There are many factors that influence the success of your business. Even though everything is based on the quality of your products, you can’t be successful without providing your customers with excellent customer service and assistance throughout their customer journey. Such aspects of the customer lifecycle and relationships with the brand as customer experience now play a much more essential role than a decade ago, but there is also another factor you should pay attention to - it is called customer engagement.
Customer engagement is a very influential factor in such things, as brand advocacy, customer retention, and customer lifetime value. Client engagement management is both a challenging and beneficial task, so the higher customer engagement is the better it is for your business.
So, what is customer engagement? Why should you pay attention to client engagement? How to build engagement with customers? What are the best methods for a brand to be engaged with customers? What is customer engagement service and how to optimize customer engagement efforts?
Let’s figure it all out.
What is customer engagement?
Definition of customer engagement is, in short, a customer's emotional connection with a brand. In some cases, customer engagement is called Brand Customer Engagement (CBE), and it works during the entire customer journey. So, it is also the way how brand builds relationships with customers via customer engagement marketing campaigns through different contact channels and using different methods to build customer loyalty.
There are four components of customer engagement: contextual customer engagement, customer engagement of convenience, emotional customer engagement, and finally, social customer engagement. This also proves that customer engagement isn’t about emotions only.
There is also a difficult question about differentiating customer engagement from customer sentiment. Well, there is no answer to this on the web, but to be honest, there is no great difference between these two terms. In fact, customer engagement is about the customer engagement marketing campaigns you use to keep engaging customer with a brand via relevant content, special offers, personalization, and proactiveness. Customer sentiment includes overall customer feelings and emotions about the brand, so it is the way a customer feels and understands the brand via associations and the brand’s positioning. Thus, customer sentiment can be positive, negative, and neutral. Successful customer engagement marketing is about building positive customer sentiment and high customer satisfaction levels. We have to mention also that customer sentiment isn’t the same thing as customer satisfaction, because even satisfied customers may have neutral customer sentiment about the brand.
There is also customer engagement score, one of the most important customer engagement metrics - others include NPS, CSAT, and other CX metrics too.
The customer engagement score formula works in the following way: you rate each event average customers complete, like writing a comment on Facebook or posting stories on Instagram, by a random number. The higher number is, the more vital event is. The maximal score depends on an overall number of events you use for measuring customer engagement, but it is either 100 or a bit higher. Afterward, you just use the formula:
Customer engagement score = Event#1 + Event#2 +....
Everything that is higher than 71 is a high customer engagement score.
But let us return to four elements of customer engagement.
Contextual customer engagement is about building customer engagement marketing based on some context. For instance, if a brand notices that a customer is changing his or her permanent living location, it can be used to offer some related goods proactively and get a high chance of successful sales. The same way it works with previous purchases, customer status, and so on.
Customer engagement of convenience is quite a simple thing - you just build customer engagement by reducing customer effort. For a sample, such a common thing as an option to save the order and repeat it by making only one click is a great example of customer engagement of convenience. You make customer lives easier, so this will be engaging customer with the company more.
Emotional customer engagement is about emotions, obviously. The more emotions you provide your clients with, the higher customer engagement will be. This is about such aspects of customer engagement marketing, as building associations via colors, sales pitches, and so on.
Social customer engagement is about social media channels. Engaging customer via social media by building communities, empowering customers to share their customer experiences in their social networks, etc. is a great way to build customer engagement in our age, especially when it comes to interaction with clients from Gen Z.
What are the levels of customer engagement?
The most popular customer engagement levels classification is based on five levels of customer engagement.
Discovering. This is a phase when customers discover your brand or a single product for the first time.
Shopping. This is a level where customers directly interact with you to find the best-fitting offer. In other words, it is quite similar to the consideration stage of the sales funnel.
Buying. This is the stage when customers purchase your products. Customer engagement marketing here can be focused on using up-sales and cross-sales opportunities to earn more.
Owning. This is the customer service stage of the customer journey, so here you can offer customers to purchase some related products - in the case of the car business, you can offer service or tuning, and in the case of insurance companies, you can offer additional coverage. The effectiveness of your customer engagement marketing at this phase will be measured by customer retention and the number of repetitive purchases.
Advocacy. This is the final level of customer engagement, and if everything is done as it should, you’ll get loyal customers who are very likely to advertise and advocate your brand. Reaching this stage is vital for the customer engagement strategy because it is the moment when your customer engagement marketing can start bringing you new clients without further investment.
We should also mention that customer engagement has also a method of determining an engaging customer from a non-engaging customer. Engaged customers may be positively engaged and negatively engaged, which means that negatively engaged customers may commit some actions, like leaving negative customer reviews, which shows their customer engagement, but it is rather bad news for a business. Unengaged buyers may also be disengaged customers in a negative or positive way.
Customer engagement versus customer experience
Customer experience is the most complex concept of customer relationships with the brand. It includes numerous components, including customer satisfaction, customer effort, first contact resolution of issues, and Net Promoter Score (Brand Advocacy in other words), but it is about how you as a business owner see all these customer interactions. Customer experience (CX) is measured by operating numerous customer service metrics, while customer engagement is more about one-to-one relations between you as a brand and a customer who doesn’t only receive what you are providing, but can also directly influence on engagement. For instance, customer engagement may be initiated by customers without using any directly focused customer engagement campaigns, and customer engagement often begins at the stage of purchasing or even earlier, as we have mentioned the Discovering phase of customer engagement, while customer experience is more about the post-purchase period of relations. Moreover, we can even say that, in some way, customer engagement can be considered a part of the customer experience.
Customer engagement versus customer satisfaction
As we have already mentioned, customer satisfaction is a component of customer experience, so in such a case, let us say that the connection between customer engagement and customer satisfaction is slightly similar to how it works between customer engagement and customer experience.
To say the truth, customer satisfaction and customer engagement may look like two aspects of one thing, but not always an engaging customer is a satisfied customer, as well as satisfied customers may never become engaged customers. On the other hand, customer engagement marketing is always focused on building high customer satisfaction scores, so you can’t work on improving customer engagement and ignore customer satisfaction.
Customer engagement versus brand advocacy
As you could already guess, customer engagement is also focused on establishing brand advocacy and customer loyalty. Brand advocacy and customer loyalty are the consequences of successful customer engagement marketing because it is the final level of customer engagement.
Thus, customer engagement is the thing that helps to achieve so important brand advocacy and this is why these two aspects of customer relations with the brand are closely connected.
How to set up an effective customer engagement marketing strategy?
First of all, you have to understand that building customer engagement is not a simple task. Customers surely want to buy great products and achieve excellent services, but it is much more difficult to engage customers than to delight customers. Basically, there are many clients who just don’t want to engage with a brand because they don’t see value in it or just consider it a waste of time. Especially it relates to social customer engagement because not every person is ready to share their customer experiences in a personal environment, but this is more about individual preferences. Nonetheless, you still have to invest more in customer engagement, at least because it is the fastest way to establish customer loyalty and brand advocacy, as well as it is a great way to reduce customer churn rate and even improve customer experience.
So, what are the most effective customer engagement strategies and secret customer engagement tactics?
Create customer profiles and research target audience
The first step where all about customer engagement marketing begins is to research of your potential customers and current ones too. You have to gather all existing customer data in one place and make access to it as easy and fast as possible, especially if we take into account that there are many tools that can provide you with such an option - first of all, it is cloud-based contact center solution with CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software integration.
Without gathering and analyzing customer data, you can’t learn such vital things as customer preferences, customer expectations, and vital characteristics such as preferred language, time zone, and needs of each customer. Without this information, you can provide neither personalized service nor proactive customer service. You can’t also design any working customer loyalty programs without it, so that is the must-have step to complete concerning customer engagement marketing.
Provide personalized customer service
The first step in building customers engagement is to provide personalized experiences across all communication channels, including digital channels. Why is that vital? First of all, it is the best way to show customer care and the fact that you consider a customer valuable. What is the best way to provide personalized service?
Well, follow the next rules:
Address customers by their name only. It is very important to show that you know who your client is, and this is a kind of “entering stage” of service personalization, without which any further steps are impossible.
Let customers choose how to communicate with the brand. Customer engagements can be achieved only in an environment that is comfortable for clients. Let them choose contact channels they want to use as preferred ones, adapt to their communication style, let them configure (in most cases, reduce) the amount of ads you send to them, unsubscribe from mailings if they want so, and so on.
Provide offerings that really suit them. If you want your customers to buy more, again and again, offer them what they need. This also relates to options of configuring the product based on personal preferences, such as color, prints, co-related products, and so on. Your ability to fulfill the individual wants of a client is very important for building rapport and further customer engagement.
Ask for feedback and use it as a fundament for further decisions. You have to listen to your customer to understand if your customer engagement marketing works well. This means no only collecting feedback, but providing customer engagement services based on customer feedback.
Provide proactive customer service
Another vital tactic to use is proactive service. What is it? Well, it means that you provide customer services and reach out to customers with issue resolution or offering that suit their current or even future needs before they ask you to do it or reach out to you on their own. Such a service is, surely, impossible without gathering customer data and analyzing customer interactions and customer touchpoints. The main aspect of proactive service is resolving customer issues before customers notice that - for instance, if you develop software, you should look for bugs permanently to avoid customers experiencing them.
Proactive service is also about sales. You can analyze current customer needs and make suggestions to them with goods they need, but they haven’t still constructed a detailed request and haven’t understood what and why they need. For example, a customer purchases a car that is known for poor noise isolation, and you start targeting the customer with offers of additional noise isolation from the early beginning since he has started to drive that car. Thus, a customer may not understand what is the issue, but feel uncomfortable - and you have a solution that describes both an issue and a solution. This is the way you save customer time and get additional revenue too.
Show the value of customer engagement
Not every customer sees the positive impact of being fully engaged with a brand, as we have already stated. But the brand feels the importance of engaging with clients, and this is why a brand should focus on establishing positive engagement experiences.
Showing a value for buyers to engage customer with a brand can be performed in a few ways:
- Establishing customer loyalty programs.
- Providing customers with rewards for sharing their customer engagement experiences.
- Exceeding customer expectations with wise use of customer data.
- Building communities on social customer engagement platforms to empower customers to comment and discuss brands.
- Communicating with clients about not only brand activities but about informational occasions too.
- Engage customer via regular communication with them and follow-ups.
Conclusion
Engagement customers show during interacting with a brand is vital for improving customer experience, customer retention, and customer loyalty. Improved customer engagement is a vital business goal for any company that wants to be successful and scale up without losing its current customer base.
To reach this goal, you need a specific tool that will optimize your communication with customers. We have such a solution - a cloud contact center that gathers a variety of channels gathered for multichannel communication and has a CRM integration feature to let you research customers and provide proactive and personalized customer service.
