In this day and age, customer engagement is one of the most important aspects of business. It is ironic that even though companies readily admit that customer engagement is something they would like to improve, it isn’t always obvious what they mean when they talk about it or how it can be best leveraged.
Let’s take a look at this for ourselves and see what it has to offer.
How does customer engagement differ from customer service?
The term “customer engagement” refers to the bond created by the interactions between a business and its customers on a psychological and emotional level. There are several different channels and mediums through which these interactions may occur – both offline as well as online.
In order to build long-lasting relationships with customers, it is imperative to engage them positively.
Importance of customer engagement
Customer engagement helps keep your brand top of the customer’s mind by creating a strong tie with your company. In other words, engaged customers keep coming back.
The reason is simple: because of the way your brand makes them feel.
They enjoy the experience above and beyond just the product or service that you offer, and that persuades them to become loyal customers. That’s why companies with the strongest omnichannel customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89 percent of their customers, while companies with weak omnichannel strategies retain just 33 percent.
Loyal customers may even be happy to do some of your marketing for you by recommending your business to others, too.
Customer engagement tips
So, it’s clear that creating a customer engagement strategy is important to your business. But how can you best go about it?
It’s all about learning how to better connect with your customers.
Here are some ways you can do that:
- Ensure that you are transparent in your business practices
Having a loyal customer base isn’t an easy thing to achieve. Oftentimes, customers believe that companies only look after themselves, and this is part of the reason for this. If you want to prove that this is not the case, then you need to show that your company has the best interests of your customers at heart. In some cases, it might be worth pointing a customer towards the product of a competitor if that product is more suited to meet the needs of the customer. Despite the fact that you may not be able to immediately see a financial benefit from this, you will be able to foster more trust with your customers and build better relationships in the long run.
- Make sure that you are using the right technology
One of the best ways to interact with customers and create engagement with your business is to use technology to help you do your job better and more effectively. Imagine that a consumer has a question regarding a product that they would like answered, but does not wish to have to send off an email and wait around for a response.
Technology such as live chat, or chatbots, can provide customers with the information they need in real time in this situation. So that your business can engage with potential or existing customers before they go elsewhere, you can engage them before they leave.
The use of other technology, such as cobrowsing, can go a step further. It is possible to provide an interactive visual tool that can help customers overcome obstacles, for example, when they encounter a tricky or confusing form. It is important to show the customer such care in order to ensure that they feel appreciated and that they remain loyal to you in the long term.
- Don’t forget to put a human touch on it
I’m not going to lie, there is a lot to be said about technology and the benefits it brings, but there’s no denying that the power of the human touch should also not be overlooked. The customer needs to have the opportunity to interact with a real person.
Furthermore, there is no reason why human agents cannot be empowered to take care of the complex customer service issues that arise as well. It is the perfect time to showcase the human side of your business by showcasing people from within the company to the public directly. It is possible, for example, to create digital marketing content, such as video content, that you can share and promote digitally, or even conduct in-person events to accomplish this goal.
- Use social media to your advantage
Nowadays, social media isn’t an optional marketing tool for brands, because your customers expect you to be on social media. If you’re in that position, you can’t just throw up any old thing every once in a while and hope that it’ll work. In order for you to be successful you will have to develop a regular cadence and develop relevant content. In social media interfaces, you can use analytics tools to determine who your audience is and what will be effective for them.
You need to ensure that the content you share on social media is inviting to them, as social media is also a platform for starting conversations. There are several formats you can use in order to do this, such as polls and quizzes. Do not feel shy about responding to comments from users as well, especially if they are negative. In this manner, you will be able to turn negative experiences into positive ones when you are interacting with customers.
- Make use of push notifications to your advantage
It is sometimes necessary to be proactive in informing your customers about what you have to offer in order to keep them interested. There are several ways to do that, such as sending them push notifications that informing them about special offers, product releases, and more. It is a great thing that because your customers must opt-in to receive such emails, they have already agreed to engage with you. As long as your notifications are persuasive enough, this will be a success. For this to happen, you need to nail your segmentation, your content, and your timing.
You must, however, be careful not to overburden your customers with too many notifications. You don’t want them to get annoyed by too many notifications.
- Be sure to personalize, personalize, personalize
There are many ways to personalize a product or service. In order to create personalized recommendations based on past behaviors, companies such as Netflix and Amazon are utilizing algorithmic technology. Even though this is an extremely effective approach, you do not have to rely on complex technology to personalize the customer’s experience.
Despite the fact that it’s always possible to proactively ask customers at the very beginning of their customer journey what they are interested in so you will be able to adjust the content, products, and offers they are exposed to accordingly. The simplest methods, such as using customer names in emails, can help increase customer engagement.
- Offer omnichannel customer service to our customers
It is a vital part of keeping customers engaged that you are always available to them, wherever and whenever they need you. Nonetheless, if you want to make sure that your customers are satisfied, by going one step further you are essentially creating a consistent, holistic, and continuous conversation. This will enable you to efficiently create a true omnichannel customer experience. You will need to create a centralized repository of data, which will provide a single customer view, in order to achieve this goal. In this way, customers are able to pick up where they left off, no matter what channels they are using, saving them from having to repeat themselves over and over again.
- Make sure you know how engaged your audience is
As obvious as it might sound to some people, if you want to improve your customer engagement levels, you are going to need to know exactly how engaged your customers are. You will have to take measures to determine exactly how engaged your customers are. Fortunately, there is a profusion of customer engagement metrics out there that can be found for precisely this purpose.
There will be a number of factors that determine the exact metrics you use, such as the channel(s) by which you want to measure engagement (e.g. social media, website, email). It is important for you to keep in mind that engagement metrics may involve looking at a wide range of interactions with your brand, regardless of their precise scope. For example, in the case of emails, the open rate may be the factor, or in social media likes and comments could be the factor.
- Request feedback from your audience
Providing your customers with a voice is one of the best ways to foster engagement with your company. For this to occur, you must collect feedback from your customers. When customers feel that their voices are being heard, they are more likely to believe they are part of your business and that their opinion matters. You just have to make sure you put these ideas into practice.
Your ability to collect information is crucial in helping you identify areas of improvement and in getting a handle on the pain points that your customers are experiencing. Taking feedback effectively can be achieved, for instance, by using comment boxes, sending out questionnaires, and asking in live chat, among other methods.
- Be a great content creator
It is awash with information on the internet. In order to stand out against all of this noise, you must make sure that the content you provide is of the highest quality, as well as useful to your clients. As part of this content, customers can learn how to better do things, solve problems they come across or solve some of the problems they come across.
You can help ensure that your users stay on your website for longer by offering them video tutorials, self-service knowledge bases, interactive assessments and the like. Content geared towards B2C audiences is mostly concerned with generating awareness, whereas content for B2B audiences is more concerned about providing consumers with straightforward solutions that will also build trust.
- Set up a loyalty program based on your customers’ preferences
I believe that keeping your existing customers rather than attempting to acquire new ones will be more cost-effective in the long run. A loyalty program that is well thought out can help you in this regard in a big way.
What structure is most relevant to your business will be determined by the way the business operates and by the industry in which it operates. You could reward your customers with a simple point system that rewards them for every purchase they make, which can then be redeemed at a later date.
The different types of customer engagements that exist
Customer engagement encompasses a wide range of activities. To begin with, there are a few different types of interactions depending on what is happening:
Engagement of customers across multiple touchpoints. There can be any point where a customer comes into direct contact with your company, for example your website.
Engagement with the product. In other words, the actual experience of using the product itself.
Engagement with the agent. A customer’s experience when dealing with customer service representatives.
Engaging with a brand. As a result of the overall customer experience, there develops an emotional attachment between a customer and the brand.
It is also important to keep in mind that from the customer’s perspective, the exact psychological reason for engagement varies. There are several ways in which customers can engage with your brand through the following different lenses:
Engaging in a context-specific manner
In order for engagement to be meaningful, it must take place in context. It is true that people aren’t interested in something unless it is relevant to them. Using technology to help you understand an individual’s behavior and what it says about their needs and desires can be very effective in helping you make this happen. Utilizing behavioral data in combination with other factors such as location, time, and so on, you can create a far more engaging and personalized experience for your customers.
Engagement at your convenience
Convenience is a very important aspect of life for many people. So, there is no doubt that you can increase customer engagement by making your customers’ lives easier. There are several examples of this, one of which is Amazon’s Dash, a feature that makes it easy to order products that are frequently ordered at the touch of a button. This leads to Amazon delivering the product they need directly to their door. Keeping the effort to a minimum will ensure that customers will be able to return to your business again and again.
Engagement on an emotional level
Human behavior is heavily influenced by emotion, which is the key driver of human behavior. In addition, there are a whole host of factors that influence decisions making that occur under the surface. This includes the way people feel about owning a product.
The ability to measure or manipulate emotion has traditionally been very difficult, but as customer experience management technology has improved, brands now have direct access to a vast array of data that can help them build this kind of understanding at an individual level.
Engaging in ethical behavior
The consumer has moved well beyond a materialist view of the world and is now much more aware of ethics than he or she has ever been. In our increasingly connected world, it looks like there’s no place to hide. There are billions of social media users around the world who can expose poor practices simply by clicking a button. I think it is important for businesses to make their operating processes and manufacturing procedures transparent as much as possible.
Engagement with society
Customers who are deeply engaged may become advocates for your company. If someone has a positive experience with your brand, they share it through their social media channels, which influences others to seek out the brand as well. Engaging customers in this way is the real pinnacle since it breeds further engagement organically without requiring extra time and resources.
Engagement means committing to something
Engaging customers involves more than just improving what you already do. In order to deliver what resonates with your customers, you must understand how to make it accessible. You will only be able to maintain long-lasting customer relationships if you do this.