Every company should strive to build positive relationships with its customers to maintain customer loyalty to the business. This is because your relationships with your customers should go beyond just transacting and purchasing. To have customers constantly turning to and trusting your brand, brand owners should work on having excellent customer communication processes to make customers feel they can relate to your brand.
Having loyal customers also means that positive news about your business will be shared with even more people. In fact, a study found that 86% of loyal customers will recommend a brand or business they fancy or prefer to friends and family which, in turn, will bring more customers and revenue to your business. Therefore, building positive relationships with customers is something that every business needs to do.
To build positive relationships with customers, the most important thing you can do is to build the right customer engagement strategy to encourage interaction with your customers. Customer engagement entails how a business will interact and communicate with customers to build positive customer relationships and maintain customer loyalty.
Understanding Customer Engagement & Its Importance for Business
Seeing the increasingly fierce industry competition today, providing quality products or services is not enough for a brand or a business to survive. Customer engagement is one of the factors that can influence and pull customers to transacting with your business or brand. Companies which successfully engaged their customers were found to experience 63% lower customer attrition and 55% higher in wallet share.
Interacting with customers can strengthen the relationship between your business and your customers. A strong relationship between business and customers can help the business maintain its hard-earned customer base. With customer engagement strategies that have become increasingly diverse in recent years, there are more and more innovative ways that businesses can implement to attract and retain customers. One example of a customer engagement strategy that is often carried out by businesses is using personalization to meet customer needs.
For example, customers may at times contact businesses before making a purchase such as to ask about a product. A warm and friendly greeting from your customer service staff will do wonders in creating a positive experience. Take this opportunity to ask more about their needs and problems that they are facing, making sure to listen carefully. After the interaction is done, you can also provide solutions by recommending the most suitable product or service according to your customers’ needs and wants.
What are the Benefits of Customer Engagement for Business?
The more often you engage with customers, the more insights about customers you will receive. Customer insights are an interpretation used by businesses to gain a deeper understanding of customer behavior. Through this insight, you can learn more about what customers need and want, which will help you determine strategies to increase business growth.
In addition, when you make customers feel valued during their interactions, you reduce the risk of customer churn that can occur when customers feel neglected. Basically, selling to existing customers is easier than selling to new prospects. Businesses have a 60 to 70% chance of selling to an existing customer while the probability of selling to a new prospect is only 5% to 20%.
When a business is successful in interacting and communicating with customers on an ongoing basis, then the business has successfully carried out customer engagement well. Without the effort to engage customers, you may be missing out on many opportunities to maintain your customer base and increase business growth.
Strategies for Creating Effective Customer Engagement
Customer engagement will become more effective if it is carried out not only on one channel but across various existing channels. Businesses must be available on various communication channels or social media platforms that customers prefer to make it easier for them to interact with the business. Here are 4 ways how customer engagement can be carried out more effectively:
1. Make It Easy for Customers to Interact with Businesses on Any Channel They Prefer
By being present on multiple communication channels, you make it easier for your customers to access information about your brand that they need from the platform they are most comfortable with. In addition, you will also have a greater opportunity to reach more customers because you are not only fixated on one communication channel.
2. Unbounded Interaction for Customers with Being Available Anytime and Anywhere
Apart from being available on various communication channels, businesses must also be responsive when carrying out customer engagement. 82% of customers think that an immediate response from a business is very important when they have an inquiry for business. Even if customers may contact businesses outside operational hours, there are tools such as chatbots that can help with prepared automated responses, which are helpful for customers in urgent situations.
Therefore, it is crucial for businesses to remain accessible 24/7. By using a chatbot, customers are free to contact your business at any time and receive immediate responses in seconds. Customer engagement can run more smoothly because of the reduced risk of customers leaving the business early in the interaction due to long response times.
3. Creating Personalized Conversations to Get More Intimate with Customers
In conducting customer engagement, it is necessary to personalize the conversation to become more intimate with the customer. Collaboration between bots and human can help to provide personalized conversations between brands and customers. Bots are well-equipped and can be programmed to provide responses to FAQ-type customer messages while agents can be allocated complex customer messages.
How can conversations be personalized? For example, agents can introduce themselves by name and address the customer by name when messaging them. Using emoticons can also be a great way to provide a personal touch. Unlike bots that often use monotonous sentences, agents can vary their choice of words to show genuine empathy for customers.
Agents have a better ability to provide emotional support to consumers with critical problems and will be able to respond appropriately during emergency situations and circumstances. Therefore, human agents can act with urgency and help create more personal touches in conversations to help customers feel more comfortable.
One more tool that can help businesses provide personalization when dealing with customers is through notification messages. Sending notification messages at the right juncture can also be a great way to communicate with customers and increase customer engagement.
Businesses can also send notification messages to provide customers with a personal touch. Examples include sending birthday notification messages to customers. A little personal touch like this will certainly be appreciated and remembered by customers. In this case, the business can collate relevant customer data, such as their birthdays, so that it can be used as a reminder to wish customers on their birthdays.
4. Thank the Customer After Every Interaction & Ask for Customer Feedback
Thanking customers for their support will make each of them feel valued. You can also increase customer engagement by seeking customers’ feedback. Involving customers in the process of improving the quality of your business will make them feel that they are contributing to helping your business improve. That way, you will further strengthen the customer relationship with your business by making them feel involved and invested in your brand.
How to Optimize an Effective Customer Engagement Strategy
Conducting customer engagement can strengthen the relationship between businesses and customers. Without putting in effort to engage customers, you may miss many opportunities to sustain your customer base and reach more customers.
Using omnichannel will make it easier for you to engage customers and reach more customers on every communication channel more effectively. With just one centralized platform, customer service agents can connect with each customer from various different communication channels simultaneously, saving time and energy, and yet will not be overwhelmed by managing a large number of messages.
Below are 4 ways to optimize your customer engagement strategies:
- Be present on various communication channels that consumers prefer through Qiscus Omnichannel Chat
- Provide unbounded interaction anytime and anywhere via the chatbot in Qiscus Robolabs.
- Personalized conversations through human-bot collaboration help businesses better understand customers
- Involve customers to contribute to helping your business through the CSAT application in the Qiscus App Center
All of these customer engagement strategies can be carried out more effectively just from one Qiscus Omnichannel Chat platform. If you would like to explore further how Qiscus Omnichannel Chat can help you engage customers more effectively, contact us here today!
