Four Ways to Drive Customer Engagement

Many top brands attribute a large portion of their success to customer engagement because it plays a key role in the growth and sustainability of their business.

Engaging with your customers through different channels will allow you to collect valuable feedback to drive improvements and lead to customer loyalty. Engaged, loyal customers are one of the most powerful resources for long-term revenue growth for a few reasons:

1. They return time and time again to keep buying your products.
2. They are easier to cross-sell and upsell to. In fact, companies with strong customer engagement programs are proven to increase cross-selling by 22 percent and can increase revenue by 25 percent.
3. They help you attract new customers by recommending your products and services.

So how do you start interacting more with your customers to leverage them for growth? In this blog, we’ll look at four ways to drive customer engagement at your organization:

1. Engage throughout the entire customer lifecycle
2. Collect customer feedback
3. Properly utilize feedback
4. Experiment with new approaches

Engage throughout the entire customer lifecycle

Customer engagement should begin even before a prospect becomes a customer and continue throughout the entire customer lifecycle.

With the right tools, you can take the opportunity to engage with someone from the first time they visit your website or interact with your brand on social media – allowing you to be in charge of the conversation surrounding your brand. If you don’t act fast and engage right away, you risk losing the opportunity to secure a stellar first impression that makes you stand out from your competitors. Feedback pop-ups and live chat, social listening tools, online community platforms, newsletters, blogs, and educational content are some of the many ways you can engage with prospects.

By engaging throughout the entire lifecycle, you’ll be able to leverage your existing customers to help you win new business. Often times, potential clients will reach out to current ones to get their opinion about your brand. This is all the more reason to use customer engagement to ensure your customer experience is exceptional.

Collect customer feedback

Collecting feedback is one of the best ways to engage customers. People want to be heard, so make it easy for customers to voice their opinions - good or bad. You can use customer surveys, add a support forum to your website, or create a space to easily collect reviews or testimonials. In order to gather customer feedback, you need effective solutions that allow you to interact with your customers, collect feedback that can easily be interpreted, and then action that feedback.

It’s important to remember that the collection component is only part of the engagement process. Responding to feedback to further engage with customers is the key to making them feel valued for sharing their opinions, and ensuring they want to continue to interact with your brand in the future.

Properly utilize feedback

A common assumption after sending out a customer survey is often that you’ve done your part and can stop there. That’s not the case. What you do after receiving customer feedback can be crucial to improving customer engagement.

After collecting feedback, it’s important to follow-up and respond to complaints or praise - ensuring that you’ve fully heard what customers have to say and use their responses to make changes and improvements to your customer experience. Using solutions that allow you interpret results, identify feedback that needs an immediate response, and share customer feedback with the entire company will help you achieve this.

Whether or not certain employees interact with customers, their role in the company is ultimately fuelled by customer engagement and loyalty. It’s customer feedback that helps the entire organization understand what people expect from your brand, and can improve communication between sales and customers as well as many other roles in an organization.

Experiment with new approaches

Don’t limit yourself to gathering feedback or engaging with your customers through one channel. Omni-channel engagement will help you collect more insights and get a complete customer perspective – so experiment with new approaches.

Learn where your customers are located, what platforms they’re active on, and reach out to them there. Once you find a strategy that works best for you, make a plan to consistently engage customers. While it’s important to always be looking for new resources or approaches to drive customer engagement; leveraging a successful, existing communication method can ensure that you’re staying on top of your customer experience as a whole. 

Conclusion

When you take the steps to improve customer engagement, you’re working towards delivering exceptional customer experiences and relationships. In an age where everyone is focusing on customer experience, you want to excel your brand to be a CX leader compared to your competitors. Engaging your customers is the first step.

Drive customer engagement at your business in these four ways:

1. Engage throughout the entire customer lifecycle
2. Collect customer feedback
3. Properly utilize feedback
4. Experiment with new approaches