What Makes a Great Customer Engagement Strategy?
The number of products being created makes it harder to differentiate them from one another. With so many competitors, it can be difficult for customers to choose your product. Companies can distinguish themselves by not creating more desirable features on their products, but rather through customer engagement strategies.
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement strategies are the documented processes through which each customer-touching staff member interacts with customers and users. It covers every touchpoint with customers, from the moment they visit your website or social media channels to the time they leave.
All employees who interact with customers should contribute to the creation of your strategy. This includes sales, support, marketing, and product team members. Your strategy should aim to improve customer satisfaction and build stronger relationships.
For better visualization, many companies first take inventory of all customer touchpoints. The journey mapping allows team members to see every contact point, identify redundancies, and bottlenecks, as well as measure success.
Different Ways to Track Customer Engagement.
To understand whether customers are satisfied with their products, companies use a variety of key metrics. These metrics may be already being tracked by your company, but they might not be directly tied to customer engagement patterns.
- NPS: Net Promoter Score is a survey that companies send to find out how likely customers or users are to recommend a product or service to their friends and family. If they were not engaged, customers won’t recommend your product.
- CSAT: Customer satisfaction score refers to a survey that you send customers after they have had a conversation with a customer-facing staff. It may be sent after a meaningful interaction, such as when you add users to your product or implement a key feature. This survey measures satisfaction with the experience of the customer.
- CES: Businesses conduct customer effort surveys on a similar schedule to CSAT surveys, but rather than measuring satisfaction, they measure customers’ ease of finding the solution/option/service they required.
- Product adoption score: This is a score that a company uses to determine how much of their product is being used by customers. This score should be created in collaboration with the product team. To create an algorithmic score, key features are ranked in terms of their “stickiness” to the customer.
- Customer Health Score: This score is similar in concept to product adoption score, but it also takes into account actions such as reaching out to support, leaving an NPS reply, and other activities. This score is based on product adoption score, as well as any other indicators that indicate a customer’s health.
- LTV: Lifetime Value is an estimate of how much a customer has earned for a company during his or her lifetime as a customer. A customer’s lifetime value will increase the more they buy. Customers who engage with your product have a higher LTV.
- Session Time: This metric tracks how long customers spend on your website while they are logged in.
- Bounce rate: This metric measures how many people visit your website and view one page before leaving and never returning.
Each of these data points can be used by companies to help them understand their customers’ engagement and predict how they will be more engaged in the future. These data points can also help you determine how successful or unsuccessful your efforts to increase customer engagement are.
Customer Engagement Strategies Have Many Benefits
We are all genetically wired to form relationships. It feels good to be able to connect with people on a deeper level. Engaging and connecting with customers has many business and financial benefits.
Competitive advantage
While many businesses offer similar features and benefits, one thing that sets them apart is their customer service. It is easier to convert customers during the evaluation phase of your product if you offer a great customer experience and a unique engagement strategy.
Boosts LTV
Many businesses consider the lifetime value a key financial metric. Your customers will be more active if they are happy with your product. Customers who are very active users of your product will be primed to become beta testers and early adopters.
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Businesses can use word-of-mouth marketing to increase their reach beyond traditional marketing campaigns. Engaging with customers regularly to remind them of your product and all its benefits will keep your company top of mind.
Better product adoption
You can control, to some degree, which features customers set up and in what order when you create a custom journey for your customers. This control allows you to optimize your user’s experience so that they get the best possible product. Your customers will find it magical to see the most important features at the right time. It makes it simple for them to use your product.
Customer trust is improved
Trust is a key element of any healthy relationship. This is true for your customer relationships as well. When you put more effort into helping your customers, your focus shifts to what you can do for them and to what your product will bring to them. The customer trust grows as the focus shifts.
How to improve customer engagement
Once you have mastered the basics of tracking and measuring customer engagement, you can start to focus on ways to improve it. There are many ways different businesses can implement best practices in customer engagement. While the approaches may differ depending on who is leading the effort, they all will improve customer engagement.
For Customer Engagement to be successful, Set a Goal
Once you have a clear understanding of your current performance, you can set a goal for the future. Collaborate across your teams and identify areas for improvement. Then, set goals to get there.
Your marketing team might notice that your blog bounce rate is high. They should work together to improve customer engagement. Other teams might focus on metrics such as customer satisfaction or churn rates. Each team should set clear goals and let them work together to achieve greater holistic improvements.
Improve your Overall Customer Experience
It makes it easier for customers to feel engaged when you focus on the small things in your customer journey, such as when they buy your product or reach out for help. Every moment that causes trust to be broken also leads to decreased engagement. Consequently, every moment that feels good will only draw your customers in.
It helps you to understand where engagement is declining by aligning metrics such as customer satisfaction and NPS with specific points in the customer journey. A user who leaves with a low detractor score will likely be less engaged than one who leaves with a high promoter score. This data can be used to identify areas where your company is failing to deliver a positive user experience and to make improvements.
Enhance the Quality of your Customer Relations
What percentage of customers do you personally contact? If done right, personal connections between your team and customers can make a significant difference.
Consider taking the time to read every survey response. Reach out to customers to thank them for any qualitative comments, positive or negative, and let them know how you will use that feedback. It is time-consuming but a great way for customers to know you care.
Increase Referrals
It’s easier for customers to communicate with you when they have context than if they don’t know your value. Customers who have referred friends to your product are more likely to believe that it is great.
You can increase the number of customers who are already engaged and excited by increasing the number of referrals. Referrals can increase customer engagement and allow your team to focus on increasing engagement elsewhere.
Start Cross-Functional Collaboration
Engagement with customers is a process that cannot be carried out in a vacuum. All departments, including customer support and success, should participate in it. To make.
Create a cross-functional group that represents each team’s stake in your customer engagement strategy, if you don’t have it already. It is important to foster ownership so that each team feels involved and works together. For example, your marketing team should be aware of what your support team does, and vice versa. Your efforts will be more effective if all your teams are working in the same direction.
Create a Brand Voice
If there’s nothing to engage with, customers won’t be able to connect with you. You’ll find customers are less likely to want to engage with your brand if it isn’t clear and concise.
Your marketing team must work together to establish a tone that represents you brand and the products that you offer. Begin by understanding the personalities and voices that your customers respond best to.
Share your Brand Voice Online
Your brand voice shouldn’t be restricted to your blog and marketing website. Additionally, you can use it informally on social media. Being more transparent about your company’s principles and brand voice will increase your chances of gaining new clients.
Your brand’s tone should be reflected in social media posts. Customers can make social media posts if they feel obligated to share them. You will reach more people who might not otherwise be able to read your material thanks to this.
Create your content based on the interests and concerns of your audience
Your content is based on the interests and problems of your audience since people are more likely to engage with things they care about. If you produce content that is useful for your business but irrelevant to your clients, engagement will decrease.
It’s critical to ascertain the interests and driving forces of your customers. Make informational materials, how-to manuals, and paperwork that advance their progress.
Everybody Benefits from using best practices for Customer Engagement.
It is essential for your company’s success to engage with clients in a variety of ways. In order to engage clients effectively, you must adopt deliberate engagement strategies and be intentional in your contact with them.
It is not easy to create a customer engagement plan. It’s essential to take your time, conduct in-depth research, and update as necessary. Engaging your customers increases your chances of engaging them. Your chances of retaining customers rise when you engage them.