Digital Customer Engagement: How Businesses Deliver Customized Experiences to Customers
Most business owners aim for the same thing: to keep customers loyal and satisfied. In today’s world, shaped by digital transformation, customer expectations are rapidly evolving. Consumers want their relationship with each brand to be more meaningful. This means businesses need to work harder than ever to keep customers engaged and happy.
That’s where digital customer engagement comes in. Let’s get into that right now.
- What is digital customer engagement?
- Why is digital customer experience important?
- Digital customer experience trends
- How do you build customer engagement?
- What is a customer engagement model?
- What is customer brand engagement?
- Customer engagement strategies
What is digital customer engagement?
Digital engagement is the process of interacting with potential and existing customers through various digital channels to build your relationship with them. These channels include email, messaging, social media, and many more.
What does digital engagement mean?
It’s about encouraging customers to get involved in the experiences your brand creates for them.
The business and customer engagement process usually begins with the first point of contact and extends throughout the customer journey. It involves proactive interactions that effectively boost engagement with customers in the online spaces they frequent to consume content or communicate
Why is digital customer experience important?
The hardest part isn’t securing a customer but retaining them after a transactional exchange. To create loyal customers, you’ll need to keep them engaged with your brand long after their initial purchase.
Today’s consumers are first and foremost digital customers. They rely on various digital channels to navigate and communicate with brands. Therefore, brands must seamlessly engage customers across various digital devices to fill the gaps in the customer’s journey.
Customers no longer just want to make a purchase decision; they want exceptional, informative, and memorable customer experiences (CX). When businesses make a goal of enhancing digital customer engagements, they’re interested in providing customers with something meaningful—something that goes beyond a great product.
Consumers want to be treated as individuals. They demand a personalized experience and expect brands to know their preferences and purchase history. To meet those expectations, businesses need to leverage data yielded from customer interactions across multiple touchpoints. They can generate actionable insights to inform engagement strategies and improve CX that way.
Whether it's exceptional end-to-end CX, real-time customer support, or valuable content, when done well, a great multi-channel engagement strategy delivers. It can improve customer relationships, build brand awareness, and bring you closer to your business goals.
Digital customer experience trends
The digital world is rapidly developing, which means customer experience is too. Digital customer experience trends shape the way we do customer experience, so it’s crucial for businesses to keep up and use them to inform their business strategies. Here are some key trends to look out for:
- Advancements in AI and chatbot technology used to automate and personalize responses
- More brand interactions through voice command
- Customers expecting hyper-personalized experiences to remain loyal to a brand
- More emphasis on improving the employee experience to deliver better results and customer retention
How do you build customer engagement?
Customer engagement is built with every online and offline brand interaction.
For businesses, each interaction provides an opportunity to enrich a customer’s experience by addressing their needs and delivering solutions to their problems.
There are a few important factors you have to consider:
1. You’ll need to implement a customer engagement strategy
One of the things brands of all business models need, if they’re to succeed at engaging customers, is a digital engagement guide that outlines their goals and strategies. Your goals should be actionable and based on data, with trackable metrics and KPIs, and clear outlines and expectations laid out for your support staff.
Implementing a digital customer engagement strategy will keep you and your team on track, and ensure that your customers receive streamlined, consistent service throughout their journey
Implement customization across digital channels to ensure customers enjoy seamless CX.
Customers want to be treated as humans. That means that generic digital marketing tactics don’t work like they used to. Businesses need to adapt to customers who demand humanistic brand interactions.
When you’re customizing content or support to an individual customer, you must be well informed about their specific habits.
Personalized content marketing is a great way to drive engagement by providing customers with valuable blog posts, text messaging, videos, etc., relevant to them.
Personalized customer support enhances customers’ engagement by providing information that’s timely and relevant to an individual. If a customer chats with an airline and the agent is armed with the knowledge that the customer has an upcoming flight to San Antonio, they can then use it to inform their chat support. The agent can initiate or carry on their chat with a personalized message like “Thanks for chatting with us, do you have any questions about your upcoming trip to San Antonio?”.
3. Use a customer engagement platform
A customer engagement platform is often a software that enables businesses to engage with their customers across various touchpoints that they have with your organization. It allows you to track your audience as they move through their journey with your business.
Top features of customer engagement platforms
The most important features of these platforms that can empower customer service transformations include:
- Omnichannel capabilities for contacting customers across digital channels
- Intelligent routing that ensures customers are directed to the right person
- Automation tools that enhance agent productivity and efficiency
- Workforce management tools to analyze agent performance and inform training strategies
- Reports and analytics that provide customer data valuable insights into the customer’s experience
Omnichannel contact center: future of digital engagement
Implementing an excellent omnichannel contact center or customer engagement platforms into your business strategy is a game-changer. Unlike a traditional call center, this kind of solution allows you to:
- Provide unified customer support across multiple channels and manage each interaction from the same platform.
- Leverage the power of AI and machine learning to analyze messages and route them to the best available agent.
- Boost sales using customer data integrated from your CRM to track interactions and inform digital strategies.
What is a customer engagement model?
It’s a theoretical model that allows brands to understand the specifics of what led a customer to make a purchase decision, their motivations, and the people involved in the process.
These models need to track the entire customer journey while focusing on creating value and analyzing results to enhance overall CX. They should also consider potential unprecedented circumstances and support automation tools.
An engagement model allows you to identify specific points where your customer:
- Engages further than planned in their buyer’s journey
- Encounters friction points
- Decides against further actions with your brand
By analyzing these digital interactions, marketers and customer service agents can understand the role they play in engaging customers, use the information collected to inform future engagement strategies, and build long-lasting relationships with their customers.
This could involve incorporating a push notification, in-app messages, or allowing customers to unsubscribe at any time throughout their user experience. It’s all about finding more convenient and timely interactions that align with the customer’s needs and meet their expectations.
What is customer brand engagement?
Customer engagement strategies
In today’s tech-driven world, businesses need to keep up with shifts in consumer habits and behaviors and new digital customer experience trends to ensure they achieve their objectives.
Here are some things that every exceptional customer engagement strategy should take into consideration:
1. Leverage the power of social media
Through social media, brands can forge their personalities and appeal to customers across demographics. It’s not merely a platform for connecting anymore; it's a digital space where brands can engage with customers through support channels, live-chat, sharing content, and more.
When coming up with a digital engagement strategy, marketers need to think of social media as a powerful tool. It can be used to connect, share, research, identify trends, and inform content marketing decisions to boost customer engagement in B2C interactions. It’s being implemented in more B2B organizations, too.
Marketers can leverage the power of technologies such as live chat to build stronger engagement strategies. The enhanced functionality of live chat means it’s not just a tool for real-time support but can also be used to observe and respond to customer behavior.
This information can be used to inform future journey mapping. What’s more, live chat enables businesses to observe customers' mobile app or website behavior, which can later be used to increase the relevance of interactions.
Personalization has been a buzzword in marketing for a while now. The meaning of personalization changes from business to business. For some, it’s simply using a recipient's first name in an email. For others, it goes much deeper—like using customer segmentation to target user-specific groups.
Personalization is about using all of the customer data available to you in order to determine patterns in behavior and understand what they want to see. This allows you to use your customer engagement strategies to direct specific, valuable content or messages towards specific customers at different stages of their journey. In this way, brands can focus on improving CX through personalized journeys.
4. Provide customers with self-service options
Customers are increasingly demanding options for self-service during any experience with a brand. These options include different tools and services, including:
- Artificial intelligence chatbots that can answer various questions and direct customers to a human agent when necessary.
- A knowledge base of FAQs and articles that customers can easily refer to when they encounter problems or have questions.
- A library of multimedia resources that customers can use as a reference when needed.
Providing self-service solutions for your customers empowers them to find their own answers and resolutions and improves digital customer experiences, thus driving future brand engagement by building trust.
Customers’ feedback is crucial to the success of your engagement strategy. It helps you learn what triggers your customers into making a purchase decision and taking other actions. It can also help you understand how valuable they consider your product, service, or content to be. With those insights, you can understand what drives their values. Customer stories can also be used to promote your brand to other potential leads.
As part of your strategy, try to send frequent and accessible surveys to find out what makes your customers tick (and what doesn’t).
Delivering customized customer experiences requires businesses to adopt a customer-centric business model to develop personal, lasting connections with customers.
The future of customer engagement is sure to be even more dynamic and exciting than it is now, which is why businesses must stay on top of trends and technological innovations.
Remember that empowering your CX teams with the best tools will allow them to form meaningful connections with customers. Adding a human touch to your engagement strategies will enable you to achieve that ultimate goal: to keep customers loyal and satisfied.
