Everything You Need To Know About Customer Engagement

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer engagement is an emotional connection or interaction made by businesses and their customers. Customers that are highly engaged tend to spend more, promote the brand, and are more loyal. The core elements of a successful customer engagement strategy should include the highest quality customer experience.

Customers that are fully engaged represent 23% more revenue on average than non-engaged customers. Empathy, clarity, and consistency are all essential components of customer engagement.

Customer Engagement Strategy

Customer engagement strategies can have a major effect on long-term business outcomes. Great customer experience and high retention rates are experienced by businesses that invest in a customer engagement strategy that works.

A good customer engagement strategy captures the attention of customers across the board and ensures that they are experiencing quality interactions. Most consumer interaction with brands is omnichannel, which means that businesses are starting to consider how and where consumers interact with them.

How To Increase Customer Engagement

Acquiring, converting, and retaining customers is a hard feat in the oversaturated digital age. Businesses work hard to meaningfully turn their customers into brand advocates.

The only way to truly increase customer engagement is to build and create great customer experiences.

Building Maps to explore customer interaction helps businesses to analyze important data points. They can then gauge any areas that need improvement whilst concurrently building a strong customer engagement strategy.

Making your brand meaningful and relatable helps to establish vital connections between customers and businesses. If customers relate to an authentic brand image they are much more likely to stick around.

Conversational Marketing is a great technique used by the digital marketing industry to deliver round-the-clock support and assistance. Chatbots driven by powerful AIs are becoming more common and are expected by customers who demand high-quality service.

Customer Engagement Marketing

Customer engagement marketing is simply a marketing strategy that is concentrated around increased customer engagement. Delivering personalized support, perks, and messages through multiple channels all contribute to a successful marketing campaign. Outstanding customer engagement is defined by a two-way conversation that delivers personalized content through several lanes including, social media, web, email, and community forums.

The rule of thumb is simple. The more personalized the content, the more engagement. Addressing areas for improvement and offering simple solutions creates an avid emotional response from customers who will likely stick with your brand long-term.

Customer Engagement Model

A customer engagement model is a technique used by businesses to engage and build relationships with their customers. Customer engagement models that include trial conversions, customer satisfaction surveys, and customer retention data are most likely to succeed.

The framework should define collaboration between a client and a business. It should set a blueprint for customer expectations and construe values, motives, and intentions. Consumers need to be engaged throughout the entire customer journey. Proactive and reactive approaches should be adopted by support teams to ensure that customers inherently benefit from the product or service.

Customer Engagement Examples

PetCo is a small to medium-sized pet health and wellness app that has its customer engagement marketing strategy down to a fine art. First impressions are a huge factor in determining long-term loyalty and retention. PetCo's welcome email is easy to scan and delivers personalized content that relates to its target consumers. It provides graphically pleasing images, masterful copy and, it elicits emotion. All of these things combined, ensure that PetCo is producing a one-of-a-kind service that resonates with its customers.

UberEats is a master at personalizing content and messages. They go beyond surface-level personalizations and create dynamic content that is relevant to their customer’s needs. UberEats uses powerful algorithms that measure posting behavior and track location data. This enables them to use behavior-triggering messaging to emphasize missed opportunities and entice customers to re-engage.

Customer Engagement Process

The customer engagement process extends far beyond the point of purchase. It's about making sure that you are there to assist customers through every step of the customer journey and product life cycle. From the first interaction to the point of purchases, the customer engagement process defines the actions that a business must take in order to attain and win over new customers.

Every business functions and works differently, but the customer engagement process looks the same across all industries. Customer needs can vary but customer expectations are always the same. In the age of enterprise, there is a wealth of competition that can easily convert and entice customers to stop purchasing a product. Market saturation and healthy competition laws mean that businesses have to constantly innovate to stay ahead of the opposition.

Why is Customer Engagement important?

When a business has elevated customer interactions, it creates a perceived high value to consumers. Potential customers will be more likely to interact with your brand if they are able to recognize inherent quality. The most important part of a customer engagement strategy is building deeper connections between the brand and the customer.

Connecting at multiple different touchpoints allows both businesses and consumers to learn more about each other and develop long-lasting relationships. Successful customer engagement strategies work to infiltrate the decision-making process by permeating a customer’s mind and altering their perceptions.

What is a Customer Engagement Leader?

Engagement leaders are members of organizations that focus on vision and promoting constructive models to customers. They work by interacting, connecting, and engaging with customers to find out their specific wants and needs as related to a particular product or service, or business. Customer engagement leaders often host focus groups whose demographics have been very specifically targeted to fill in the gaps in customer engagement strategies.

The job of the customer engagement leader is to define problem areas through customer interaction and feedback and incorporate their findings into building a better customer engagement strategy.

Customer Engagement interview Questions

In a customer engagement interview, you'll most likely be asked behavioral questions to gauge your responsiveness to fulfilling needs and expectations.

There are the three most commonly asked questions in a customer engagement interview:

1. Email, phone, or in-person: Which do you prefer and why?
2. How do you balance deadlines on multiple accounts?
3. How would you incorporate consecutive criticism into a customer engagement strategy and improve metrics?

Emotional Customer Engagement

Consumers that have an emotional connection to a brand have on average a 306% higher lifetime value and are a lot more likely to recommend and connect with the brand long-term. When businesses concentrate their efforts on building strong and emotional connections with their customers it leads to a higher spend, purchase frequency, and free word of mouth promotion.

Brand advocates can discern and spread value through brand recognition. This induces a higher lifetime value and increases authenticity whilst rewarding customers for their loyalty.

Customer Recognition Definition

Just as important as employee recognition, customer recognition utilizes the value in forming individual relationships with their customers to better understand their needs. Customer acknowledgment is a crucial component in operating a successful business. The transactional nature of business operations can feel impartial; and when this is applied to the customer, it creates an uninviting marketplace that leaves the customer no incentive to return. Personalizing business interactions with your customers cultivates an experience unique to each customer and can inspire or add value to a transactional relationship.

Customer Involvement Definition

Customer involvement is defined as the varying level of personal interest in each potential customer. Assessing and acknowledging the factors that go into consumer decision-making. Successful customer involvement is evident in a seller's ability to motivate customer engagement and influence/shape consumer decisions to the point of purchase. Customer involvement is achieved when the seller increases the chance of customer transaction by predicting buying habits and associating a product with a customer's self-identity. It’s defined as the successful practice of an immersive marketplace, individualized marketing, and observing consumption patterns in association with a service or product.

Conclusion

Customer engagement strategies are on the rise with more and more businesses wanting to increase and retain their valuable consumer bases. The digital revolution has spurred on competition at phenomenal rates and now businesses are trying to find new and innovative ways to reach and engage with their customers.

Adopting a customer engagement strategy is the best way to keep hold of legacy customers whilst opening the avenue for new ones. It’s about listening to customers' needs and fulfilling them in a way that sets you apart from everyone else. Doing so will have long-term benefits that will far outweigh the investment.

Disclaimer: This article was originally written for the Walk.Me Glossary.