Everyone talks about customer engagement, but what does it really mean and why is it important?
customer engagement is the process of interacting with customers through various channels to develop and maintain a relationship with them. No matter what your starting point, coming from marketing or customer experience, focusing on the relationship between your business and your customer is the key to enabling a successful customer engagement.
Customer engagement directly impacts profitability
Customer engagement is about encouraging your customers to engage and willingly to takepart in offerings you are creating for them. If you do it right, you’ll grow your brand reputation and build customer loyalty and, in turn, you drive a sustained revenue. A study by Constellation Research reported that companies who improve their customer engagement can increase cross-sell revenue by 22%and up-sell revenue by 38%.
Customer engagement and retention go hand in hand. The more engaged your customers are with your business,the more likely they are to keep coming back and become a loyal customer. Customer retention is important when it comes to Return on Investment (ROI)because it costs 5X more to acquire new customers than to retain existing ones.
Factors that influence customer engagement and retention include customer service, responding to feedback and reviews, giving exclusive offers, etc. A report released by Retail Reputation Report showed that most retailers simply don’t respond to their customer reviews— particularly negative ones. When a customer takes time to leave a review,it’s the ideal time to engage.
It’s essential to incorporate your customer feedback while improving your offerings,thus meeting your customer needs, better. If customers like your offerings andare happy with your services, they’ll talk about it. They’ll recommend your product/service to others, and nothing is more powerful than word-of-mouth.Engaged customers already love what you do and they’ll provide free advertising for your business.
Customer engagement isn’t solely about generating higher profit. It is about empowering customers to interact with you on a long-term basis and to incentivise them with personalised experiences. Successful customer engagement and adding value to their experience will keep your brand at the top of the customer’s mind when it comes to the decision-making process.
Finally, a very important point to remember is that no business can force their customers to engage with them. Paul Greenberg was spot on saying that Customer engagement is ‘’offered by the company, chosen by the customer." (Source: HubSpot)
For more insight into winning over customers for good and driving them back to your business, book for a consultation here.
