At a time when consumers have increasingly high expectations for website content, site owners need to pull out all the stops when creating an engaging experience for their visitors. This may include social networking features, multimedia, interactive features like polls and contests, and of course, fresh content that changes frequently. And these features need to be easy to add to a site (and change often) without constant intervention from the IT department.

The trouble is that all-in-one solutions for online customer engagement are thin on the ground. For the most part, the various functions that a site owner needs to deploy for customer engagement – such as analytics, social networking, and content management – are found in separate solutions, creating software management headaches for site owners.

Why is customer engagement so critical for today’s site owners? In a still-recovering economic climate, websites can’t afford to lose customers who show up on the home page, only to lose interest and leave when they’re not drawn in by compelling content. Engaged customers will download information and submit their contact information, which fills the lead-generation pipeline. They’ll buy products, they’ll stay longer, and they’ll come back again and again.

You need to adapt your digital strategies to meet the high expectations of the consumers, and the requirements of your business, to make as many customer interactions succeed. Ideally, customer engagement systems contain the following functions if they are to achieve the goals of retaining customers and improving sales:

Tools to streamline marketing campaigns:  Marketing and sales departments shouldn’t need to enlist technical people every time they need to launch a new campaign, or shift gears on a current campaign. Nontechnical users should be able to easily create campaigns and monitor their progress.

Campaign testing capability: A complete customer engagement solution should make it easy to test campaigns across customer channels in real time, allowing marketers and other stakeholders to keep improving their customer engagement efforts.  Concepts that sound easy (like A/B page comparison and multivariate testing) are frequently hard or impossible to conduct by the marketing staff.

Thorough reporting on customer reaction: Creators of customer content need feedback on site visitor activity in response to campaigns, so they can adjust tactics accordingly.  While the content itself is important, the small things make a difference as well.  Content needs to be organized and presented in a way that makes sense for the visitors and not just convenient for the developers.

The Right Stuff:  while content is king, the type of content (written, images, or rich media) can make significant differences to site visitors who want to find the information they seek in a quick way. This information must be, organized to their thought processes, not the processes that are convenient to the site developers.  Navigation, layout, and color can make the difference in how easy it is for visitors to follow the steps that have been laid out for them.

Tying all of these functions together in a single customer engagement solution creates the best environment for a team approach to content development. Unfortunately, finding such a comprehensive solution isn’t easy. Most businesses make do with a mishmash of disconnected, siloed solutions that don’t talk to each other, and that don’t provide easy access for workers outside of IT departments.

These disconnected solutions can cause disputes about responsibilities for content management—and slowdowns in pushing content out to customers. Content owners may believe they have a lack of control of their material and its presentation, since they are not “owning” the process from starts to finish. And they may argue with IT as to who owns which parts of the process. Finally, during IT crunch times, IT may put content management on the back burner, delaying the ability to improve connects with customers—therefore, time to market will grind to a halt. And, to make matter worse, disparate systems can make it difficult to correlate information and metrics coming in from many different places, which can be key to determining how to fine tune and improve the site for maximum engagement.

What’s needed is the ability to bring all of these critical elements together in one platform that makes it easy for everyone involved in the management process – from marketing to IT – to collaborate effectively and efficiently. The benefits of working with a single tool to manage all aspects of a company’s web presence are many: the lives of the content creators, developers and back-end management become easier, the accuracy of metrics coming in from multiple systems is more apparent and the cost from integrating technologies from several vendors via one platform is significantly lessened.