A customer engagement platform is software that sends a consumer app's messages to its users, by push notification, email, SMS, WhatsApp and inside the app, and then tracks what each user did next. It is also called an omnichannel engagement platform, or marketing automation for consumer brands. Shopping apps, food delivery apps, banks and fintech apps use it to reach millions of users without an employee writing to each one.
The platform does three jobs. First, it sorts users into groups, based on what they did in the app. This is called segmentation. A group can be, for example, "everyone who searched for a product this week but did not buy". Second, it runs a planned series of messages for each group. A marketer draws the series on screen like a flowchart. This is called journey orchestration. Third, it sends each message on the chosen channel, and records whether the user opened it, came back to the app or bought.
To do this, the platform must know what each user does. The app sends the platform a short record, called an event, every time the user does something: opens a screen, adds an item to the basket or pays. Some platforms build their own profile of each user from these events. Others receive the profile from a customer data platform (CDP).
Take, for example, an online pharmacy app with 60 lakh users. Many of them buy the same blood pressure or diabetes medicine every month. The marketer creates a group: users whose last 30-day order was placed 26 days ago. This week, 1.8 lakh users fall into it. Each of them receives a push notification: "Your refill is due. Reorder in one tap." If a user does not open it within 24 hours, the platform sends an SMS. If the user reorders, the series stops at once, so that nobody receives a reminder after buying. At the end of the week, the marketer sees that 41% of the group reordered.
The platform does not deliver the messages itself. It hands each SMS to an A2P SMS aggregator, which delivers it through the mobile operators. In India, every business SMS must carry a sender name and follow a message template registered with the operators, under TRAI's rules. Some apps send push notifications and emails through separate notification infrastructure. WhatsApp messages go through a messaging API provider.
Most platforms are sold as SaaS, with a fee based on how many users the app reaches each month. Newer platforms add AI decisioning: an AI model picks the message, the channel and the time for each user, instead of following a journey that the marketer drew.