How to Engage Your Customers?

Customer Engagement refers to the engagement or positive enthusiasm a brand can build amongst its customers. They are your biggest ambassador and one of the greatest assets. An engaged customer not only drives business forward but also promotes your business as a word-of-mouth advertiser. Not only will they actively go out of their way to advertise your brand, free of cost, they would also be your most loyal customers making a repeat purchase. Yet, while brands focus on creating amazing new products, very few of them focus on engaging with their customers. We can create an entire series about how engaged customers help your business, but in this article, we will only talk about how you can engage your customers.

What is Customer Engagement?

Customer Engagement refers to the interaction between customers and business, offered by the business and chosen by the customers. Brands from different industries may define customer engagement differently but at the core, customer engagement refers to the engagement with customers that leads to long-lasting relationships and loyalty. Customer Engagement can be seen across platforms, ranging from blogs to social media to monthly newsletters. Brands that focus more on their customer engagement strategies are often the ones that stand out from their competitors.

The need for Customer Engagement?

Are your customer engagements just some fleeting online conversations or do you look to make a meaningful long-lasting relationship with your customers while engaging them? Customer Engagement has proven to have a direct benefit to the business.

How can you engage your customers?

Customer Engagement is an integral part of your customer experience program. A brand that aims to implement a robust customer engagement often sees a rise in its customer experience program. If you are looking to work on your customer engagement programs and wish to know how you can engage customers, this list is for you:

Identify your customers and their journey

The first order of business should be to create a customer journey map. This would allow you to find the journey cycle of your customers and major touchpoints and challenges your customers face in their journey. You cannot create a customer engagement strategy without knowing who your customers are and what are their persona. Once you create their journey and identify the touchpoints, you would be able to create your buyer persona and understand what they want and their behaviours. Get additional information about demography, incomes, why they shop, and questions they ask. All this information would help you shape your strategy to engage your customers.

Find what drives your customer

There are sometimes that your engagement plan would work and there would be cases where you would not get the desired result. It is because of what I would call ‘drive’. Some triggers compel a customer to interact with a brand. It can be a social media post that asks for feedback or it can be a forum post that talks about future developments or a customer feedback survey that talks about products and services. To understand what drives your customer, ask them questions. There are questions you can consider asking your customers:

• What do you like about our brand and why?
• Describe how you felt about your experience with us
• Suggest ways we can improve our service/product
• Are you pleased with the service you received?
• Would you like to share anything with us?

Once you identify the customer trigger, focus on them to get the maximum result.

Personalized service

Customer Experience is an ever-changing domain, with trends changing every year. However, one trend that has stayed for some time now is the need for personalization. Brands today are expected to be customized to the needs of an individual customer. An estimate, 80% of customers are expected to purchase after a personalized experience. So, it pays to treat your customer as individuals rather than a group. Start with including their names in direct communication. Also, segment your more engaging customers who are more likely to spend in a group and focus on providing them personalized service.

Visual engagement tools

In a competitive market, you need all the tools at your disposal. According to a Forrester Research Paper, companies can leverage visual engagement tools including co-browsing and screen sharing. Co-browsing allows you to view and interact with your customers’ browsers in real-time. With this, you can assist your customers in troubleshooting their issues or helping them navigate through a process.

Aberdeen Group in a report estimated that businesses that actively used visual engagement tools witnessed more than 80% increase in their annual revenue. Forbes in its study concluded that companies with the tools witnessed a higher satisfaction rate amongst their customers as compared to the companies who didn’t use such tools.

Provide Value

Today, businesses are expected to provide more than just the product or service they advertise. Customers today expect value from the businesses and marketing is less about the product and more about the content now. In essence, every time a customer stops to interact with your brand, he/she must return with some values. Depending upon your product and service, the value can range from entertainment to education.

Make Your Marketing More human

One of the first and most basic rules of marketing in 2021 is to make your marketing more human. Gone are the days of the glorious campaign, promising customers of the moon. Today brands have switched to a more humane approach to their marketing, focusing on dialogue with their customers rather than one-way traffic. Not all your ideas should be brand-centric. You need to create an authentic relationship with your customers. Some ideas that you can implement is:

• Share Behind The Scene content of the team, brand, office. This would allow your brand to appear human.
• Publish images, videos, and content that show the shoutouts your brand got from its customer as proof of value.
• Encourage the team to organically share the content published by the business on their feed.

Create Brand Identity

An extension of making your marketing more human, you need to create a brand identity and personality for your business. Many tech brands have carved a niche for themselves by making technological advancement their brand identity. While brands like Zomato and Swiggy have made a unique brand identity for themselves, that suits the industry they operate in. Apart from your product or service, this brand identity would separate you and help you stand out.

These are few ways you can start to engage customers. If you wish to know more about Customer Experience and looking for a platform to help you with all your Customer Experience requirements, visit www.survey2connect.com