WebEngage - Full Stack Customer Engagement and Retention Platform

My main use case for WebEngage Customer Data Platform  at UpSkillist is reminding people that they have classes and that they need to attend them. Second is generating revenues through retargeting channels such as SMS. Another important use case is reporting. When we discuss events and analytics, WebEngage provides data that helps us understand how much revenue we have obtained from which channel and how the trend is progressing. I can analyze metrics such as open rate, click rate, and other key performance indicators in both tabular format and Excel format. In the WebEngage dashboard, I can see how my open rates and click rates are trending, along with my click-through ratio. This information keeps me updated and helps me strategize my next campaigns and determine which channels I should be reaching out on. If I conduct a campaign with email and some users are not available on email, I can reach out to them through SMS or web overlays.

I believe everything regarding improvements needed for WebEngage Customer Data Platform  is covered. I would leave that to the product team of WebEngage to do all the necessary analysis and come back with solutions. The notification inbox could be a separate channel, but since it is not there, I would leave it with the WebEngage product team to finalize rather than giving recommendations.

The reminders feature is valuable in the context of WebEngage Customer Data Platform. UpSkillist is an e-learning platform where we have learners from different parts of the world. We have users from the US, UK, India, Australia, Asia, EMEA, LATAM, and many other regions. It becomes very difficult to send out reminders and get attendance updated and back on track across all these regions. WebEngage helped me set up reminders to ensure that even though a user has signed up for lesson one, lesson two, or lesson three, they receive reminders based on what they have signed up for. This made my attendance consistently trending upward.

Second is generating revenues through lifetime memberships. We got good revenue through WebEngage because of different email service providers and different SMS service providers. When you have different ESPs and different SSPs, you have the opportunity to work with them and learn from those services without repeating the mistakes you made with current ones. You have options, whereas some automation tools have their own sending providers, making it difficult to understand where exactly the problem is.

WebEngage has a deliverability team and their own services team. If you have a very customized campaign that needs service support from WebEngage, their services team helps you. Whether you have professional services enabled or disabled depends on the campaign type and the account you hold with them. I feel more privileged with WebEngage because the majority of my hurdles are getting solved. This is not just because of the relationship built with WebEngage, but because of the service I receive from them. I attend weekly huddle calls with WebEngage to understand where WebEngage stands for UpSkillist and what issues we are facing. If WebEngage is releasing new features, we get the privilege to test them and understand whether they are helping us boost our business.

The best features of WebEngage Customer Data Platform depend on every organization. For me, Journey Builder, analytics, and dashboard are the best features. When I say dashboard, I can create multiple dashboards as I want. Every morning before I start my work, I can look into those metrics and understand what strategies I need to make for the rest of the day, week, or month. Analytics gives me cohort analysis, events analysis, and funnel analysis, through which I can understand everything from a user perspective. Journey Builder gives me the option of connecting users on different channels. If a user is reachable on email but has not opened the email, I can still reach out to them on different activated channels. Journey Builder helps me understand based on user behavior and shows me how many users are opening emails and what your opening window is on each day of the week. Based on that, I send campaigns and promotional triggers to get maximum revenue. Another recommendation feature is web personalization. If you have a website and a user visits for the first time and then drops off but is moving towards a final purchase, when they visit the website again, you can personalize that entire content for them so that the user sees personalized content while others see generic content. This is the best feature that WebEngage has for personalizing website content and getting more conversions. Everything is best with WebEngage, and it depends on how organizations treat it and recognize these as the best features.

I would suggest a notification inbox feature as a separate channel with WebEngage Customer Data Platform. Let's assume that a user is getting a push notification through an app and you want that particular notification that was triggered a while ago, yesterday, a week back, two days back, or whenever, to be stored in your app's notifications. I think that should be a separate channel rather than a particular feature inside another channel. Notification inbox is not actually a separate feature, though it has been mentioned in the documentation guide as a separate channel. However, it has been treated as an in-house feature of push and web push. If this feature were available as a separate channel with WebEngage, I would have stuck with WebEngage entirely rather than going to any other solution.

Regarding metrics, I am able to reach my targets with WebEngage Customer Data Platform. Obviously, it depends on user activity, as some users would be active during certain months and there would be some idle or dull months. During dull months, WebEngage makes sure that I meet my targets at least 85 to 90 percent of the time, which means I have the best service providers and channels coming in. Regarding attendance, there was a lesson drop where the benchmark for lesson one was around 60 percent and for lesson two was around 50 to 55 percent. For lesson three, it was around 50 percent. When we understood the metrics with WebEngage, we discovered that lesson three was falling short by 5 to 10 percent, which was concerning. Since WebEngage was able to share these metrics with me, I was able to create campaigns to ensure people came back and took their lessons for lesson three, getting my attendance back to 50 to 55 percent.

From an operations perspective regarding WebEngage Customer Data Platform, I do not find many issues. However, if you do not make up your payments, they keep on pointing out popups that annoy you on every click. If you have not made a payment for WebEngage services and it is overdue, payment reminders will keep popping up, which is annoying. I am not sure if WebEngage can come up with some alternative options to ensure this is not impacting users or organizations.

I have been using WebEngage Customer Data Platform since 2020.

I do not see WebEngage Customer Data Platform as unstable. Any downtime or reliability issues are absent.

WebEngage Customer Data Platform can handle growth and increased user load well. I had experience with an account that had almost 13 million users, and it managed them properly without any downtime, rundown time, or any error on the APIs.

I know how to reach out to WebEngage regarding support. Just an email to the support team and then your account managers look into the matter. This makes your task easier and your question gets solved very easily.

We were using Marketo  as a prior solution before WebEngage. I am not sure why it was part of that discussion or why it was switched to WebEngage. When I joined this organization, it was already WebEngage. I did a proper evaluation with WebEngage competitors regarding options before choosing WebEngage Customer Data Platform, such as Salesforce  and many others. I felt WebEngage was the most suitable platform that would help me with all my requests, and since I already have a good relationship with WebEngage, I felt it would help me with all the things. I just went ahead with WebEngage.

I have seen a return on investment with WebEngage Customer Data Platform. Whatever we pay for WebEngage, I would say we are getting the most out of it. However, certain times we have to neglect the platform cost because it will not settle up or provide any return on investment. Let's assume we are paying almost 2,000 dollars for the platform. If we get a revenue of around 125, 130, or assume 220 dollars, I am not sure if that would settle up the return on investment. If you forget about the platform fee and just focus on the email service provider fee, you are always on the profit side regarding return on investment.

It was not challenging for me with WebEngage regarding pricing, setup cost, and licensing. WebEngage was quite understanding and was able to understand every use case rather than just talking about charging a certain number of dollars for something. They were getting it customized for me, which was the best part. Licensing was not per seat. It was based on the MAU we have. The seats are not counted; it is the users and events that are counted. We were happy with the onboarding and also happy with the pricing negotiations.

I did a proper evaluation with WebEngage Customer Data Platform competitors regarding options before choosing it, such as Salesforce  and many others. I felt WebEngage was the most suitable platform that would help me with all my requests, and since I already have a good relationship with WebEngage, I felt it would help me with all the things.

I would advise picking up the best ESPs and SSPs and making sure your account is being set up with WebEngage Customer Data Platform. Double-check while you are being onboarded because later on, there would be certain miscommunications happening because WebEngage's technical terms are quite different than any organization's technical terms. I would rather suggest all organizations double-check the moment they are being onboarded. We run WebEngage Customer Data Platform on our own servers in my organization. We have just got our access done with them. Since I take care of the communications part, the access part and everything was being taken care of by the tech team. They would be the right people to talk about this, but I will come back to provide more details if needed. I have given this review a rating of 7 out of 10.