Customer engagement definition and its meaning?
AI is radically redefining the customer engagement scenario. From computerized messaging to visual search, AI permits organizations to better support their customers' needs at more touchpoints throughout their journey.
According to Forrester Consulting's research, customer engagement is defined as "creating deep connections with customers that drive purchase decisions, interaction, and participation, over time."
Customer engagement is the method of communicating with customers through multiple channels and reinforcing your relationship with them. For some organizations, this process starts with the first interaction and extends beyond the point of purchase. Organizations can engage with customers via social channels, emails, forums, or any other space they're consuming content.
Repeat and loyal customers are the backbones of any business as they bring in more than 70-80% revenue compared to new customers. Therefore it becomes crucial to enhance customer engagement in every interaction a customer goes through during the entire customer experience journey. Customer engagement is a constant process by which companies cultivate a relationship with their customer through various interactions to nurture brand awareness and loyalty. Customer engagement allows companies to strengthen the emotional connection between the customers and the products that ultimately help in building higher brand awareness, recall, and recognition. These customers later become brand ambassadors & advocates driving sales & revenues for the company in the longer run.
What are the types of customer engagement?
There are 4 types of customer engagement as follows.
Active engagement:
Active engagement is about reaching out and communicating with your customers on various platforms like Social Media, Websites & Blog Pages and engaging with them on necessary conversations that include answering their queries, commenting, replying on social media posts, assisting them through the buying process, and so on.
Emotional engagement:
Emotional engagement is a sensitive area to work on, as every customer has unique relations and emotions attached to the brand. Brands can be transparent and unambiguous about things that matter to the customers, from product information to processes and more.
Rational engagement:
Rational Engagement is about involving customers & their interests in and around the products and offerings to make them feel more inclusive & emotionally engaged with the brand. For example, Dell allows customers to customize their laptops & configure them as per their requirements.
Ethical engagement:
Ethical engagement talks about how companies interact & engage with their employees, partners, customers, and suppliers. How fair & transparent their code of conduct is towards these stakeholders and the entire world in general.
Source: Salesforce Research
Why customer engagement is important?
Improves customer experience
A lot of time customers buy a product solely based on the experience. And, they love it when they get an instant response to their questions because it helps them to connect with the brand at the very initial stage of consideration or making a buying decision.
Boosts brand experience
Brand identity and image have a lot of components, and one of those components is how uniquely the brand engages with its customers.
Increases customer loyalty and trust
Brand identity and image have a lot of components, and one of those components is how uniquely the brand engages with its customers. Businesses need to build that experience and maintain the same throughout their lifecycle to win their loyalty.
Uncover up-sell opportunities
Customer satisfaction and engagement allow businesses to cross-sale and up-sale products & services, leading customers to shell out more money and try out new options.
Provides valuable customer feedback and insight
Communication and engagement open up the channels for constructive feedback and also allow brands to take a look at customer insights that can be beneficial for both parties in the long run.
Increases sales funnel velocity
Customers shouldn't feel stuck at any point in time throughout the buyer journey or sales funnel as it may lead to customer churn. Hence, maintaining the required engagement ease the process and increase the velocity of the sale funnel, getting more and more customers on board.
What are the 5 stages of customer engagement?
There are five stages of customer engagement, Discover (Awareness), Consideration, Conversion, Post-sales, and Loyalty & Advocacy. Companies need to chart out strategies for each lifecycle stage and implement them for efficient customer engagement & experience and to ensure success in the long run.
Discovery or Awareness
This is the first stage of customer engagement and also the first impression of the company in the books of customers. Businesses need to be very careful on how they are reaching out to potential customers, what channel they are using and what tone they are using to introduce their products and services, and so on.
Consideration
"Are they counting you in as an option?" is the question we need to answer at this stage. It's important to convince and communicate how you stand different than your competitor or is there anything that you are adding o enhance the customer experience at this stage to their consideration.
Conversion
While making a purchase, a customer might have certain questions or queries around the offering. And it's crucial to resolve the same before losing a customer. Having a strong communication system and engagement is required for a higher conversion rate. Nowadays, the majority of businesses are deploying AI-enabled chats bots to their websites and App to keep the communication and engagement process intact & smooth.
Check how Enagti Chatbots can leverage your Business with Automation & AI.
Post Sales
This stage allows companies to create a rapport with their customer by following up for feedback and post-sales assistance. Companies invest a huge chunk of money on after-sale services as it helps customers to create a personal connection with the brands.
Loyalty and Advocacy
Repeat customers contribute 75% or more sales to the business. And happy customers advocate the brand to more than 4-5 people on an average. Hence, businesses need to nurture the relationship with these customers and strategies campaigns to keep them engaged.
What are the best Customer engagement strategies?
A. Make a strong first impression
Every day a potential customer comes across your product/ service for the very first time. This is why it’s important to remember that products should be designed keeping the customer in mind.
The first screen your prospects see has 3 important roles-
- Explain how your product works to solve a problem.
- Motivate your users to get started.
- Let your users know how to get help, if and when they need it.
B. Build a brand voice
Customers prefer engaging with a brand that has a personality. Most brands differentiate themselves with a unique brand voice. This personifies the brand making it more relatable and establishes it as a thought leader.
Customers will look up to you as an expert in the industry that they can count on.
C. Personalize customer experiences
Today’s consumers expect the brand communications they receive to be tailored to them at a one-to-one level. Earlier, that could only be done through agent interactions, but technology now allows companies to personalize communications on a wide scale.
Customers get ‘pitched’ a lot of generalized content throughout the day on multiple channels like emails, social media, or blog articles. For you to stand out from the crowd it is important to segment customers and offers personalized content or short bursts of content that is highly relevant.
D. Engage them on social media
Social media enables brands to get up, close, and personal with customers. Request them, thank them, call them out, offer them something to catch their attention.
It’s essential to get to know on which platform your target audience exists and what content they enjoy consuming. This makes it easier to deliver exactly what they’re looking for which hooks them onto your brand.
Knowing they have a social presence to trust can play a huge role in customer loyalty.
E. Use Email Marketing to Bring Your Subscribers Back to Life
One thing that haunts marketers is a dead email list. It’s a scenario that occurs pretty often and it goes pretty much like this – a user likes something, subscribes, but goes under the radar never to return again.
To counter this problem and bring users back to life, first try to figure out the reason they’ve gone inactive, and really get to know your intended audience. Then, try offering them something of value to capture their attention once again. Once they take action – WHAM! – you overdeliver by offering something they actually care about.
What are the examples of customer engagement?
H&M - Omnichannel Engagement
Brands are focusing on engaging with their customers across multiple platforms & channels such as websites, social media, apps, and stores to provide a consistent experience.
H&M has more than 5,018 physical stores around the globe and is considered one of the leading clothing & apparel companies in the world. Even after having a strong presence in the offline market, H&M came up with its website, mobile app, and is also present on social media platforms like Facebook & Instagram.
GoPro Inc - Social Media & UGC
With over 3.6 billion users worldwide, social media provides a unique opportunity for marketing and customer engagement activities.
GoPro is a digital camera brand known for its small, rugged cameras that you might have seen with your favourite vloggers or travel YouTubers. GoPro uniquely engages its customers by putting up User Generated Content (UGC) on their Instagram and Facebook pages, which gets them great attention worldwide from their customers and prospects.
Redbull - Messenger Chatbot
Red bull is a leading energy drink, selling approximately 7.5 billion cans annually. They came up with a friendly Facebook Messenger Bot that interacts with customers, provides them with exclusive content, and collects customer insight and engagement. Facebook Messenger Chatbot improved customer engagement to a distinct level and increased the customer base for Redbull.
Engati also provides Chatbot integration solutions that can leverage the business to improve customer experience & engagement.
Nike - "Nike By You" Customization
Nike came up with a "Nike By You" campaign to engage their customer beyond possibilities. They allowed customers to customize or design their shoes on the website with a user-friendly manual & interface with just simple clicks. This campaign received a great response & success and helped Nike capture a far greater market share than any other company.
Source: Animaker
What are Chatbots for customer engagement?
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is radically changing business, and AI chatbots are becoming a feasible customer service channel. The best ones deliver a customer experience (CX) in which customers cannot tell if they are communicating with a human or a computer. AI has come a long way in recognizing the content – and context – of customers’ requests and questions. They are ubiquitous on nearly every brand website today – making a significant mark in consumer-facing tasks through fast and consistent support.
1. Available 24/7 for Your Customers
Being available 24/7 is one of the biggest benefits of chatbots to engage your customers. Your support agents cannot be available throughout the day and night. Even if you have teams taking different shifts to provide 24/7 support, it’s going to end up costing you a ton in wages and overhead. Chatbots are an inexpensive and effective way to tackle this problem.
With chatbots, you can provide them with answers and solutions at any time, even when your customer service staff is unavailable.
2. Chatbots continuously learn
Chatbots don’t just use AI to answer questions. They also use it to learn and automatically improve the quality of the support offered in the future.
You can also train your bots to provide better answers. You can use questions your customers have actually asked (or ones you think they will ask) to improve how your bot responds.
3. Ensure a Personalized Customer Service Experience
One of the advantages that chatbots have over human agents is that they are machines. This means they have the ability to process huge data in the blink of an eye.
They automatically collect customer information and history from your CRM, instantly providing them with personalized support based on their previous interactions.
This is extremely critical considering how human agents have to spend some time sieving through your customer database to find the most relevant information.
4. Your team has more context on each customer
Customers who see chatbots on your website may be more likely to ask questions and understand your brand better rather than silently browsing and acting as an “invisible lead.”
With that first touchpoint from a customer, you have their information in your system. This is a great start: if they contact you again, your customer support agents can use that conversation history to better understand their needs or just to make sure their first question was properly answered.
5. Creates a consistent user experience
Finally, customer support chatbots can help you maintain a consistent, on-brand experience for your customers. Since you’re in control of the voice, tone, and language used in your bot’s responses, there won’t be any “we don’t say that” situations.
