What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the name given to any interaction a customer or consumer has with a company via various online or offline channels.
It is a process, which involves relationship building between the company and the consumer, resulting into loyalty and trust. This eventually increases the overall tangible and intangible benefits to the company such as profit, brand value, and recognition.
Customer engagement is a key tool for nurturing a customer’s loyalty to a brand, as individual interactions will impact a customer’s overall experience with the brand.
What are the various types of customer engagement?
- Contextual Engagement :
When engagement is done with complete information about the customer and situation and proper context of the subject, brands understand the customer’s needs through proper communication and collaboration, and that results in effective and personalized solutions and discussions.
- Engagement of convenience :
When engagement is done at the convenience of brand as well as the customer, the overall ratio of customer’s happiness and suffering determines customer convenience.
- Emotional Engagement :
When brands engage with their customers on emotional level through their communication channels, brand imaging and offline and online touchpoints it facilitates the company to connect with their customers, understand their needs and thus deliver not only what customers ask for but also caters to their latent needs. This helps brands perform much better and gain long term trust and loyalty.
- Social Engagement :
When brands interact or communicate on the online platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc. it helps brands to build brand network and communities.
If companies want to build loyal customer bases and grow market share, then they need to deliver quality customer experiences. Modern CEOs are aware of this fact, with Acquire research finding that 39 per cent say customer experience is the most effective method of creating a competitive advantage. Acquire also found that 86 per cent of consumers said they would buy from a company again after receiving a good customer experience.
In this exclusive CX Network guide, we look into how companies can improve their customer engagement tactics.
How to improve customer engagement
1. Make sure customers have consistent experiences
Research by Salesforce found that most consumers (75 per cent) expect consistent experiences across multiple channels. However, spikes in enquiry volumes triggered by factors like an influx of support tickets, chat messages or the launch of new channels, have created more opportunities for fragmented interactions to occur. When teams communicate with customers in conflicting ways, it creates frustration and excessive effort that decreases both the quality and efficiency of support. This frustration can leave customers feeling disappointed by a brand, making them more likely to churn.
One solution to these disjointed experiences is to introduce AI tools and technologies. These technologies can provide automated ways to keep teams in-sync. For example, platform-agnostic tools like AI-powered writing assistants and living style guides offer real-time guidance to employees around the correct language, brand names, terminology, style and even tone. These tools can remove communication bottlenecks and deliver improvements in both customer satisfaction and efficiency by integrating into all the places customers and employees interact.
Additionally, by implementing AI-powered writing assistant technology that enhances the consistency and efficiency of communications, companies can achieve high levels of customer satisfaction on record. The technology operates seamlessly across existing systems and workflows, and can enhance an entire support team’s communication skills without investing in dedicated training.
2. Ensure that insights are actioned
While companies may have rich data on their customers and are able to produce insights from this data, these insights must be actioned for them to be of real value.
Nick Macfarlane, VP of customer engagement at Sky Ticket, likens failing to action CX insights to being a postman: CX professionals just post the insight to the right location (department) and leave.
He explains: “That’s my biggest CX lesson over 20 years: If you are really tuned into your customers and you understand so much, CX teams have got to convert this understanding into making meaningful changes.”
He suggests that companies use real-time technologies in order to bring swifter value to their customers.
“If you can tap into what your customers think in almost real time, you can be agile in making changes that will bring benefits quickly,” says Macfarlane. “If you always conduct lengthy research with customer segments around every VoC insight and then craft detailed delivery plans – your customers may well have gone by the time you implement the needed change!”
3. Introduced virtual and augmented reality
As brands adapt to provide value in a post Covid-19 world, virtual and augmented reality experiences have been pegged for more prevalence in customer engagement, as these systems can provide a level of immersion on a remote basis. Retail brands, such as IKEA, have been providing augmented reality experiences, enabling users to use their mobile devices to experiment with staging new potential purchases in their homes.
By introducing these virtual and augmented reality experiences, brands are able to cater to customers within their homes, offering them buying experiences that they may not otherwise have. These experiences can help boost customer engagement by expanding the available options for interacting with a brand.
4. Introduce personalization
Research by Epsilon has found that up to 80 per cent of individuals are more likely to do business with an organization that offers personalized services. However, if incorrectly implemented personalized marketing can become intrusive. This is often referred to as ‘creepy marketing’. This can occur when data is shared between departments, resulting in actions that surprise and unsettle the customer.
To personalize marketing at scale without customers feeling intruded on, brands can utilize methods involving automation, artificial intelligence and machine learning. The scale benefits of these technologies must be utilized wisely as marketing mistakes will no longer just impact one person, but risk impacting an entire customer segment or base. When large-scale personalization is not backed by accurate data, brands run the risk of damaging multiple customer journeys. When large-scale personalization is not backed by accurate data, brands run the risk of damaging multiple customer journeys.
5. Introduce a Voice of the Customer initiative
By collecting and actioning feedback from customers, brands can increase up-selling and cross-selling success by up to 20 per cent, Oracle has discovered. Additionally, decision-making rooted in customer feedback can lead to improved Net Promoter Scores (NPS) and increased top-line revenue from customer retention.
By listening to an actioning VoC feedback, companies can make sure engagement strategies are more targeted, giving them a higher chance of success. By implementing customer feedback, companies show their customers that they genuinely care about their customers’ satisfaction levels.
Simone Correll, head of customer experience at Allianz, explained how introducing a VoC initiative transformed the financial services business: “In the past, customer satisfaction and transactional feedback programs were a market management related topic only. What we achieved with the implementation of VoC is [getting] all the different relevant stakeholders in the company involved and working together in understanding what the most relevant and recurrent customer pain points are. Additionally, all the employees are concerned with customer satisfaction and understand the importance of not only listening but acting on customer feedback.”
6. Introduce customer centric cultures
Customer centricity is a business outlook that focuses on improving a brand’s customer experience to help it win, serve, and retain customers. It aims to increase understanding of, and alignment with, customer ideals by putting them at the forefront of all decisions, actioning their voices to enact change.
By introducing customer centricity, businesses are able to make both new and existing customers feel valued by actioning their requests and showing customers in real time that their feedback affects the way the business runs. By providing, a more tailored and relevant experience, businesses can ensure that they provide the best value service to their customers.
Simone Correll shared that customer centricity is at the core of all operations at Allianz, for all employees.
“All our stakeholders, including the frontline employees, understand that customer centricity is the only way we can ensure that systematic issues are tackled consistently, allowing us to optimize our processes and ultimately improve customer satisfaction,” she explained.
Case study: Better Collective
Better Collective, an iGaming affiliate, was able to boost customer engagement by 30 per cent by introducing personalized emails. These emails were informed by a wealth of customer data during its acquisition of web-based sport betting and gambling news site VegasInsider and web-based daily fantasy sports community RotoGrinders.
Providing one-to-one personalization based on all of the available data should be the main goal of customer engagement, Fowler advises. “In the case of betting expert, we were pulling from about seven of our different APIs just to produce one email for each person. From this previous integration, we knew what we had to do with RotoGrinders and VegasInsider to replicate success.”
Thanks to the data-driven personalization, customer engagement rates have significantly improved, notes Fowler. “On one campaign, the daily open rates for a three-month period since rolling out are over 40 per cent, for what normally as an (iGaming) industry average is a few percent and is seen as notoriously poor or spammy content.”
In order to drive customer engagement, companies should deliver a consistent, personalized experience, introduce customer centric and Voice of the Customer initiatives and ensure that customer insights are actioned.
Conclusion
Customer engagement is the process of brands interacting and communicating with their customers throughout their journey with the brand and thus enabling an in depth understanding between the brand and the customer. There are multiple strategies as to how brands can engage with their customers such as improving overall customer experiences with brand and capturing qualitative and quantitative data to extract insights. Brands can introduce innovative technologies such as AR, VR and enable personalization for enhanced engagement. With all the initiatives and efforts by brands, they will surely be able to connect and talk to their customers in a much efficient and effective way.
Read More:
Access the content below for more resources dedicated to customer engagement:
Boost your CSAT and accelerate performance with consistent communication, Dorian Stone, 06/16/2021
Customer retention myths that can hurt your brand’s growth, CX Network, 07/16/2021
What are consumer insights?, Olivia Powell, 08/04/2021
CX Market Leaders in Retail: A CX Network guide, Chanice Henry, 10/28/2021
Drive fierce customer loyalty with connected digital workflows, CX Network, 11/03/2020
The definitive guide to e-commerce customer experience, CX Network, 04/08/2020
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