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Nonetheless, customer engagement is much more important than you could think. Engaged customers are those who drive your business forward and form the most loyal customer base that ensures the financial success and stability of your company for years ahead. Customer engagement is the most significant factor when it comes to such vital aspects of your business as cross-sales, up-sales, purchasing decisions, customer satisfaction at different stages of the customer journey, and so on.
Thus, ignoring customer engagement management and the inability to define customer engagement makes business weaker in terms of competition and marketing campaigns, and harms the efficiency of customer acquisition and customer retention strategies. That’s why we have decided to create a complete customer engagement guide on how to measure, track and improve customer engagement.
Let’s start.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement (CE) is the emotional connection customers feel to your brand and their willingness to interact more actively through different customer engagement channels. Customer engagement (CE) is sometimes spelled as customer-brand engagement (CBE). In fact, customer engagement definition can differ depending on the beliefs of the customer service professional who is trying to define it, as it is a very broad term - perhaps even broader than customer experience.
You have to understand that there are two different ways to define customer engagement - from the customer perspective and from the brand perspective. From the customer perspective, customer engagement is how likely it is for customers to engage with the brand. From a brand perspective, customer engagement covers all strategies and practices that can be used to acquire more engaged customers and engage with clients effectively to improve other aspects of the customer-brand relationships.
As with any other aspect of customer service, customer engagement is meant to improve a company’s profits and sales. Engaged customers are more likely to make positive purchase decisions and they are also more likely to come back for another purchase and stay for longer with a company, which means that engaged customers are loyal customers - and vice versa. In other words, successful customer engagement strategy increases conversion rates, reduces bounce rate, helps sales teams and marketing teams to provide seamless experience and to build trustful relationships with customers. Anyhow, there can be exclusions.
Customer engagement vs customer experience
As we have already mentioned, people often confuse customer engagement with customer experience or just believe that customer engagement is included in customer experience, so focusing on one of them means that another is already done with. Actually, it is wrong - customer engagement and customer experience aren’t diametrically opposite terms, but we can surprise you - even a customer who received the worst customer service experience of their life can be an engaged customer. How? Well, customer engagement exists in a few dimensions - longevity, proactivity, volume of customer interactions, context, and frequency. Can an engaged customer who has just received a poor experience reach out to you proactively and tell you all they think about your service? Surely, that’s how customer engagement works in a negative connotation. \
Thus, let’s define the terms clearly. Customer engagement means how deeply customers are engaged in communication and interaction with the brand, and customer experience is how these clients evaluate all their customer interactions with the brand throughout the customer journey.
Customer engagement vs customer satisfaction
This paragraph is here because of a single reason only - some people still think that customer satisfaction and customer experience are two different things. They are, in fact, but customer satisfaction is nothing but a component of entire customer experience - one of four. Thus, customer engagement just measures absolutely distinct aspect of customer-to-brand relationships than customer satisfaction does - customer engagement is, again, about how engaged customers are, and customer satisfaction is about how satisfied they are with your goods and services.
What is marketing customer engagement?
Customer engagement marketing is a marketing strategy and bundle of practices that are used to improve customer engagement and interact with customers in a way to make them engage with the brand’s generated content and the brand itself in order to increase sales and motivate engaged customers to interact with brands more frequently.
To understand how customer engagement marketing works, you have to understand what is engaged customer himself. First of all, engaged customer is the one who communicates not only (and not in the first place) with the brand, but with other members of the brand community - which means other customers, obviously. This communication can take the form of customer comments, blog posts, forum posts (if there are forums that are dedicated to your products), etc. Engaged customers always share customer feedback through customer surveys, take part in all activities and events organized by the company and show their activity and readiness to interact with company and community in other ways - thus customer engagement builds brand advocacy, as you could guess.
Thus, customer engagement marketing strategy is focused on sharing as many relevant content from the brand to customers, by using customer service engagement channels that are preferred by your target audience to make the audience interact with this content, share it further and increase customer engagement.
How to improve customer engagement? Top 5 tips
Build the brand voice
Brand voice, or tone of voice of your brand, is the unique way and style of communication you use to interact with your customers and targeted audiences when creating contect or communicating proactively with clients. Brand voice also influences the way you provide customer service. Even though we can say that brand voice is quite similar with tone of voice, we have to mention that while tone of voice have some precise frames and limits of what can it look like, brand voice is much broader and affects all aspects of customer relationships with the brand. Let’s make it clear - for instance, let’s use such a popular car brand as BMW as an example. In almost all countries in all parts of the world - no matter the cultural differences and specifics - BMW is associated with brutality, high social status, and masculinity. On the other hand, official communication of the brand is much “softer” - BMW positions itself as a premium brand for business executives with sporty temperament. Nonetheless, the non-formal brand voice of BMW matters much more than its formal tone of voice - 9.9 of 10 people who want to buy (or already bought) BMW have never read its official press releases or visited any of BMW events and identified as drivers of “business-class cars”. How does it relate to customer engagement? Well, first of all, look what customer engagement means for BMW clients - they create forums where they discuss cars, mods, add-ons, buy additional goods for their cars, and so on - isn’t it a pure customer engagement, especially if we take into account that target audience of this brand consists of mostly rich and successful people who don’t have much free time? That’s how it should work - even though 99.9% of brands will never come even close to the status that BMW has, you have to make your brand voice as unique as possible - in frames of your industry and compared to your competitors.
Provide proactive service and communication
Do you remember what we said about different dimensions of customer engagement? Proactivity is one of these. Under proactive service and communication, we mean that you, as a brand, have to initiate discussion and communication with customers as frequently as possible - by sharing content that provokes discussion, by offering client engagement services, client engagement programs, and so on. Customer engagement is a double-edged sword - customers can’t be engaged with a brand that is not focused on building customer engagement level.
Proactive service, on the other hand, is the way of resolving customer issues that is focused on identifying and resolving these issues before they are noticed by customers. On one hand, this helps to prevent customer dissatisfaction and negative customer experiences, and on the other hand, this is the best way to show customer care and invest in customer engagement improvement - as customers can be engaged only with brands that are engaged in resolving customer pain points.
Build community
The best way to improve customer engagement is to create an environment where customer engagement is possible and where engaged customers can share their experiences and motivate other users to join this community and make it grow. Customer engagement can be built in one easy way: when some clients see high customer engagement shown by other customers, their customer engagement level also increases.
Community is one of the most effective types of customer engagement model, but there are different types of such online communities: these could be forums, social media resources, etc. Forums can be considered outdated, but still, these are the best ways to stimulate customer engagement, even though it is difficult to use customer engagement management practices as forums and other communities are mostly created and managed by enthusiasts, not by your customer engagement team. With social media channels, it is easier to manage your customer engagement service, but still, it is more difficult for engaged customers to communicate with each other in this case.
Provide omnichannel communication
Customer engagement is also about customer comfort, so you have to provide customer engagement services and customer service all through the most preferred customer communication channels. It is impossible to ensure customer engagement if you don’t use contact channels that empower customer engagement, you can’t expect your customers to be engaged. Omnichannel communication means not only providing all customer engagement channels that can be provided but also an option for customers to switch between these channels without losing the progress of the conversation.
Omnichannel communication platform as customer engagement platform also allows you to gather enough data about customer behavior and customer preferences, so you can change your customer engagement strategy when needed to make it more effective and more customer-oriented.
Provide customer engagement programs
Customer engagement programs are just another word for customer loyalty programs. In other words, offering some benefits for loyal customers is the best way to improve customer engagement - customers will see measurable results of their customer engagement, and it will motivate them to be engaged. Customer loyalty programs can be designed in many different ways, including point collection, personal discounts, gifts, special offers, and so on - the main point is to make customer engagement programs personalized and designed in accordance with customer expectations.
Customer loyalty programs have to be also beneficial, which means that the benefits customers receive from being engaged in such customer engagement programs have to be “bigger” than effort customers have to put.
Personalize the service you provide
As we have mentioned before, personalization is a vital part of customer engagement. Customers are now common with personalized service, which means they don’t want to receive any other client engagement service, but personalized only. Personalization of customer engagement strategy doesn’t mean only that you will send customers emails with mentioning their names, but also personalized approach to forming offers, discounts, servicing customer requests, helping with choosing products, and so on. In the case of customer engagement, it is very important to show that the company is engaged in customers- brand relationships too - then customer engagement is possible, and personalized experiences are the best way to acquire potential customers and build effective customer engagement strategy. You can use different customer engagement tactics in the case of personalized customer relationship management - use purchase history to offer goods, ask satisfied customers about their positive experience to share, use social media engagement tactics, motivate current customers to become brand advocates, and so on.
How to measure customer engagement?
Some managers use other indirect customer engagement metrics to measure customer engagement - customer satisfaction, customer effort, customer churn, customer lifecycle value, net promoter score, and so on. We do not recommend this way, as it is indirect and measuring customer engagement process isn’t accurate in this case - it can't show the percentage of customers who are engaged or average customer engagement rate for your target audience.
So, there is also customer engagement score. How do you calculate it?
You have to define scores for key events that point to customer engagement - it can be using some features of a product, visiting account, etc. It should be done on a scale from 1 to 10, and after that, you have to multiply an even importance on number of times this event occurred. For instance, if using feature X has 4 importance, and it happened 10 times during measuring period, we have 40 scores of total event value.
After all, you just summarize all event values and see what is your customer engagement score and compare it to your maximum possible customer engagement score.
Here is the formula for your customer engagement campaign:
Customer engagement score = Event value #1 + Event value #2 + Event value #3
