Customer engagement is the ability of an organization to identify, engage and influence customers to achieve the strategic goals of the company. It is concerned with the dynamic relations that occur between customers and companies, and the actions that companies can take to increase these relations to support the organizations’ efforts to build long-lasting relationships with customers.
Customer engagement standards are the set of behaviors, skills, and attitudes that a company employs to ensure it delivers a consistent, long-term customer experience. As a rule they involve four key categories:
- Customer relationship management (CRM)
- Customer experience management (CEM)
- Customer service management (CSM)
- Customer service quality (CSQ)
Some of the more important standards include customer service, customer engagement, and customer experience. These standards are important because they are the basis of any customer relationship.
When we talk about customer engagement, we are talking about the relationship that you have with your customer, whether they are a person, an organization, a business, or some other entity. Customers are individuals, families, groups, communities, companies, and other businesses with whom you interact.
Role of Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is the ongoing process of working one-to-one or many-to-one or many-to-many with the customer to satisfy customer needs, or desires, through the customer’s channel of choice, to generate increased sales and revenue, etc. This process may be executed to solve a specific customer problem, create long-term profitable customers, or develop new customers. The result of this process is a satisfied customer who will recommend your brand and products or services to others, or who will return to purchase your products or services in the future. All of these outcomes create additional sales and revenues.
Customer engagement is critical to a brand’s success. But just because something is critical to your business doesn’t mean you can afford to ignore it. The wrong kind of customer engagement can harm your business and finally someday will make your business hang a black American flag. Are you ready to give your place under the sun to your competitors?
As a leader, it’s your job to make sure your company is providing the best products and services to your customers. That means you need to listen to what your customers have to say. But it’s just as important to listen to what your customers aren’t saying. To be successful in today’s marketplace, you need to understand the needs of your customers beyond what they say they want or need.
The role of customer engagement in the modern business landscape is often overlooked. But when it comes to advancing your business, investing in customer engagement can be one of the most effective strategies.
Define Your Customer Engagement Goals
The purpose of customer engagement is to enhance the competitive position of the company by optimizing customers’ relations and the value that they create for the organization. A customer engagement strategy is a process of identifying the strategy and determining the tactics that will be used to carry out the strategy.
Benefits of Metrics to Measure Customer Engagement
Customers drive revenue for any business. That’s why successful businesses are always looking for new ways to leverage the insights you gather from your customers in your marketing, sales, and product development processes. By engaging your customers, you not only develop valuable insights on their likes, dislikes, and expectations, but you also demonstrate your commitment to customer service. The right tools and metrics will help you to measure your success and to track the results of your efforts and will:
- Create successful and effective public relations outside as well as inside
- Let you focus on staff, organization or department
- Grow the company and change it for the better
- Help with development and lead company’s course and plan
- Support decision making
It’s important to measure the progress of your customer engagement program and see whether the activity is aligning with your strategy. The following are 10 ways that organizations can measure their customer engagement and gauge its success. These metrics will help you understand the level of customer engagement inside your business, establish benchmarks for performance, and track your progress.
10 Customer Engagement Standards
We’ve broken down the 10 standards that you need to measure to stay ahead of the competition in terms of customer engagement. This includes everything from the effectiveness of your digital communications to the quality of your experiences.
- Actively Share Customer Reviews on Twitter, Linkedin, and Facebook. It is a powerful way to retain current customers as well as re-engage them. It helps increase ecommerce conversion rates.
- Gamification. It will boost sign-up engagement. Such an onboarding option for the sign-up process will engage new users adding more interest to the brand.
- Your brand advocates can become your community leaders. These are your brand fans. These are people who constantly re-sharing your posts. Find ways to get to them for collaboration. Some companies hire their fans to write for them. Find your brand activists and try to invite them for the joint work.
- Create omnichannel customer service.
- Surprise customers. Use Ulta-personalized outreach for that. Thanks to digital marketing you can take such personalized engagement many steps ahead.
- Run inspiring collaboration contests. Ask your customers for opinions of the current services or products. They will be happy to give you their insight. For example, you can offer various types of rewards for the creation of their versions of your products. Today many companies apply old-fashioned but highly effective post mail communication. Instead of online communication through sending coupons and catalogs, they personalize communication by delivering them right to your doorstep.
- Use microcontent. An excellent copy will show the high quality of your products and services.
- Create a positive feedback loop. Try to pair reviews with requests. For example, use after purchase rewards paired with after purchase mail requests. It works excellent in the B2B sector, for example for online paystub generation services or any other invoice generator platform.
- Use Q&A. based on their personal experience let your customers ask questions and provide them with answers. Such an attitude fosters a sense of connection to the brand.
- Optimize headlines. Find out how headlines impact clicks.
When it comes to the latter, we’ve found that some brands are still prioritizing quantity over quality. They’ll put out a lot of content, but it’s usually not the best quality.
Customer engagement is hard. It’s a numbers game, and unlike revenue and profit, which are easy to track, it’s difficult to define, measure, and optimize. But it’s also the key to success in the digital age. The companies that invest the most in customer engagement will see the best returns.
Final Thoughts
After all, a well-targeted marketing strategy focuses on the customers who will benefit the most from your products and services. And when it comes to growing your business, there’s no better way to build a strong customer base than to engage with them on an ongoing basis.
The thing to keep in mind is that it is possible to create an effective customer engagement strategy and help your customers get connected to your brand of products or services on whats magazine. Sometimes old-fashioned methods are better than new, sometimes you can benefit from digital ones. One thing remains unchanged-the way you can reach your goals.