Customer engagement revolves around interactions between consumers and your brand. It comes in many forms and offers many advantages for businesses, especially when done with top-of-the-line innovations.
Companies have come a long way when it comes to customer engagement. In fact, there are dozens of technologies available today that can be used to maximize profits and convert inquiries into sales.
Read on to learn why you need to care about customer engagement and what technologies have been tried and tested to yield optimum results.
Why Bother With Customer Engagement?
Before you start brainstorming with your team about the innovations you can try, you must first understand the reason behind this step. Ask yourself this: Why is customer engagement important?
Many businesses use up too much of their resources on customer acquisition, but that is just one part of the whole process. In fact, it comprises just one-third of the three-step process that will help grow your business. Once you’ve got your digital signage, it’s important to have engaging digital signage displays. Eye-catching displays can dramatically increase footfall and customer engagement. The rest lies in how well you engage and, eventually, retain your customers.
After getting some decent acquisition strategies in place, the next step is to figure out how to maintain customer engagement in between purchases. This way, you can strengthen your brand’s emotional connection with them, thereby boosting the possibility of keeping them as loyal customers who will help with your business growth.
5 Technologies to Enhance Customer Engagement
As modern and technologically advanced as businesses are today, why many companies fail at engaging their customers still remains a mystery. Of course, one possible reason is their lack of knowledge about innovative tools they can use in achieving this goal.
To add to the current stable of information, below are five technologies that have been proven to enhance customer engagement today:
1. Multi-Touch Digital Signage
People’s reliance on their mobile devices to learn things has become the norm to the point that consumers now expect instant access to information whenever they see or touch a screen. This explains why consumers become more responsive to information provided digitally.
To capitalize on the power of digital signages, business owners can offer targeted goods, feature loyalty promotions, and push users towards the information they want to share.
Using multi-touch displays, you can provide your customers a sense of security for all the critical information they provide and offer access to content in several formats, be it in the form of a photo, video, audio, or text.
Each medium can convey information and have various advantages and uses. To get optimum results, all design elements – from the words chosen and the font styles used to the background color and negative space – must work together to appeal to the right audience.
Besides the displays and what is featured in them, the location where they are planted matters, too.
Malls, for example, can benefit from putting multi-touch displays in areas where consumers naturally spend wait times, like vending booths, checkout lines, and customer service centers. Heavy traffic areas like escalators, elevators, and entryways are also perfect spots for these multi-touch display kiosks.
2. AI-Powered Customer Service
Many companies use artificial intelligence to automate processes within their business to save on labor costs. However, powering your customer service with AI can also achieve something else – better customer engagement.
Most customers prefer their queries to be answered immediately, which is why automated customer service machines called chatbots that are available 24 hours a day have become a vital engagement tool.
Be it app-based or web-based, companies that leverage this technology have seen more efficient customer inquiry processing.
Since these AI-powered chatbots can respond to simple and straightforward questions, live agents can attend to more complex transactions. The key is to develop a seamless transition and use of chatbots and live-agent customer service.
3. Social Networking
A Business2Community report revealed that 63 percent of millennials stay updated about their favorite brands via social channels.
From special offers to new product lines, social media followers remain hungry for updates (or even fear missing out). If you pass up on such platforms, you practically fail to engage your loyal customers to the fullest.
In social media platforms like Twitter, Snapchat, Facebook, and Instagram, you can:
- Offer limited promotions and discounts for your brand’s followers.
- Conduct exclusive events like private sales and virtual live gatherings.
The thing about social media is that you’re not only targeting those who are already buying your brand; you’re also given a chance to reach out to members of their network. This explains the importance of shareable content, which can lead to referrals that help grow your customer base.
As a bonus, social media can give you valuable insights into what your customers want and how you can adapt to their ever-changing needs and tastes.
4. Customer Loyalty Platforms
According to Forbes, consumer loyalty yields higher sales.
The article says that you should engage 20 percent of your customers – those most loyal to your brand. This can yield 80 percent more sales, which is a mix of purchases from that 20 percent and their family, friends, and followers whom they talk to about your products or services.
To make the most out of this, it is imperative that you engage your top fans and most loyal followers. Besides communicating with them through social media, you can also come up with a customer loyalty or rewards program that will show your appreciation for them.
Invest in a customer loyalty management platform or develop a unique rewards program aligned with your brand strategy. The bottom line is that offering something in return for continued patronage could be a valuable investment in customer engagement.
5. Big Data Analytics
Every interaction you have with your customers generates data. In fact, the entire customer journey – from the very first point of contact to the delivery of goods or services – yields information that can be used to improve customer engagement further, update your offerings, and ultimately promote business growth.
By tracking, recording, and analyzing data, you can improve all business aspects that affect your bottom line. And while data analytics is far from new, it has undergone plenty of improvement over the years.
With strategic use of big data and advanced analytics, you can:
- gain a better understanding of the customer journey, including bottlenecks and bounce triggers;
- get insight on the company’s most valuable customers and those at risk of churning;
- have a method to forecast consumer behavior to improve your relationships with existing patrons and break into new markets; and
- personalize the customer experience to convert casual shoppers into loyal brand advocates.
Engage Customers with Technology
Technology has changed how customer engagement works.
By implementing the innovations listed here, your company will not only see happier customers but also experience business growth like never before.