What is Customer Engagement and Why Does It Matter?
Let’s start by talking about customer engagement vs. customer experience.
- Customer experience is a customer’s entire journey with your brand and reflects how a person feels after interacting with your organization. A good customer experience confirms you’ve delivered on your promise, providing people with a valuable product or service while creating an enjoyable experience across every touchpoint.
- Customer engagement is more about matching what you do best to what a customer wants most. It reflects how people react and respond to your offerings and how they reach out to you and spread the word to others.
While customer engagement is unpredictable, customer experience is inevitable. That’s why customer engagement management is so essential to improving customer engagement and elevating your brand in the marketplace.
Customer engagement today is about creating seamless experiences that build trust. A recent Salesforce report shows that consumers are holding companies to account in new and unprecedented ways, with over 80% of them now expecting immediate engagement when they contact a business. Instead of focusing on single revenue-driving transactions, brands must now look for ways to deliver connected experiences that create a positive feedback loop with their customers.
Automating Customer Engagement
How your company competes today in many ways depends less on the products and services you offer and more on the experiences you offer. You might be one of a dozen brands in your locale offering a particular product or service, but if you give people the enjoyable experience they’re looking for, you’ll be the one they return to over and again.
Salesforce’s survey found that nearly six in ten people agree AI will revolutionize how they interact with a business. Customer engagement tools like self-service portals can be useful in creating more enjoyable customer experiences. People tired of waiting for assistance consistently say they prefer to help themselves, particularly for simple issues. Self-service tools give customers the immediate convenience they crave, making them more likely to engage with your brand.
Customer Knowledge Management
Customers have so much power now. Social platforms give equal voice to ardent fans and critics, so it’s crucial to success to know and understand your customers’ needs, no matter what industry you’re in.
Ways to boosting customer engagement differ from brand to brand and industry to industry, but these tactics can inspire any organization’s customer engagement strategy:
- Build engagement opportunities into customer experiences. When designing, updating, and implementing user and customer experience elements, make sure engagement is top-of-mind. What your user interface looks, feels, and even sounds like can have a huge impact on how customers engage with your brand.
- If you don’t have one, consider starting a loyalty program. From humble stamp cards to tiered point systems, loyalty programs can boost customer retention while giving you insight into whether your customers feel appreciated.
- Inviting customer feedback lets people know you care what they think and that you want to give them the experience they’re looking for. Reviews, satisfaction surveys, social media engagement, and in-store suggestion boxes are all excellent ways to gather contextual customer experience data.
- Offer personalized experiences to improve customer loyalty. No longer limited to targeted offers, personalization now extends to the entire customer experience. Developing customer profiles, training employees to be customer-facing, and developing enjoyable and helpful self-service experiences are proven ways to boost customer engagement.
A good knowledge management platform makes it easy for employees to share information, including customer behaviors and feedback, which, in turn, can improve the customer experience. It also increases customer satisfaction through self-service capabilities, helping people get the answers they need fast.
If you’re ready to drive your business forward and discover novel ways to boost revenue, foster innovation, and increase customer retention, KMS Lighthouse is a cloud-based knowledge management system that can help you do just that. It offers rewarding experiences for customers and employees, simplifying communications, elevating customer experiences, and engaging people in new and rewarding ways.
