7 Strategies for Better Customer Engagement

These days there are so many platforms that you can use to communicate with customers. The phone remains the dominant way that many customers will want to communicate with you, but increasingly there is a suite of digital media platforms that customers would rather use. From social media and email to the metaverse, which research firms suggest people will spend more and more time in, customers are increasingly looking to communicate with companies on their own terms.

Why is this important? Because it’s critical that, regardless of how a customer wants to communicate with you, the modern company 1) facilitates that communication and 2) ensures that the communication is of equal quality across all platforms. Taking three weeks to respond to an email or hiding away from social media is going to do your company more harm than good, even if you have a great phone system ready to go.

Here are some ways that you can ensure that across all touchpoints, customers will have an excellent experience in communicating with your business.

1. Make sure you’ve got a good Internet connection. Whether it’s video conferencing, working through chat bots, or otherwise interacting online, the first thing that you’ve got to make sure you get right is the Internet connection, so that the customer can enjoy a smooth, seamless and responsive interaction with you. Dropped or poor quality video and slow response times are going to leave the customer egative perception of your business.

2. If you’re going to use automation, make sure you get it right – test, test, and test some more. Many organisations are now using automation in an effort to manage the volume of calls and contacts that come in. On one level, this makes a lot of sense – most people have fairly standard reasons to contact a company, and by automating the first response to address those challenges, the company can free up their staff to spend more time addressing the needs of people with more complex problems. However, 83 per cent of consumers said they would stop using a company if they had a poor experience with an automated system. So don’t set-and-forget. Keep testing the systems internally to make sure that the all-important “first impressions” are positive ones.

3. Train your people. Most contact centres rely heavily on employees working off scripts, which often creates a situation where the customer doesn’t feel like their specific needs are being met, and the call needs to be escalated. In the worst case scenarios it’s little better than bad automation.

You would be far better off if you trained your staff to move away from the scripts as much as possible and have a more natural conversation with customers. This will likely mean that they need training on the products and services that your company sells, as well as a deeper level of training on customer service and effective interactions. Essentially, the better trained your forward-facing stuff, the better the communications outcomes.

4. Use social media to have a genuine conversation. Another common mistake that many brands make is to use social media purely for promotional purposes. If the extent of your Twitter and Facebook engagement is to share deals and specials, your community will not be that engaged or find that much benefit from following you. The most successful brands on social media are those that take the time to have genuine conversations and interactions with other users on social media, and establish a “personality.” The interactions don’t even necessarily need to be related to your business!

5. Collaborate with other companies! Another way to deepen your communication with consumers is to partner with other companies on projects and initiatives. For your current customers it will be a chance to see your company in another light. It also gives you a chance to reach out to the customers of the other company and potentially broaden your reach. A good example of this might be to dual-host a webinar on a subject that is equally of relevance to both you and your partner company.

6. Produce a lot of content. Customers trust brands that provide them with plenty of information and are constantly visible to them. The reason that so many companies publish blogs, video content, and other similar material is because it allows the company to become a resource to their customer. The more they’re seen as a source of news, information, and guidance, the more the company’s products become appealing to them, as a trusted source of quality.

7. Personalise the interactions. Finally, one critical thing that every company should be doing is learning about their customers. This means building up profiles of what customers are interested in, what they purchase, and what their pain points are. From there, the company should aim to personalise interactions with each customer, ensuring that they’re highly targeted and relevant.

For example, a retailer might build a profile of a customer that tells them that they’re interested in technology products, but not white goods. When that customer gets a weekly deals email, the offers would be for a laptop but not a refrigerator. This ability to tailor the interactions right down to the individual user is why Amazon, in particular, has been so effective.

How to achieve better communications

None of the seven points above are technically difficult to implement, nor expensive. Small businesses are able to achieve quality communications with their customers every bit as well as the largest of enterprises – if anything, smaller businesses find this a little easier because they have a smaller pool of customers that they need to build that 1:1 relationship with.

Either way, though, the challenge is really strategic. Has your organisation got the discipline to build profiles of customers to properly personalise the interactions with you, the level of training that, across the entire staff the customer can have an even interaction, and are you active enough on social media and across your customer touch-points that you’re regularly visible? If this is a committed focus of your organisation, you will start seeing a positive response from your customers quickly.