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Customer Engagement / CX

When it comes to payments and finances, customers are anxious and impatient when they encounter issues.

CX (Customer Experience)​

Customer experience (CX) is the cumulative impact of every touchpoint throughout the customer journey. CX managers first determine what a positive customer experience entails for their target clients, theorize and implement changes they believe will have the most impact, and use results to optimize each customer interaction.

What is Customer Engagement?​

Quite a buzzword among online businesses today, customer engagement is a measure of a brand's interaction with its customers across all touchpoints throughout their lifecycle. Consistently engaging customers on a variety of channels help brands build and strengthen a 'human-to-human' connection with them and add value beyond just transactional relationships.

If there's anything that hasn't changed from the good ol' brick-and-mortar times to this day and age of thriving online businesses, it's the firm belief in the mantra 'Customer is King'. And with iconic marketing campaigns such as 'Share a Coke' (Coca Cola) or the 'Big Sleepover' (Ikea), giant multinational corporations have taught us that customer engagement is a key pillar of any other business strategy for happy, returning, and loyal customers.

Customer engagement is no longer limited to sales, support, or services; instead, it's an ongoing practice of brands anticipating customers' needs and keeping in touch with them to foster lasting relationships, loyalty, and hence, business growth.

Often used interchangeably, customer engagement or visitor/user engagement involves actively interacting with your audience with messaging that interests, educates, or motivates them, and encourages two-way conversations with your business basis their stage in the buying journey.

With more and more businesses adopting the customer-centric approach while developing their marketing strategies, customer engagement inevitably holds center stage in order for them to build top-of-mind awareness and achieve the intended inbound growth.

Benefits Of Customer Engagement​

  • Stronger And Healthier Customer Relationships With Improved Loyalty
  • Improved Customer Retention And Reduced Churn
  • Better Opportunities For Cross-Sell & Up-Sell
  • Increase In Subscribers
  • Shorter Purchase Cycles
  • More Brand Evangelists
  • Distinguishable Brand Identity
  • Enhanced Customer Service

How To Draft A Winning Customer Engagement Strategy​

  • Define An Ideal Customer Journey On Your Website And App

This would be the primary step that would form the foundation of your customer engagement strategy, without which you'd be compromising on its robustness and efficacy. To be able to successfully drive and encourage engagement on your digital properties, you first need to define how a typical customer or prospect interacts with your business, and what their journey looks like.

This will include defining all customer touchpoints right from when someone comes in contact with your business till after they have become a customer, understanding how they navigate on your website or app and through the conversion funnel so you can identify the exact opportunities for optimization to drive more engagement.

  • Track And Analyze Customer Behavior On Your Digital Properties And Across Channels
  • Clearly Define Goals And The Corresponding KPIs
  • Segment Your Customer Base To Target All Communication

While a universal approach to engage all customers might work in some scenarios, in most cases, you'll need to segment your customer base so you can deliver more relevant experiences. Therefore, before you begin working on a strategy, it's essential to clearly define your customer segments so you can align all your campaigns and communication as per customers' needs, behavior, and purchase/search history and grab their attention from the get-go.

Purchase behavior (new vs. returning vs. loyalist), geo-location, device type, time of maximum interaction, etc. are just some of the many factors you can use to slice and dice your lists and divide them into suitable buckets for relevant targeting.

  • Create An Omnichannel, Definitive Roadmap To Improve Customer Engagement
    • Your primary, secondary (and so on) buyer personas and their behavioral attributes and interests
    • How you will engage these at various touchpoints throughout their purchase journey and beyond
    • How you will tie together interaction across multiple channels to deliver a flawless, delightful experience
    • The various opportunities you will be leveraging (such as product launches, topical events, retargeting, etc.) to encourage engagement
    • An actionable plan you can immediately set in motion

How To Drive Customer Engagement? A Guide On Various Channels​

Owned Digital Properties (Website/ Mobile App)​

To deliver delightful experiences and engage better, you could start by targeting some low-hanging fruits such as the following:

  • Offer relevant, distinctive, and valuable content across your blog and other resources so your customers willingly spend time reading it and benefit from it
  • Make sure your customer touchpoints are personalized as per customers' needs, device, location, and industry to ensure all your communication is contextual
  • Incentivize customers across all touchpoints (offer relevant freebies, exclusive coupon codes, complimentary expert consultation, referral bonus, etc.) to lure them into sticking around on your digital properties

Social Media​

  • Respond to mentions so you are always up to date with what your audience is talking about you and don't miss out any opportunity for interaction
  • Capitalize topical content to stay ahead of all industry trends and events relevant to your audience and category
  • Be consistent with your posts to stay on top of your audiences' minds
  • Offer satisfactory responses to customer complaints in comments to assure your audience you are listening
  • Post customer and employee stories to humanize your brand and connect better with your audience
  • Make your posts interactive; roll out polls, quizzes, contests frequently to convey to your audience that their inputs matter

Video​

SMS/Text Messaging​

  • Use historical data to make your SMSs more contextual and personal to ensure a high click-through / response rate
  • Since visual elements tend to stand out and captivate better, make your SMSs visual by adding relevant emojis and images
  • Use SMS to send helpful and timely reminders about events, abandoned purchases, etc.
  • Keep your customers updated with information on their reward points and loyalty benefits so they don't lose out
  • Instead of sharing links in your SMSs, give an option to respond to the message to perform certain quick actions such as confirming an order, canceling a subscription, etc.

Mobile App Push Alerts​

Voice Assistants​

Actionable Ideas To Boost Customer Engagement​

  • Create A Consumer-Centric Content Marketing Strategy
  • Gamify Your Digital Experiences
  • Continuously Collect And Incorporate Customer Feedback
  • Humanize Your Brand Communication
  • Personalize Customer Experiences And Communication
  • Create An Exclusive Engagement Strategy For Power Users

Customer Engagement For B2C Vs. B2B​

What Are Customer Engagement Platforms And Why Are They Important?​

A customer engagement platform is simply an automation tool that helps online businesses centralize, automate, track and analyze customer interaction across all touchpoints throughout the customer journey. By enabling them to seamlessly coordinate and execute their engagement campaigns, it empowers businesses to deliver better experiences to their customers, and in turn, drive growth while continually outdoing operational efficiency and reducing costs.

A customer engagement platform helps you closely monitor your customer journeys and figure out relevant opportunities for engagement. Since it comes equipped with analytics and best practices, you can rely on customer engagement platforms for insights on customer behavior to deduce patterns and accordingly deliver targeted, most relevant communication.

A customer engagement platform can help you automate the following:

  • Building an efficient engagement workflow that allows collaboration and information sharing and helps fastrack business processes
  • Facilitating omnichannel customer communication (across email, social media, live chat, etc.)
  • Forming customer segments and delivering personalized experiences
  • Maintaining consistency and quality across all customer communication
  • Drilling down granular insights for various customer relationship to better shape customer-facing teams' communication
  • Defining key metrics and measure the outcomes of your customer engagement campaigns

https://vwo.com/customer-engagement

https://acquire.io/blog/customer-engagement-strategies

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/content-marketing-kpis/user-engagement-metrics

User Engagement​

Be right about the conversation you have, the audience you target, the place and time you choose to interact

  • Learn audience
  • Identify segments
  • Engage at right place & time
  • Personalize
  • Measure impact

Power Users​

Power users drive some of the most successful companies - people who love their product, are highly engaged, and contribute a ton of value to the network. In ecommerce marketplaces it's power sellers, in ridesharing platforms it's power riders, and in social networks it's influencers.

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