Customer engagement is the cornerstone for most successful businesses today. In a world where customers connect across multiple devices and channels, quality of experience is effectively taking over price as the critical differentiator between offerings. Hence, brands must adopt a customer-centric approach. Understanding and analyzing customer behavior is the key to providing personalized and relevant experience, which, in turn, increases conversion, retains existing customers, and creates brand loyalists.
The journey to becoming a customer-obsessed brand is long, complex, and riddled with issues of understanding customer behavior, personalizing recommendations, dissolving silos between analytics, engagement, and automation, and enhancing cross-team collaboration. But as the saying goes, ‘A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.’ That single step is implementing an intelligent Customer Engagement Platform!
You’ve got to start with the customer experience and work back toward the technology, not the other way around. – Steve Jobs
Customer engagement is a strategy used to engage with customers using different offline and online touchpoints such as in-store experiences, in-app experiences, social media, website, etc.
According to a PwC survey, 73% of consumers said that their experience is a critical decision-making factor while buying a product from a brand. That’s why customer engagement is no longer a good-to-have strategy. It has become a priority for brands to improve their revenue and build customer loyalty. In fact, the deeper the engagement, the more are the chances for brands to increase conversions and cross-sell future products.
However, to build a successful customer engagement, brands have to analyze the customer’s behavior and personalize their experience. The customer’s purchase path has significantly evolved in this connected customer experience ecosystem. Let’s look at some changes you would witness in customers’ purchase paths and some ways to adapt to them.
To know more on this topic, check out our blog on Behavioral Change and Evolution of Modern Purchase Path: Key Learning Lessons. |
As the customer purchase path evolves, brands also have to consider the evolution in customer engagement. Considering that customers engage through multiple channels, brands have to create a seamless experience. However, omnichannel engagement faces several challenges.
The only way to address these challenges is by building a 360-degree customer view. This will help the brands to create a consistent and seamless engagement with the customer.
Read more on how to build a seamless omnichannel engagement with customers, download our e-book. |
By now, it’s clear that brands can increase their revenue and take their business to the next level if they focus on customer engagement. A Deloitte survey reveals that customers are likely to spend 140% more after a positive brand experience. One way to improve customer experience is through insights-driven 1:1 customer engagement. Customers do not like receiving communication that’s not relevant to their interests. 1:1 customer engagement helps brands analyze the customer, predict their behavior, and communicate accordingly. This could include understanding the most active time of the customer on their platform, picking their preferred communication channel, and recommending the right content by deciphering what the customer wants to see.
Brands must also focus on simplifying the onboarding process to keep the customers engaged and nurture them throughout the journey. There will be some challenges, such as keeping every customer engaged, and multiple martech tools could lead to silos in data and impact personalization. However, companies can tackle these challenges with the help of customer engagement platforms and experimentations.
Click to know more on how to achieve 1:1 customer engagement. |
A customer engages with the brand through various channels such as social media, emails, websites, etc. Each of these channels functions differently. This could pose a challenge for brands in providing a consistent and positive experience to customers. You can address this issue by using customer engagement platforms. A customer engagement platform is a single portal that centralizes, optimizes, and analyzes customer interactions across different touchpoints.
Apart from initiating communication with customers, a customer engagement platform can help brands analyze behavior and industry patterns and analyze the platform’s data to optimize customer engagement. It enables brands to think beyond customer acquisition and focus on retention, expansion, and cross-sell/upsell. Brands can also streamline their workflows and automate repetitive tasks, thus enabling the customer service teams to focus on long-term customer engagement and growth.
The customer engagement platform has become so crucial that the brand might have difficulty optimizing its engagement activities without it. These platforms have enabled brands to make data-backed decisions and boost engagement metrics.
Do you know 70% of customer experience professionals view silos as the most significant obstacle in customer service? Silos don’t just deteriorate trust between the teams but could also lead to critical decision-making delays. Despite knowing the shortcomings of silos, the sales and customer service teams work in siloes. They don’t collaborate, and as no one takes charge, the brand risks losing potential sales opportunities. The lack of accountability and transparency could impact the brand’s sales and revenue long-term. One way to resolve this problem is by using customer engagement platforms.
A customer engagement platform consolidates all the information about the customer in a single place. This enables the sales and customer service teams to understand customer behavior, improve segmentation, and send relevant content to boost conversions. It also provides the team with valuable insights into why drop-offs happen and improves engagement accordingly. It enables the teams to improve their efficiency across acquisition, retention, and up-sell/cross-sell. Thus, the sales pipeline becomes manageable.
Most importantly, as the customer engagement platform automates the repetitive tasks and streamlines the workflows, the teams can optimize customer engagement. It can help improve the team’s efficiency and boost customer engagement metrics.
Check out our blog on customer engagement for modern teams for more information. |
Customer-centricity is essential for building long-term customer engagement. A customer-centric approach can offer several advantages to brands.
In a nutshell, being customer-centric will help brands to engage with customers at various stages of the customer journey, align experiences according to the customer’s changed behavior, gain their trust, and convert them into brand advocates.
However, a brand can successfully achieve customer-centricity only if it takes a data-driven approach. A data-driven approach enables the brands to have better visibility of the customer across all the channels. Most importantly, data is a single source of truth that everyone from sales, marketing, and customer success trust. So, brands can leverage this data to create successful customer engagement strategies. By taking a data-driven approach, brands can improve their speed of execution, improve sales through better segmentation and understanding of customer behavior, and improve engagement.
You can read more about building data-driven customer engagement in our blog. |
To become customer-centric and data-driven, brands need to build a customer-first culture within their organization. Everyone – from the management to employees in a customer-first environment is committed to delivering an exceptional experience. Simply put, they are customer-obsessed, which drives them to align their functions, stay agile, and promote innovation. To build a customer-first culture, a brand must follow these basic 11 tenets.
Learn how to build a customer-first organization to create successful customer engagement. |
While implementing customer engagement strategies, brands must also define and measure the metrics to determine what’s working and build a better relationship with the customer. Contrary to popular beliefs, customer engagement metrics are not restricted to email open rates, click rates, or social media engagement. Here are 13 customer engagement metrics that brands could measure to build meaningful customer engagement.
Check out our blog to learn more about measuring customer engagement metrics. |
As you might have already learned by now, customers engage with your brand through multiple channels. The boundaries between these channels have blurred, and now there is just an omnichannel experience that offers customers a unified and continuous experience. We have shortlisted 11 proven methods that can help you to improve your omnichannel customer engagement.
There is no one-size-fits-all method to building a unique omnichannel customer engagement.
However, thinking omnichannel and putting yourself into the customer’s shoes will enable you to deliver unique experiences across different channels.
You can read about omnichannel customer engagement to gain new insights into perfecting this art. |
A discussion on customer engagement is incomplete without mentioning mobile app engagement. You may have built a best-in-class mobile app, but all your efforts could go in vain if you don’t focus on app engagement. Mobile app engagement gives your customer reasons to return to your app and perform the desired action. This is important because research shows that an app loses 77% of its daily customers within the first three days of installation and almost 95% of them within 90 days. So, what can brands do to improve mobile app engagement? We have listed 21 ideas to rekindle customer engagement.
For more ideas on improving mobile customer engagement, read this article that discusses ways to improve mobile app engagement. |