As one of the leading trends in businesses of all sectors, customer Engagement should be a priority in 2019. If your business does not yet a customer engagement strategy in place then now is the time to start giving it some serious thought. As consumers increasingly become loyal to brands through positive engagement rather than product costs or even the products themselves, keeping up with those needs is therefore key. Failing to develop positive customer engagement will inevitably mean that you lose sales.

There are challenges for all businesses hoping to optimise their customer engagement processes, and you will need to tackle those in order to get more from your engagement strategies.

Consistency and Engagement

One of the biggest challenges for improved customer engagement is that businesses now have to be omni-channel. It’s no longer enough to encourage engagement with customers face to face. Now, there is a wide range of platforms that will need to be taken into account, and your customer engagement needs to remain consistent across all of them. The benefits are worth the time that it takes to develop and clear and consistent engagement plan.

Use your plan to help you:

• Understand what your customers want and what they expect from your business
• Uncover new ways to increase loyalty and involvement with your brand
• See the signs of a customer that may be considering moving to another company for their needs
• Adopt new measures to improve engagement on a rolling basis
• Minimise churn and recognise any opportunities to upsell
• Improve the reputation of your brand
• Increase audience reach and attract new customers

Whether it’s through your fully optimised website, a social media platform, or even phone calls, remaining consistent with your engagement is essential.

Why is Engagement so Vital?

Business has always been about competition, and the race is on for all businesses to explore how to get more from their customer engagement. If you as a consumer are treated badly by a business, or have a poor experience with a brand, then you are less likely to spend money with them.

That’s one of the main reasons why businesses are spending more on their customer engagement, with that trend set to continue. It may seem like common sense, but the fact is that far too many companies neglect to even look at their customer feedback, let alone collect or analyse it. This can lead to a growing divide between your brand’s ambitions and reputation. Understanding consumer expectation is the first step to greater engagement.

The Omni-Channel Challenge

Brands now have to engage with their customers across a broad range of platforms. From offline phone calls to the range of social media platforms, having the strongest engagement plan will be vital. Through the development of a strong omni-channel engagement policy, your business will retain up to 89% of your customers. If your engagement process is weak, then that can drop to as little as 33% of your customers, and that can have a dramatic impact on your bottom line. The best way to fully optimise your customer engagement process is through:

• Regular training of team members
• Ethical and actionable uses of customer data
• Recognising bottlenecks in communication channels

Because your business will be communicating through a variety of methods, the need for a more streamlined process is essential. Customers will quickly become frustrated if they are forced to keep repeating the same query over and over again to different departments. Having that consistency in your omni-channel communication is going to need to be a clear focus for your engagement strategy, ensuring that customers are able to quickly and easily get what they need without hassle.

Customer Engagement Methods

If you want to keep delighting your customers and strengthening the perception of your brand, then you need to develop an engagement strategy that will improve the customer experience. While consumer trends evolve, there are modern tools and methods for getting more from your engagement processes. These include:

• Analytics Use: Ideally, you want to be looking very closely at your product engagement. Knowing how and when customers use your product is the key to easier and more efficient marketing options that can help you stay relevant in your sector. This is a modern take on understanding customers and should be a priority when it comes to the growth of your business. Analytics can be used in a variety of ways throughout your company, but using them to identify customer engagement possibilities will be highly beneficial. Those metrics will help you to identify and clear the customer journey, and spot those products and pages that are hindering the sales and engagement process.

• All Employees: Every single member of your workforce needs to understand the importance of positive customer engagement. They are the representation of your brand, and no matter how little interaction they have with customers, instilling a culture of consumer satisfaction is vital. Some companies are prioritising this even more, with staff members taking turns to serve customers no matter what their usual role may be. Having that focus on customer satisfaction can help drive your business forward, and your team will be the ones that can make it happen.

• Use your Customers: If you already have a set of highly engaged customers that interact with your company on social media or through blog posts, then you have a loyalty that can be used to perfect your customer engagement process. This can be a mutually beneficial relationship (and the reason why influencer marketing has become the big trend of the year), with your business better able to use your existing relationships to test new products and question interactions that your power users have had with both your business and your competitors.

At its most basic, improved customer engagement is about creating a personalised and seamless experience for those that encounter your company. No matter the channel, the potential rewards of more proactive and positive customer engagement strategy are certainly worth the investment of time it might take to fine-tune and perfect.

The more that you engage with your audience, the more you will develop loyalty and make more sales. Failing to prioritise your customer engagement means that your business will be vulnerable and at risk of stunted growth.

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