Why Customer Engagement Matters

What does it take to get a customer from being interested in your brand to investing in your product or services? Well, it’s a journey of a dozen little steps. 

First, they need to discover and understand your brand, then they need to be interested in what your brand has to offer. They must have a specific need your brand can meet, and they need an internal or external incentive to make a purchase. And – perhaps most importantly – they need to know that you’re invested in helping them along the way.

In 2022, how your brand engages with the customer before, during, and after a purchase is just as important as getting them to the check out page. Customer engagement, in fact, might just be the thing that gets them there. 

What is customer engagement? 

Customer engagement is the process of strengthening a relationship between a prospective customer and your business throughout the customer journey or sales funnel. The end goal of customer engagement is to build trust with your prospective customer, convince them to make a purchase, and ultimately, to become a loyal, repeat customer.  

What does customer engagement look like?

“Engagement” is essentially when a customer actively chooses to interact with your brand or a representative of your company. When a customer is engaging with your brand on social media, when they’re leaving reviews or feedback about their experience, or when they’re emailing, calling, or using chat functions to ask questions and learn more about your product or services, that shows that they’re engaged with your brand and have a willingness and interest in learning more about your products or services. Engagement leads to conversion, so it’s critical that you do everything you can to foster customer engagement.

Why does customer engagement matter? 

Customer engagement matters for a number of reasons and has a lot of mutual benefits for your business and the customer. The biggest benefit is that actively engaging with prospects helps them feel more connected to and loyal to your brand, leading to additional sales. The second major benefit is that engagement provides you with richer customer insights so you’re better able to advertise to and serve your audience.  

Customer engagement increases connection

A relationship to a business is, in many ways, very similar to a relationship with another person. If you don’t feel heard or valued by a business, you won’t want to maintain that relationship. Similarly, the best way for a business to improve its relationship with a customer is to help them feel heard throughout the entire customer journey. Customer engagement is how your brand can do that. 

Customer engagement leads to better data

Let’s continue this idea of B2C relationships being similar to human relationships. The longer you stay engaged in a conversation with another person or develop a relationship with another person, the more you’ll learn about them: their interests, their goals, their likes and their dislikes. 

With the right virtual customer service software, every interaction you have with a customer can be analyzed and broken into actionable data that will help you understand their personal needs better and the customer experience with your business as a whole. Those insights can inform your marketing decisions, your content or product development, your customer care experience, and your sales and shipping processes. It can also provide you with the history you need to personalize your customer experience for each individual so they feel especially taken care of. 

How can customer engagement help my business?  

The more engaged a customer is with your business, the more likely they are to work with or purchase from you in the future. Ultimately, that means boosted sales and continued growth. 

Until you know your customer and understand what they’re looking for, you can’t do a great job of serving them. Customer engagement gets you the insights that you need to understand things like why a customer made the purchase they did, what’s stopping them from making a purchase, what things they like and dislike about your product, and more. 

That kind of knowledge is incredibly valuable, and it directly informs every aspect of your strategy and the way you do business, thus improving your ecommerce customer experience, streamlining your processes, and increasing sales.

How can I improve my customer engagement? 

You may choose to engage your customer in many different ways, depending on what stage of the buying funnel they’re at. You might post relevant and funny memes on your social media channels so that customers at the top of the funnel can be reminded of your brand and have an enjoyable experience with your brand before they ever make a purchase. You may reach out to customers at the bottom of the funnel who have purchased your product and posted about their experience to reshare their photos or simply show your appreciation. 

When your website incorporates automated customer service tools that provide customers with accessible support at every point of their journey, when your sales representatives communicate with your customer over the phone or chat, or when your social media team interacts with customers via Twitter or other community management platforms, these too build customer engagement.

To improve your customer engagement, it’s important to identify every major step in your customer’s journey. Once you’ve done that, you can incorporate touch points that will drive their movement across the entire funnel and reach them at any point in the process, providing them with helpful information, personalized service, and consistent support. 

An important thing you’ll want to think about is your target demographic and the type of services you’re providing. If you cater to a younger crowd, for example, there may be lots of value for you in putting your brand on TikTok (Duolingo, Gymshark, and Chipotle are examples of brands who successfully use TikTok to engage with customers).

If you sell a product that photographs well, you might incorporate more visual and mixed media content to show it off on apps like Instagram or Pinterest.  

Another critical touchpoint you can include to increase customer engagement is by providing an automated chat feature at every point of the journey on your B2C or B2B website so that customers can always be in contact with someone and have their questions answered. 

It’s important to note that customers may not want to engage with your brand at every point in their experience. The idea is not to force them to engage but to provide them with resources that allow them to engage at any point when they might need or want to so that they feel confident your brand supports them. 

Improved customer engagement starts with the right customer engagement platform. Learn how UJET’s award-winning CCaaS Platform Virtual Agent can help you grow your business.