A special guest post from Sophia Young.

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There is absolutely no contesting the importance of customers for a business. No matter how fantastic your product or service is, you essentially have no business without customers buying and using what your business offers. That is why businesses need to focus on their customer engagement strategy and see how they can use technology to improve it. 

What is Customer Engagement, and Why is It Important?

Customer engagement is the ongoing cultivation of the client-business relationship that goes beyond the sale. Building your relationship with your customers allows you to connect with them. By getting to know your customers, you better understand their needs, their wants, and how you can best solve problems for them. 

When creating customer engagement, there is two-way communication between the customer and the business, often online, but it can also be achieved through traditional communication channels. The keyword for customer engagement is “interaction.” This intentional interaction the business prompts with the customer at every point of the customer’s journey can have lasting positive effects on the company. 

You may observe some overlap between customer engagement, satisfaction, and experience. However, these three are distinct concepts from each other. Customer engagement is the customer’s perception of your business based on everything they see, hear, or learn about your company. Customer Satisfaction is how the consumer likes or dislikes your products or service. Customer experience is self-explanatory, the customer’s impression of the business and their buyer’s journey. 

Customer engagement is vital because it affects the company’s big-picture goals. It improves customer relationships, boosts customer loyalty and retention, and helps open new sales opportunities. Consistent engagement can lead to a better understanding of the customers’ purchase cycles so you can better anticipate and create more sales opportunities that sync with these cycles. 

How to Use Technology for Customer Engagement? 

1. Gather customer insight and start from there

Customer data can come from many sources, and it can get overwhelming. The trick is to know what you need. Pick a goal or an area of your business you want to learn more about from a customer’s perspective. From there, think of the relevant information you can gather from your current database and what you need to go out and retrieve. 

Many Customer Success Manager tools have features to gather and filter out irrelevant data so you can focus on the information you need. They can even provide summaries to make gathering insight much easier. 

2. Using messaging platforms and newsletters

 The best way to affect your customer’s perception of your business is to reach out to them. You can do this via SMS, Facebook Messenger, iMessages, Whatsapp, and other relevant messaging platforms. You can also send out emails and newsletters. 

If you have gathered the right data, you can also make the smart decision to be strategic with how you use certain messaging platforms. That way, you can reach out to the customers using the platform they prefer. This makes you look more professional and intentional with your engagement rather than giving the impression of spamming the customer.

Messaging platforms and newsletters are the perfect vehicle for any news, promotional offers, and programs you would want your customers to be in the know of.  This is because it directly targets the customer, actively seeking them out to interact with the message and your business. In an Internet Retailers survey, 83% of customers open SMS messages within 90 seconds. This makes messaging customers a very direct and personal channel of communication. 

3. Optimizing social media 

Social media is a very dynamic tool for reaching out to your desired audience. Plenty of people use social media to subscribe to their favorite brands. 

You can use social media post schedulers and trackers to ensure that any relevant business news and updates get posted on the internet to keep the customers up to date with your business, like when you’re producing a virtual event or hosting seasonal sales. 

While messaging platforms and newsletters are like throwing out a fishing line to each customer, social media posts are like big fishing nets. Using social media allows businesses to have a wider reach which can improve customer perception, but it does lack the personal touch of direct messages. Still, each method serves its purpose, and when executed right, both can produce incredible results. 

4. Creating a more holistic and unified approach when talking to customers

At whatever point you and your customer interact, the goal is to make life easier for the customer. Customer Relationship Management software can help businesses keep track of their communication, interactions, and customer relationships. 

A CRM tool can make it easy to keep tabs on a customer’s interactions with the business. This allows companies to be intentional with their communication, tailoring it to where the customer is in their buying journey. Using a CRM tool to log in all previous interactions you have with a customer also makes it convenient for your customers. If their current inquiries or concerns are similar to previous interactions logged, you can finetune your assistance to handle their problems better. 

Why Use Technology for Improved Customer Engagement?

Incorporating technology into your business processes can be invaluable to improving your business. Technology can lend a very efficient helping hand, from recipe management to customer engagement.  With plenty of customer engagement happening in cyberspace, it’s only apt to use technology to meet your customer’s needs and even deliver beyond their expectations. 

Building customer engagement with technology can mean more personalized interactions by gathering relevant customer data. It can also help simplify and automate processes to help your team work smarter and faster. This allows the team to use more of their time and resources to create more holistic customer interactions and experiences, boosting customer satisfaction. As you can see, it’s all interconnected. 

With the help of technology, you can effectively strategize, execute, maintain, and improve your customers’ perception of the business.