Customer engagement refers to a connection or communication between customers and businesses using different channels. Every customer engagement effort should aim to improve overall customer experience, both online and offline.
Engaging with customers should never be underestimated. According to statistics, 87 percent of marketing professionals say that customer experience is vital to any business, and 61.5 percent say that poor customer experience can lose customers. Also, 52.5 percent of the respondents say that poor customer experience can damage a brand’s reputation. That’s why businesses should prioritize customer experience to mitigate any potential business risks and provide customers with lifetime value.
In this post, you’ll learn some helpful tips to boost your customer engagement that can help you attain your business goals.
#1. Personalize Business Communications
You can boost your customer engagement by personalizing your business communications. Making your customers feel truly welcomed and valued comes with a personal touch. One way to provide personalized communication is a live chat feature on your website.
Delivering great content to your customers improves customer experience without red privacy flags. It’s a good way for customers to reach you and ask questions without having to sign-up or divulge their personal information.
Here are other types of personalized communication:
- Contact Form: Contact forms are ready-to-fill templates that work like emails, wherein a customer is asked to fill in some details, like their name, email address, and message. It’s a more professional way of customer connection for those who are willing to wait. Upon submission, the form is automatically organized according to dates, and your email customer care team can address issues and answer concerns, and reply within 24 to 48 hours.
- Direct Customer Service Line: Those who want to speak with a live representative would call your customer service line. However, interactive voice response or IVR can cause huge customer frustration. According to a report, 61 percent of customers hate dealing with an IVR. So if you want to keep both your new and loyal customers happy, make sure to have a direct customer service lines with minimal or zero IVR communication.
#2. Don’t Underestimate Comments and Testimonials
Whether on your web pages or social media fan pages, comments and testimonials can be a good or a bad thing. Carefully monitoring your comment sections allows you to answer questions, issue corrections, and engage with your audience to improve your trust rating.
Social media comments are common nowadays. Many consumers check social media comments before making a final purchase decision. That’s why it’s important for every business owner to know how to effectively manage negativity, complaints, and inappropriateness online.
Here are some tips to help you handle negative comments on social media:
- Document Everything: Documenting every negative or controversial comment on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social media channel can be done by taking a screenshot or whatever method you prefer. If an issue or major problem needs to be escalated to the social media platform, you need to have proof that the matter exceeded or violated guidelines. Comment posters can modify or delete their comments, so knowing them allows you to resolve them right away.
- Don’t Delete Negative Comments: Deleting negative comments may aggravate the condition, which brings your business integrity in question, most especially among your followers.
- Never Take It Personally: You don’t need to reply to all comments because there are commenters who are just trying to create a big bang out of a minor issue to ignite emotional reaction or pick a fight.
#3. Be Responsive
Even if you have the best products and services in your business niche, a seller who is not responsive is a huge source of customer dissatisfaction. Show that you are responsive by not delaying answering customer queries and giving prompt solutions, such as having a clear returns policy in place.
#4. Provide the Best Value to Your Customers
Creating useful content on your website through your blogs is one way to provide the best value to your customers. Videos, images, infographics, and podcasts make great content, helping your target audience face day-to-day struggles.
For instance, if you’re in e-commerce you and sell smartwatches, you can post articles about how to use a smartwatch to track a person’s fitness and health. Lawyers can share expert legal advice online for free. Dentists and doctors can provide a helpful how-to guide to attain optimum dental and overall health.
Conclusion
While every customer is unique, applying the strategies mentioned above can help boost your customer engagement. By personalizing your customer communication, it reflects your professionalism and trustworthiness as a business. Also, being responsive and taking each comment positively helps you establish a good reputation. Finally, providing the greatest value to your customers through your web content can help them realize how much they need your products and services in their lives.
Unnati Vaidya
Unnati Vaidya is a freelancer Content Writer and SEO generalist. She is an enthusiastic reader of Novels and a big fan of watching Sci-fi movies and seasons!