Ways to Increase Customer Engagement
Written by Support EXP
There’s no better advertisement for your business than a customer who’s happy with their experience and excited to share it with others. You don’t just want clients who are generally satisfied with your work—you want clients bursting to tell others that “you HAVE to try X company!”
How do you develop this type of brand excitement and customer loyalty? With great customer engagement and a well-thought-out customer engagement plan.
When you connect with clients and meet them where they are, you’re building connections that will advertise your business better than an expensive ad campaign.
In this article we’ve put together some ways you can start working on improving your customer engagement to grow a loyal client base.
Key Takeaways:
- Investing in customer relationships will create long-term viability and repeat sales.
- Increase reliability, empathy, and trust to ramp up successful customer engagement.
- Provide value and a genuine CX by knowing your customer’s wants, collecting feedback from their experience with you, and taking action.
- Create a strategic customer engagement plan based on research and targeting.
Defining the Goal of Customer Engagement
Before you jump into the “what,” it’s essential to understand the “why” of customer engagement.
Why is it important to make sure your customers are engaged in the first place?
When customers feel invested, they’re more likely to stay with you in the long term.
Your goal is to create a relationship with your customers, so they feel like a valued part of your community. When you do this, customers do more business with you and are more likely to tell other people about you.
Ultimately, word of mouth is one of the best marketing tools, and getting customers engaged and excited about your business is the best way to do this.
Elements of Successful Customer Engagement
Good customer engagement gives clients a face to put with the name.
You want to position your company not as a nameless and faceless business but as an empathetic and caring group with the customer’s best interest at heart.
Here are some hallmarks of successful customer engagement:
Increase Reliability
All customers want reliable communication with your business.
If they send you an email, they want to know you’ll respond promptly. If they call, it’s essential to make sure someone picks up and that they don’t experience long holding times.
Customers want to know that when a representative promises them something, you will deliver on it.
When you carry reliability through the entire customer engagement process, you create buyers who feel connected and valued by your organization.
Increase Empathy
Your customers need to know that they’re more than a few dollar signs to you. Treat them like they matter.
When your representatives relate to a customer’s problems and take it upon themselves to find a solution, you’re boosting customer service and telling consumers that they matter to you.
Increase Trust
The ultimate goal of increasing customer engagement is trust.
You want customers to trust your business. You want them to be confident that you will provide a quality product or service and make it right if they experience issues.
When customers trust you, they’re more likely to stay engaged and enthusiastic about your brand.
Developing a Customer Engagement Strategy
What are some ways to increase customer engagement?
It’s essential to develop a comprehensive customer engagement strategy. Here are a few tips and tricks to boost client engagement:
Knowing What the Customer Wants/Providing Value
You want to make your customer feel like they’ve spent their money well.
Give them the experience they’re looking for by understanding what they want and providing value-added services they appreciate. What this looks like will differ based on your niche or industry, so you’ll want to do some analysis.
Survey current and former customers, asking them what they prioritize. Don’t be afraid to ask departing customers why they left and what could have convinced them to stay.
“Closing the Loop” to Strengthen or Save Relationships
If you’re not using closed-loop feedback, you’re missing out on a meaningful way to increase customer engagement and retain customers.
With this strategy, you prioritize following up with customers that provide feedback to you.
Instead of taking the data and moving on, act on their suggestions, or work to resolve their specific problem. Then, follow up to see if the issue was resolved.
This strategy isn’t just useful for negative experiences—it can also be helpful for people who had an overall neutral experience with your brand.
Ask what you could have done to improve the transaction or offer a few perks to see if they’ll become more enthusiastic about your company.
When you close the loop, you won’t just find some good steps for a better customer engagement strategy—you’ll also be able to strengthen relationships with clients and even save a few customers who would otherwise switch to another brand!
Digital Customer Engagement; Meeting Your Customers Where They Are
Omnichannel customer engagement focuses on the overall experience with your brand, not just an isolated area like social media engagement or website experience.
Omnichannel treats every possible interaction with your company—from walking into a physical store to seeing an online ad—as part of an interconnected whole.
You need to ensure you’re visible across platforms to meet your customers where they are.
With omnichannel customer engagement, you might open social media accounts or implement social media marketing across platforms to engage with younger buyers where they are while still maintaining a physical store for people who prefer brick-and-mortar shopping.
Other methods to improve customer engagement via your omnichannel approach are email, live chat, blogging, outreach, mobile app, video content, digital marketing, and more.
To make the omnichannel experience good for customer engagement, make sure you get feedback from customers across platforms, seeing what they liked and what they didn’t.
Customer Engagement Plan
Customer engagement matters if you want to maintain loyal buyers who are excited about your brand and ready to share with others.
A good customer engagement strategy isn’t developed overnight—it results from careful research, strategic emphasis on positive traits like empathy, and a targeted plan based on your customer demographic.
Are you a bank or credit union looking for ways to increase customer engagement?
The experts at Support EXP can recommend the best engagement solutions for your business.
Reach out below to learn more.