7 min
The average customer wants to have a two-way conversation and relationship with the brands they use. Users appreciate genuine reciprocity: they buy the products and services, and the company responds with an outstanding customer experience when they interact with the call center. In many cases, customers expect those interactions to be online, as that is where they spend the most time. They want to chat, email, and do it at a time that suits them best.
So what does that mean for organizations? Reaching and keeping customers is about knowing what digital customer engagement is, how it’s changing, and how to build it into your brand, creating more opportunities for users to be loyal.
What is Digital Customer Engagement?
One of the first things to keep in mind is that there is a difference between digital customer experience and digital customer engagement. Although the two elements are related, they are not the same.
- Customer engagement consists of talking to a chatbot, leaving a comment on Facebook or Instagram, responding to an email or any other active participation in a digital channel.
- The digital customer experience refers to the way the user thinks about a brand, based on their personal interactions. That means having a customer engagement strategy will allow you to offer a better CX.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
The modern world is now an environment where customers come first. That means that customer-business relationships have become more than just transactional exchanges.
When it comes to ensuring customer loyalty, organizations need to keep users engaged.
According to a Gallup survey, there are three types of customers when it comes to engagement:
- Customers actively disconnected. These types of clients are completely emotionally disconnected from the company. Switching to a different brand is something you will do without hesitation. If these users encounter difficulties in their interactions, they are likely to share it with people in their social circle.
- Indifferent customers. An indifferent customer is one who is neutral both rationally and emotionally. You have no serious concerns about using the products and your feelings are not serious enough to care.
- Fully committed customers. A fully engaged customer is one who is emotional and loyal to the company. These types of people will want access to all products, as they believe that no other organization offers the same level of quality. These users can be considered brand ambassadors and will be the most profitable and valuable you can have. There is data showing that fully engaged customers will buy more and show more brand loyalty.
What Are the Trends in Modern Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement has gone digital. This form of participation is constantly changing and growing, which can make it difficult to keep up with the latest trends and technologies that are emerging. However, staying up-to-date is important to attracting new customers and ensuring you retain the ones you already have.
1) Technology is Creating a Big Data Revolution
The digital world we live in is one in which huge amounts of information are created every day. Only recently has it been possible to properly access and analyze all this information on a large scale.
Brands will find that it is now easier to keep customers engaged by creating services and products that resonate with them. When you have a customer-centric brand, products will be developed using what you know about their preferences and feedback.
Having information about customers in real time allows companies to be agile and act according to user expectations to remain relevant.
2) Companies Provide A Truly Holistic Experience
Rather than having a single phone number, customers want to communicate with businesses from any device or channel. This helps build brand loyalty and assure users that the business will be there when and where they need it.
Technology has made it possible to see what is happening in any department at a glance. For example, more than 60% of failed customer service calls could be more easily resolved using better data access.
Having a single view of the customer allows companies to handle this problem and meet the omnichannel needs of users. When a customer has consistent experiences, a business can collect more data, save resources and time, and buy more.
3) The World Connects Through IoT
With the explosion of IoT (Internet of Things), people and processes are working together. For example, many devices in a home can communicate with each other by exchanging, collecting, and analyzing information.
The intersection of robust data analytics with interconnected devices has changed the way businesses and customers interact. Business Insider predicts that there will be more than 41 billion IoT devices by 2027, up from 8 billion in 2019.
With those elements and the potential for communication between them, the options for customer engagement will be nearly endless. We are already seeing text-based push notifications on smartphones and computers, among others.
4) Social Media is Building Communities and Personalities
With the advent and popularity of social media, companies now have platforms where they can participate in two important ways: content and community. Instead of having one-on-one conversations online, brands can have many conversations that spark interest in who they are and what they do.
Social networks are one of the most important factors that allow companies to create personalities with which customers can feel connected.
Many companies are focusing on using social media to their advantage by displaying products, sharing interesting information, and talking to customers. So if a customer can send a Facebook message and get their question answered quickly, they are much more likely to stay loyal because their preferred channel gets a response.
5) AI Automation Keeps Conversations Flowing
Today’s world is “always on.” That means customers want to communicate with companies anytime and anywhere that is most convenient for them. Once they send a message, they expect a quick response.
About 75% of online customers expect to receive a response within five minutes of sending a message to the company, according to a McKinsey study. Another 66% believe they should receive a response in no less than 10 minutes for customer service, sales and marketing inquiries. This would be impossible if we only have human agents, but Artificial Intelligence has made companies provide answers with little work through chatbots and voice assistants.
If you are looking to incorporate automation into your user engagement efforts, the best place to start is with your customer service processes. Using chatbots can ensure that everyday customer inquiries are answered correctly and quickly at any time of the day. These bots can also offer recommendations in seconds.
6) Personalized Interactions Proliferate
Customer engagement and communication must be personalized to attract users and keep them loyal to the brand. Most consumers indicate that they are much more likely to interact with a branded offering if it has been personalized based on their past interactions.
With rapid advances in communication tools and Big Data, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ensure maximum personalization in your communications. Personalization could mean creating custom loyalty coupons for a customer’s favorite products; present specific website content based on a user’s interests, etc.
To start building those relationships, as many tools and channels as possible have to be involved to increase customer engagement. When developing your engagement strategy, you need to focus on personalized contact and the best ways to convey it to your audience. Some of the best tools for providing that personal connection include:
- Direct emails with a single interaction with an agent.
- Social media messaging services, with or without integrated chatbots and AI.
- Chatbots and live chat agents on the main website.
- Omnichannel routing with intelligent technology to ensure that the customer reaches the right agent at the right time for the right resolution and avoids call queues.
What Are the Unique Customer Engagement Options That Suit a Brand?
Customer engagement is changing and growing due to new technological advances. That is precisely why there are a wide variety of solutions for companies, large and small, on cloud technology:
- Omnichannel routing solutions.
- Automation and Artificial Intelligence.
- Workforce participation options.
- Customer analysis products and services.
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