have you thought of the Best Practices for Customer Engagement, it is very important and vital for any organizatins growth. Engaged customers represent 23% premium for share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth. – (Gallup State of the American Consumer 2014)
That means customer engagement strategy should be the prime focus for every business. Not only does it impact customer retention but customer acquisition too.
In view of this fact, it is essential that the customer engagement strategy should cover two things:
• Keeping a potential customer engaged throughout the entire sales process
• Keeping a present customer engaged enough to choose the same brand when they are looking to buy again
In order to build customer engagement that extend and last, you need to understand its new definition and put it into action. The below-mentioned ways help you just do that:
1. Make it social
The past saw company-customer interactions happening in siloed, closed-off settings where customers mainly interacted with the company through email/call. The communication was private and issue often undisclosed.
But now, we’ve come to an “always-on” world where social has taken the place of email and call. Whether it is buying a product or posting a ticket about it – customers are unabashedly using social to connect with the business anytime. As a result – from the business’s point of view marketing, sales and customer service has shifted from traditional channels to the social sphere.
And businesses who are not engaging their customers’ socially are lagging in the race. Customers are getting the feel of neglect and businesses are missing out on the opportunity to better their customer relationship.
If you do not want to suffer the same, equip yourself with a cloud CRM solution to engage with the customers through social platform. That way you will be able to provide them with better and more immediate service. Not just this, staying in the forefront of the customers’ posts will increase your chances of better customer service when the time comes to responding to a query.
2. Promote Your Customers Interests
There’s nothing like it than promoting your customers’ interests over social media platforms. If, for example, you are a vet, post content that benefits your followers. That can mean posting tips on best pet maintenance practices, posting your patients’ pictures (with their owners’ permission, of course). Even you can promote your customers’ blogs and subjects of interest (if any).
Or even better, offering special deals on products or services. However, make sure it is all genuine. Remember, pulling a hoax on your customers may generate attention, but in the long-run it can undermine your credibility. And nothing is more important in customer relationship than trust, Right?
3. Ask questions
People love sharing on social media. So encourage your customers to weigh in on topics that are relevant / interesting to them. Let’s say you may ask your fans to vote on their favorite pets or suggest a few cool joints for pet spa. All in all, the questions should engage fans and inspire them to engage with the business for greater insight.
4. Offer rewards for social sharing
Do not waste a lot of time skimming the surface of multiple channels. That will dilute the efforts and minimize the overall results. Focus your efforts on mediums where your customers are most active.
Once you zero in on the specific medium, keep harping on that. Let’s say if Twitter is where your customers are, for a specific period of time, double the reward points for customers who retweet about your product in their profile. Offer a few tempting benefits to the ten customers with the highest reward points. This will encourage your followers to promote your brand and expand your reach exponentially.
5. Make it results-driven
Engage with your customers with a specific goal in mind. Do not make the goal related to a specific area (let’s say: sales, marketing or service) but equally targeted to all three.
Tim Colley (Customer Service Keynote Speaker) comments – ‘’whether it’s product marketing, sales; or nurturing customer loyalty – the lines between them have blurred. While traditionally, customer engagement solely benefited the customer service team – today nurturing a relationship with the customers make a major impact in all arenas. That is because the responsibilities that formerly fell to the marketing and sales teams now fall into the realm of customer service too. And that is precisely what companies need to understand. They need to broaden their perception of “customer service.” and not treat it as an isolated section of the business model.’’
Once you determine what your goals are, frame the engagement strategy that makes it easy and efficient to help you get what you want.
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