Engaging customers, keeping them informed, and adding new prospects is crucial to every business’s growth. By staying in touch with customers and keeping communication lines open, firms ensure better customer experiences, higher sales, and easier conversion of prospects.
For a business, understanding the technicalities behind better customer engagement could pave an easy way towards success. Since customer relations is an essential part of each business model’s architecture, a piece of dedicated machinery for communication and promotion is essential to retain and expand market share.
Engagement strategies for businesses have undergone a sea change in the past few years. Changing customer expectations, increased competition, and ever-evolving channels of communications have forced businesses to consider personalized and contextual engagement strategies.
Let’s find out what Customer Engagement entails in recent times.
Customer Engagement in 2021
Today, 54% of the customers think that companies need to transform how they engage, and 64% of consumers expect tailor-made engagements based on previous interactions. Thus, engaging customers and gaining their full attention requires a lot more than just posting on the internet.
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Therefore, modern customer engagement involves communication via humans, artificial intelligence, automation, and/or sensors deployed across multiple digital channels for optimal involvement.
Today, customer engagement is not limited to just sales, support, or services. Instead, the process involves predicting customers’ brand expectations and staying connected with them to boost long-lasting relationships, resulting in a boost of your business.
Thus, firms create a piece of dedicated machinery known as a Customer Engagement Hub to manage the above factors and improve consumer involvement. Customer Engagement Hub factors in consumer demographics, proper planning, communication lines, market conditions, etc. to improve brand perception.
What is Customer Engagement Hub?
A Customer Engagement Hub (CEH) is a construction of a framework that dynamically connects multiple customers on a single platform to engage customers exponentially and effortlessly with each other about a brand through internal or external stimuli.
With the rise of digitization, customers have become more impulsive and impatient in their buying behavior. Amid changing customer demands, businesses are converting their entire communication system into a sophisticated customer engagement hub to draw in consumers.
Businesses need to use the right mix of strategies, channels, content, and promotional platforms to reap maximum benefits from their customer engagement machinery. Thus, setting up a CEH requires patience. However, once set up, businesses can gain tremendously.
Let’s discover what businesses gain from using dedicated customer engagement machinery:
Advantages of a Customer Engagement Hub
1. Makes you stay ahead of the competition
As the technologies are revamping daily, the expectations of the customers are continually evolving. Thus, with the adoption of fresh strategies, the probability of standing out in the market becomes really high.
Not only does a CEH ensure longevity by using the latest channels and systems for better engagement, but it also ensures that consumers connect with the brand through its philosophy.
Connecting with customers via multiple media platforms makes you more relevant, dynamic, and acceptable to the customers as compared to your competitors.
2. Attract both new and existing customers
With highly personalized contact based on their buying history and preferences, you can entice customers about your brand for a reasonable period.
Creating marketing campaigns on different platforms panning across diverse regions will help you reach out to both your loyal and potential customers, maximizing the organization’s revenue generation.
3. Get feedback openly from the customers
Bill Gates famously said, “Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning.”
The above quote describes how important customer feedback is in helping your business grow. Evaluating feedback on your services or products from the customers will help you know how to improve your business model dynamically.
Modern CEHs, therefore, not only take care of marketing and sales but have also created feedback channels (e.g., chatbots, quizzes, ratings, etc.) with the help of customer feedback software to interact directly with consumers and know what improvements can be made to your services or products.
4. Facilitate brand loyalty
Retaining existing customers is much easier and more economical than finding new ones. If your brand has set up a genuine customer base, then it is evident that your product has many admirers. However, developing such a customer base further can indeed seem challenging.
Hence, your engagement system needs a protocol for communication with customers to ensure that they are informed, involved and invested in your brand for the long haul.
A CEH keeps track of your customers, competitors, and client communication to ensure brand loyalty and a superior connection with your user base.
How To Create a Customer Engagement Hub
Now that you know the advantages of an organizational CEH, it is time to set one up. To create an effective CEH, you must understand user psychology and learn to mold it.
With the help of analytical tools present on every social engagement platform, it has become relatively easier for brands to evaluate consumers’ psychological side. This helps in filtering, labeling, and segregating your customers using behavioral insights. You just need to analyze where they can be found, what their needs are, and what kind of content they react best to.
Thus, creating a CEH for your business is easy if you understand the fundamentals that you need to keep in mind while building your brand value online. So, let’s discover the five fundamental steps needed to create an effective CEH:
1. Build trust and positivity
Customers’ purchase decision depends upon emotional rather than a logical thought process. The simple mantra for better engagement is to therefore create your business brand with a positive feel to it.
Positive and progressive communication will allow the customers to trust your brand through a smooth communication flow.
2. Create original, credible, and relatable content
Customers do not just buy a product anymore; they invest in a lifestyle or value which they want to relate to. Your customers no longer buy products that they need; instead, they purchase products that they ‘want.’ Hence, you must set your brand values that are authentic, original, and assertive.
As a brand, your content must create a bond between the customers lining up the importance of your brand to create an automatic drive strategy for you.
The alignment of the values in your content should be based on demographics and must be relatable, fulfilling the principle of ‘social identity.’
3. Introduce effortless communication
Customer interaction should be through channels convenient for your prospects, and communication should neither be too frequent nor too little as both can prevent your customers from engaging with your brand.
For the same reason, most brands connect to their audience through social media management channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, etc., to be able to reach out to customers emotionally. However, all updates, alerts, and notifications are usually reserved for emails and personal messaging.
Today, the whole process has been automated and streamlined with modern tools and programming to help brands get maximum visibility and connect easily with their users.
4. Deliver brand information in a subtle way
Today, people have a limited time on their hands and a much lower attention span than, say, a decade ago. Hence, there is a necessity of evaluating fluency and accuracy while sending out a specific message of your brand. Content plays a tricky part here.
Types of content that are clear to process and easy to remember are therefore preferred and considered reliable. It is best to choose the best channel and communicate straightforwardly with customers for better engagement.
For instance, Twitter lets you reach out to your customers using a few words only, while Instagram and YouTube will enable you to give a visual with your words about your brand to help your customers process your products accordingly.
5. Set up Dopamine loops in customers
Purchases by customers these days are more emotionally driven and hence mood swings play a critical role in the buying process. ‘Dopamine’ is a chemical in the human brain that is associated with a feeling of being rewarded. This chemical can trigger and act as a catalyst to decide for people to buy products.
This means you need to work on your customers’ tipping point on why and when they would choose to buy your products or services. Once you figure out what gets them going, your customers will fall into a dopamine loop and keep coming to you for more.
Boosting Customer Numbers with Customer Engagement Strategies
So you have learned how to set up a basic customer engagement hub, but as long as it doesn’t boost engagement numbers, it is of no use. Thus a proper strategy needs to be created for better user engagement where the goals and customer-facing roles are clearly defined in the organization.
Each brand is unique and has a distinct persona or image associated with it. Depending on the brand image, it is imperative to create strategies based on customer tastes and competitor efforts to gain maximum numbers.
A business must use the following strategies to ensure clear, curated, and robust branding that garners superior customer engagement:
1. Create a unique brand voice
Customers seek a brand with a distinct reputation and usually avoid using ‘copies’ of other brands. So, it is wise to differentiate your products and services from the competitors by giving a unique brand voice to each of them.
With the use of a distinct brand voice, your brand can simply present itself in a more relatable and memorable manner to the customers. This way, as a leading marketer of the organization or as the CEO, you can establish yourself as a thought-commander of the industry.
2. Share the brand voice
A brand can become more powerful when it has a personality to associate with people. You can start building on the character of a brand on social media, just as you would do with your personal profile.
You can then generate and share content that would align with the company’s brand values and also share messages to match the trends to get visible.
3. Personalize the customer experience
Nowadays, you can use specific analytics software that personalizes recommendations based on a customer’s search history or past purchases. Making a customer feel that you remember their preferences is a great way to ensure loyalty.
You can also customize the experience of customers and gain valuable feedback to help you serve them better. For example, asking them to take a short quiz before opening your app or website, taking customer feedback and ratings, etc. helps understand customers and personalize communication.
Wrapping it Up
Having a dedicated communication management system is an excellent way to run successful marketing campaigns and improve brand value. With a Customer Engagement Hub the journey of screening, analyzing, and reporting is much faster and easier, making sure that both promotion and conversation are a breeze.
With a bit of research, effort, and analysis, one can easily set up a customer relationship management system that maximizes returns for the business and engages new and existing customers simultaneously.
Is there any CEH Component that we missed out on? Let us know in the comments.
Chirantan Patel is the Product Manager at Softwaresuggest & Callhippo, an Inc. 275 company that researches and analyzes software to educate, advise, and connect buyers and sellers of business technology.
