Every interaction a business has with its customers can be an opportunity for the business to build trust and increase customer satisfaction. By doing so, businesses can better understand customers and improve customer relationships. This is also known as customer engagement.
Customer engagement describes how a business interacts and communicates with its customers to build relationships and maintain customer loyalty. The more interactions and communication are done, the closer businesses will be to customers, directly impacting customer loyalty.
Every business needs to ensure customer engagement because it helps business growth, including strengthening customer retention. Customer retention is the ability of a business to retain existing customers to continue buying products or services from the business. In other words, maintaining customer loyalty and trust ensures consistent sales for the long-term.
Why Do Businesses Need to Strengthen Customer Retention?
In working towards business and brand growth, maintaining the loyalty of existing customers is more significant than finding new prospects. Because loyal customers tend to make repeated purchases that will benefit the business, even the most loyal 12-15% of customers can contribute to a whooping 55 to 70% of business sales.
The success of a business certainly cannot be separated from customer connection and loyalty, which can only be obtained through a high level of customer satisfaction. The result of the right customer engagement is increased customer satisfaction so that they will be interested in coming back again to become loyal customers.
When customers are loyal to a business, the added benefit is that 86% of customers will also recommend the brand or business to friends and family. This certainly helps businesses to reach more potential customers to increase business growth.
How Does Customer Engagement Strengthen Customer Retention?
While having quality products or services is key to returning customers, one additional factor that can make customers stay is the success of the business in carrying out customer engagement. As discussed earlier, loyal customers produced by good customer engagement tend to stay with your business products or services for a longer period of time, thereby increasing your customer retention rate.
When you make customers feel valued during interactions, you help to increase customer loyalty while reducing the risk of losing customers. In fact, businesses which successfully engaged their customers were found to experience 63% lower customer attrition.
When customers interact and communicate with the business on an ongoing basis, it means that the business has found a successful customer engagement formula. With increasingly fierce industry competition, customer retention becomes more challenging and at times, it is almost impossible to stay on top without the right customer engagement strategy.
Maintain Customer Retention By Optimizing Customer Engagement
There are various ways that businesses can carry out a customer engagement strategy. Starting from providing excellent customer service, providing a personal touch, to asking for customer feedback related to your brand’s business products and services are just some of the ways to do so.
Optimizing customer engagement is something every business must do. Given that customer preferences continue to change over time, businesses must constantly innovate so that customer engagement remains optimal. Here are strategies you can use to strengthen customer retention through customer engagement.
1. Connect with Customers on the Right Platform
In conducting customer engagement, businesses need to know which communication platform is the most frequent and most convenient for customers to use to connect with the business. By providing customer service and support on the platform which customers frequent and find most convenient, it makes it easier for customers to connect with businesses. It also makes customers feel your business is trustworthy and reliable.
2. Fast Responses to Customer Messages
One of the reasons some businesses lose customers is because of their long response times. Responding quickly to customer messages will certainly increase customer trust because it shows that the business values the customer’s time. With chatbot technology, it is easier for businesses to respond quickly to customer enquiries. Chatbots can respond directly to customers in seconds, making it easy for customers to access information.
Besides that, businesses should be doing real-time analysis consistently to ensure that no customer messages are neglected by customer service agents. Not neglecting any customers assures them that the business pays attention to the needs of their customers. Businesses need to diligently monitor and analyze the number of resolved conversations and the average response time of agents to customer messages to gauge how fast the brand is responding to customers.
3. Personalize Every Conversation
During your interactions with customers, show genuine empathy to your customers so they can witness the human side of your business. Avoid responding with monotonous sentences and instead, use emoticons and thank-you notes after the interaction to provide the customer with a personal touch.
4. Take Advantage of Customer Feedback
It’s hard to maintain customer loyalty if you don’t know what customers are thinking or how well they value your business. Therefore, customer feedback helps businesses to find out whether customers are satisfied with products and services. With this feedback, you get insights as a reference to correct deficiencies and improve the quality of your business.
In addition, asking for customer feedback will make them feel they are contributing to the process of improving the quality of your business. This, of course, will further strengthen customers’ relationships with your business so that they will become more loyal.
Optimize Customer Retention through Customer Engagement on Omnichannel
There are many strategies that you can follow to strengthen customer retention through customer engagement. As long as you pay attention to your customers’ needs and wants, they will be happy to continue doing business with you whenever the opportunity arises.
Using Qiscus Omnichannel Chat will help you strengthen customer retention through customer engagement in every communication channel more effectively. The features will help you increase response rates, create personalized interactions, and obtain customer feedback.
Through optimal customer engagement, you can strengthen customer retention by better understanding customers’ needs and increasing customer loyalty. If you are interested in optimizing customer engagement through Qiscus Omnichannel Chat and would like a further discussion, please contact us here.
