Customer needs and expectations keep constantly changing. The way your customers continue to engage with your brand can be a major catalyst to differentiate your business from the rest. Offering new and unique ways for customers to interact with you by consistently maintaining their interest is something that will keep you ahead of your competitors. Understanding the deep-seated aspirations of your customers, getting them excited about your brand, and ensuring that they feel appreciated will help you develop meaningful connections with them. To put it simply, building an emotional connection with your customers is where you will gain a competitive advantage against your rivals.
Increasing customer delight by providing unique solutions and adding values in diverse ways will help your customers have a positive customer experience. Positive customer experience is all about helping people find ways to make parts of their lives more memorable and fulfilling. These positive experiences accumulated by your customers will help foster a long lasting relationship with them. Nurturing a positive relationship with them will bring in many benefits to your business, including higher conversions, lower churn rates, and more referrals. Improving customer experience is what will enable companies to get big returns on their investment.
In other words, customer engagement is at the heart of an outstanding customer service as greater customer engagement rate leads to a happier and more loyal customer base. A customer engagement strategy is the foremost game changer and it is all about boosting customer satisfaction by driving positive interactions. Your strategy will involve a collection of processes, tools, and resources to reach out and connect with customers through their channel of choice. The goal of the strategy should be to focus on value creation rather than revenue generation.
Let us explore some of the innovative ways to improve customer experiences.
Online Presence: A powerful way to engage with your customers and stay connected is to have an online presence in the form of a website, blog, or ecommerce store. This will enable new customers to discover your business and existing customers to have a continuous relation with you through their queries, testimonials, feedback or complaints. You can also blog about your business through personal stories that tells about your business journey, your successes or failures or even simply inform them about new updates, discounts or offers. Recent research showed that customers continued to remain loyal to their favourite brands through online stores despite the restrictions brought about by Covid 19 pandemic.
Omnichannel Support: Besides a website or a blog, most companies today offer multichannel customer support where customers can interact with a brand through various channels such as social pages, phone, email, web forms, mobile apps, and retail stores. But your customer engagement strategy gets more innovative when you can continue to support your customers even when they transition from one channel to another. Many a time, it happens that a customer has started an inquiry through, say, Faceboook Messenger and then wants to switch to phone, email, or webchat to explain their problem better. This is where an Omnichannel approach comes in where you can streamline customer interactions across multiple communication channels under one platform. This is a great customer engagement model as different customer circles prefer different modes of communication and when a customer transitions from one channel to another, you will not be losing out on a huge aggregate of customers and leads.
Keeping a complete 360-degree view of every interaction you’ve ever had with your customers will help you provide a consistent shopping solution to your customers across all touch points while delivering a satisfying customer experience journey. Some of the top omnichannel ecommerce softwares like Contalog, SAP Hybris, Netsuite, and Intershop help you put all of your customer’s communication channels in one place while providing customers with a seamless shopping experience.
Customer Reviews: Listening and responding to customer reviews are an essential part of engaging with your customers. It is the first step you can take towards customer-driven innovation. Customer input can be the primary inspiration for improving your services or a product. Unhappy customers or those who cannot engage with your brand can provide you with the most valuable feedback and suggestions. Addressing customer concerns and responding to negative feedback can go a long way towards building trust and excitement for your brand as it will make your customers feel empowered and ‘in charge.’ Analyzing the feedback and customer data may actually change things around as you can leverage that knowledge to change your business plans and accomplish your objectives on time. Your business will gain some interesting insights into what really works and in turn provide you with greater opportunities for your business growth. Additionally, monitoring third-party sites for mentions and new listings, and responding to them positively while posting screenshots of their feedback on your site or tagging the customers for their positive comments will influence others to do the same. Adding a community forum or creating a dedicated page for your customers to share their ideas are some of the innovative ways to boost customer engagement with creativity, subtlety, and finesse.
Adding Chatbots: Lots of companies are implementing chatbots to their website to communicate with their customers, share product recommendations, and solve pre-purchase queries. Whether a company uses a pop-up on their website or a dedicated chat service for customer support, it is undoubtedly an innovative way to enhance customer experience. Chatbots automate support functions, handle basic service inquiries, and connect customers to the right representatives as per customer requirements. It can even personalize its messaging to support and encourage users based on their location, the page they are browsing, and new or returning visitors. Chatbots can give users advice based on their budget and create a balanced support system by responding to both hurried customers as well as those looking for detailed responses. They help you to be proactive with your customer base and resolve their queries at the earliest. This is one of the best customer engagement innovations that provides convenience and immediate gratification over more traditional support methods like email and phone. Nurturing excellent customer experiences will go a long way in strengthening relationships with your customers.
Mobile Apps: Extensive increase in smartphones has led people to spend almost three and a half hours on their phones every single day. Over and above users spend 90% of their smartphone time on mobile apps. Companies have a huge opportunity to retain and engage with their customers through mobile apps. Focusing their marketing efforts towards this source can leverage this widespread app use to their advantage. Moreover, mobile apps prevent consumers to shop for products from rival brands as they are not exposed to any other ads from competitors. Instead you get a chance to display some of your other products or services that they aren’t even looking for. As a result, they are less inclined to shop around and compare with other brands whilst they are using your company’s app. Increased focus on your company’s mobile app thus garners interest for your product against your competitor’s. There are also chances of promoting offline sales since a stronger connection has been nurtured between the consumer and your products. Once a user downloads an app they tend to invest time on it and develop an attachment towards it, thereby becoming loyal customers of your brand.
Additionally, providing multiple options to your mobile app such as rewards, information, gamification, and mobile pay will enhance the customer’s shopping experience, create top-of-mind awareness, and boost sales.
- Reward Engagement: Rewarding your customers with discounts, referral bonus, gift cards, prizes or loyalty cards is a smart way to gain customer engagement.
- SMS: Using SMS reminders keeps you connected with your customers and help you ensure that their shopping experience is an enjoyable one.
- In-product Messaging: Implementing in-product messaging where you place messages directly on the product helps new customers get acquainted with your product or nudge them to complete an already started action. In-product messaging can be used for sending personalised offers and discounts as well as encouraging free-trial prospects to use premium features. It will go a long way in improving customer engagement and encouraging them to use your product more.
- Creative Product Packaging: Designing beautifully printed packaging for your customers will build an outstanding as well as an emotional unboxing experience for them. This will lead to extraordinary customer experiences from the instant the customer receives their package.
We’re living in a customer-centric world and putting one’s loyal buyers first is vital for any brand today. Creating an enjoyable customer experience will help you quickly gain a competitive edge by generating more sales and making people come back for more.
