it, teams need engagement that adapts as customers browse, buy, pause, return, and change their minds. Customer engagement platforms support that continuous, responsive approach across channels, so experiences stay coherent even as behavior changes.

The core components of a CEP

Best-of-breed customer engagement platforms share a specific set of capabilities. A big part of that is customer data orchestration—getting the right customer context into the right place fast enough to act on it, and giving marketers a practical way to orchestrate what happens next.

Real-time data processing

It’s important that the platform is architected with stream processing technology, so data can be accessed within seconds as it flows into the system. That’s what supports acting on customer actions and behaviors as they happen, and turns testing into real-time personalization, across messages, channels, and journeys. Not all CEPs are built this way.

Audience segmentation

Stream processing supports segmentation based on user data and customer context that’s continuously updated in live customer profiles. That means precise, real-time audiences with no outdated lists or extra queries.

Cross-channel orchestration

A journey management tool lets marketers orchestrate campaigns across channels like email, web and mobile push, SMS, mobile inboxes, and in-app messages, all within a single user interface.

Testing and personalization

Multivariate campaign testing supports continuous optimization at the message, campaign, and strategy level. Pairing live customer profiles with interaction data also makes one-to-one and one-to-many personalization easier to run and scale.

Intuitive interface

An integrated and intuitive visual interface supports composing, personalizing, and orchestrating single- and cross-channel campaigns from one place, without constant toggling between systems.

Flexible platform integrations

A “no more custom integrations” approach comes from support for best-in-class partnerships across the stack, including tools across Business Intelligence, Customer Data Platforms, Attribution, and AI.

Data integrity

Best-in-breed CEPs use pseudonymized numbers, such a unique ID, to identifies each individual’s user profile to track actions and create audiences, instead of relying on directly identifiable data (such as email addresses).

Best-of-breed vs. legacy systems

Legacy engagement tools can make modern engagement feel harder than it needs to be. They were built for a different era of marketing, where speed mattered less, channels were fewer, and personalization could be handled with broad segments and scheduled sends.

A best-of-breed customer engagement platform is built for real-time behavior and cross-channel coordination. It’s designed to keep data, segmentation, journeys, and measurement moving at the pace customers move.

Legacy solutions

Legacy systems often come with:

• Data processing latency
• List-based segmentation
• Batch-and-blast campaigns
• Cumbersome testing
• Siloed data sources
• Disconnected systems
• Clunky interfaces
• Single-channel communications

Best-of-breed solutions

Best-of-breed platforms focus on capabilities like:

• Continuous stream processing
• Action-based segmentation
• Personalized customer journeys
• Native multivariate testing
• Data centralization and agility
• Flexible integrations
• Intuitive interfaces
• Cohesive cross-channel communications

Evaluating a customer engagement platform: Key criteria

A customer engagement platform can look great in a demo and still fail to hit the mark in real life. These questions help you pressure-test whether it will actually support real-time, cross-channel engagement as your stack, channels, and audiences grow.

Choosing the right customer engagement solution

Start with the fundamentals:

• Can it unify customer data and give you a single view of the customer?Look for a complete, holistic view across platforms and devices, so you can deliver the right experiences at the right times.
• How intuitive is the orchestration and segmentation process?Building segments, creating robust audience profiles, and launching personalized campaigns should feel automated and simple inside the tool.
• Does it integrate easily with your existing tech stack?A strong fit means it plugs into what you already use, can collect and send data from any system, and can export information freely between databases.
• Does it support real-time decisioning and multivariate testing?Real-time access to results matters, along with the ability to test each element of a message or journey, so you can see what’s working and what isn’t.
• Can it scale with your business and support new channels?You want something that grows with you, and that has a plan for supporting emerging platforms, so you don’t miss new ways to connect.

A strong solution will provide best-in-class technology with intelligent AI-powered engagement and automation, enabling you to focus on improving the customer experience.

Does a customer engagement platform have the same capabilities as an omnichannel engagement platform?

Often, yes. In practice, many customer engagement platforms are built to support omnichannel engagement, and the terms get used interchangeably.

The difference is emphasis. An omnichannel engagement platform points directly to connected channels and continuity, where messages and context carry across touchpoints.

A customer engagement platform puts the focus on the overall customer experience and the outcomes you’re trying to drive, which may include omnichannel orchestration, and features like predictive analytics that help teams anticipate intent or risk signals and tailor journeys accordingly. It can also include other approaches that best fit what customers need in the moment.

Calculating value and ROI

Marketing technology buying decisions come down to perceived value. That’s why it helps to look past the surface costs on the price tag and ask what you’ll actually spend (in time, effort, and resources) for your customer experience optimization.

A practical way to assess that is to look at two things:

Explicit and implicit costs

The platform cost is only part of the picture. The bigger question is what sits beneath it, including the work required to get data flowing, campaigns live, and teams productive.

Expected time-to-value and potential results

Ask how quickly you can get to key capabilities, and what outcomes teams typically see once they’re there.

Here are some examples of the impact Braze has had on our customers’ strategies.

• 3X industry standard open rates for Overstock
• 58% increase in loyalty offer redemptions for e.l.f.
• 41% add to cart rate for Grove Collaborative
• 3X uplift in onboarding email open rates for happn

Beyond the platform: Why partnership matters

A customer engagement platform can have all the right features, but it still takes real support to get value out of it. The right partner helps you reduce initial time-to-value, get more out of the technology, and learn alongside a wider community of innovators.

A partnership with Braze shows up in practical ways across the lifecycle, including:

• Pre-sales supportDiscovery and strategic planning, personalized workshops, use case walkthrough demos, technical scoping, and ROI measures.
• Customer successA primary contact, ongoing business reviews, ongoing maturity support, plus long-term strategic planning and actionable recommendations.
• Data servicesData pipeline strategy, data training sessions, reporting requirements, and dashboards and reporting setup.
• Integrations and onboardingPlatform configuration support, best practices, personalized training, technical quality assurance, and go-live guidance.
• Deliverability servicesEmail onboarding, an IP warming plan, email best practices, personalized recommendations, and deliverability monitoring.
• Technical supportAward-winning technical support, a vast knowledge base, and live answers to product questions.

It’s also worth looking at the strength of the community around the platform. Braze has 300+ customer advocates and 1,600+ community members, which can make a real difference when you’re looking for references, advice, and proven approaches.

Key takeaways of customer engagement platforms

Choosing a customer engagement platform is a long-term decision. The best choice is the one that gives your team the speed to act on customer behavior, the flexibility to grow across channels, and the support to keep improving over time.

Here are the main points to keep in mind:

• Move beyond outdated marketing and data paradigmsModern engagement needs real-time data processing, responsive segmentation, and orchestration that can keep pace with customers across devices and channels.
• Choose a partner for the long haulThe platform matters, but so does the ecosystem around it. Look for strong support, services, and community that help you reach value faster and keep building.
• Ask the right questions upfrontFocus your evaluation on the practical realities: how data is unified, how easy orchestration is, how testing and decisioning work in real time, and how well the platform integrates with the rest of your stack.