It’s time we talked more about customer engagement. Entrepreneurs have, since time immemorial, talked about transactions. Customer service was something that simply should exist, by everyone doing their job as well as possible. It was not so long ago that entrepreneurs actually started to invest energy and money in restructuring their companies to improve customer service.
And now we have taken it one step further, with customer engagement.
Customer engagement is not just about the customer taking a picture of your product and posting it on Instagram. Customer engagement includes all interactions that the customer has with your company. This is when the customer chooses your item in the store due to the packaging, when the customer calls your customer service or when he or she opens one of the company’s newsletters. Social media, in turn, has made it possible for us to reach our customers, around the clock. Even if your customer service always answers the phone in less than 10 seconds but that questions and comments are never answered on social media, you need to improve your customer engagement.
So how do you get a good customer engagement? Here are three trends that have grown strong in recent times.
The conversation is more important than the transaction
Many companies would benefit greatly from understanding that long-term relationships are more important than single transactions.
It is increasingly rare for companies to invest in one large campaign per year. Instead, today it is about micro-interactions, which take place at regular intervals, over a longer period of time.
It was only when companies realized that they could reach their customers via social media that they started talking about the conversation being more important than the transaction. Instead of marketing becoming a one-way communication, the customer could now interact with the marketing. Platforms, such as Facebook, developed systems to help companies become better at finding the right target group. In this way, entrepreneurs could improve both their marketing and their customer service.
But now we have taken it a step further, now it is the Conversational Customer Engagement Software that is the new black. With these software, entrepreneurs can have continuous conversations with customers across several different channels in a simple and smooth way.
Your customers are on several platforms, so you need to think omnichannel
Where your customers are, there you should be. And very few companies have the luxury of having customers who are only in one place. Usually, companies need to think about everything, physical stores, websites, web shops, social media, phone, email and chatt.
This may sound a little overwhelming. But if the customer does not have the opportunity to contact you via the systems where he or she uses, there is a great chance that the customer chooses another company. And it’s not just about new customers, being able to handle existing customers is just as important.
There are solutions that make the omnichannel-thinking easier. Through Contact Centers, you can get all contacts into one interface. In this way, your agents can handle the cases that come in through different channels in an efficient way, where prioritization etc. becomes clear.
Learn more about Dstny’s Contact Center solution here: Contact center
It’s all about data
It’s time to stop guessing now! Many companies work in a certain way, just because they always did. Some companies work based on what they think the customer wants. But it’s not enough.
Today we can get a lot of data about our customers and in this way make data-driven decisions based on reality. In customer service and customer engagement, it’s a lot about staffing. Where and when should I have people in place to interact with the customer? It may feel like an expensive investment to start having staff answering the phone in the evening, but if that is when your customers choose to actually call, this is probably more sustainable for your company in the long run.
We at Dstny have several services that help you as an entrepreneur to gain full insight into when your customers contact you. You can either get the information in compiled reports that are sent to your email or as interactive bulletin boards that show in real time how your response groups perform.