When it comes to today’s customer, the sales process doesn’t stop once they receive the product or service they purchased. Creating engaged customers helps cultivate loyalty and earn trust.
But how do you develop engaged customers?
Building strong customer relationships hinges on an emotional connection between tha brand and the customer. There are many ways to accomplish this and below we dive into five steps to help you build an effective customer engagement strategy for the modern customer.
Why Is Customer Engagement Important?
Rather than playing a guessing game to determine what your customers want and need, engaged customers are ready and willing to let you know their thoughts. This can help lead to product or service development, the introduction of new features, and customers who feel seen and heard.
By doing things like active listening, having conversations on multiple channels, and non-transactional engagements, you can create a more fulfilling customer experience. In turn, this leads to more engaged customers.
How to Create a Customer Engagement Strategy
While there are a variety of approaches to creating your own engaged customers, we’ve created five helpful steps that can help you kick off your strategy today.
Step 1: Choose the right customer engagement platform
There are a number of platforms that will help you utilize technology to connect with your customers. Consider platforms that offer omnichannel customer service, conversational marketing and conversational commerce to help connect with your customers in a variety of ways.
Step 2: Understand your target channels
Creating detailed buyer personas can help you identify your target audience. This will inform how you prioritize different communication channels as different generations and audiences prefer communicating with brands in vastly different ways.
Step 3: Personalize experiences
Rather than having stock dialogue templates agents use during every interaction, leaving some room for customization will help your team tailor experiences to fit the unique needs of each customer. Your customer engagement platform of choice will also help you gather invaluable data from every interaction to help you shape your support to better suit customer needs.
Step 4: Ask for customer feedback
Customer satisfaction surveys and feedback forms are crucial to determine customer sentiment. However, sometimes customers need a little incentive to fill out surveys — even short ones. You can do this by offering a small discount, free shipping on their next order, or other loyalty rewards.
Step 5: Collect customer data
Tracking the right metrics matter when it comes to evaluating customer engagement. Both leading and lagging indicators are helpful to measure customer engagement strategy performance and show you where to improve. Customer engagement is an ongoing process, but continuing to track customer data related to engagement will help you fine-tune your strategy.
Customer engagement is a key metric to nurture and develop in today’s competitive market. For even more inspiration on how to create a lasting customer engagement strategy, this infographic from Sinch outlines examples of brands that are knocking customer engagement out of the park and shares lessons learned from successful brands.
