Customer engagement explained

What is customer engagement?

In the world of business, the creation of strategies by brands or companies to aid in the pursuit of user interactions is called "customer engagement." It is a multifaceted concept that can take place across multiple channels, by various means, within a wide variety of industries. At its core, customer engagement aims for active participation and emotional connection from customers with a brand, helping foster loyalty and satisfaction. Customer engagement plays a vital role throughout the entire customer journey, from initial contact to end-of-cycle interactions.

Customer engagement requires a company to look past the idea of a transaction, service rendered, or billable time and instead create goals aimed at building meaningful, often long-term connections with customers. This can be achieved through effective and engaging communication, consistent interaction, and valued feedback between a company and its audience. In this article, we will discuss how and why customer engagement is important, its many aspects, and its potential. But first, as we continue to define the concept, let's take a look at its foundation.

Communication, without a doubt, is the most important aspect of customer engagement, and without it, dialogue and interaction cannot take place. Communication must occur throughout a business's marketing/sales model—employing channels such as social media, email, chat, events, or real-time conversations. All of these are means by which a customer can ask questions, ask for assistance, find information, and be offered benefits, rewards, or insight. Solid communication leads to trust and transparency, allowing your brand or company to set itself apart from others in the eyes of your customers. Communication is also essential for gathering feedback, the second cornerstone of customer engagement.

Simply put, feedback is the most efficient way of gathering information on integral customer perceptions and preferences. You can build a deeper understanding of your customers through surveys, reviews, social media, or person-to-person interactions. This allows you to make adjustments and improvements in the correct areas or silos. As you continue to explore the idea of customer engagement, you quickly realize that the ability to gather feedback allows you to grow alongside your customers, adapt quickly and efficiently, and achieve goals.

With all of this said it's no wonder so many companies put such an emphasis on creating and implementing a solid customer engagement strategy. It's also important to remember that the early steps of such a program can take significant initial investment and may not produce results right away—building trust takes time, and it will be worth it in the long run. 

But if that sounds discouraging, we encourage you to keep reading.

Customer engagement vs customer satisfaction and customer experience (CX)

Let’s distinguish customer engagement from two inter-related concepts: customer experience and customer satisfaction. 

Customer experience (CX) vs customer engagement

Customer experience is all customer interactions with your company at all customer journey stages. Managing customer experience is about caring for and improving customer interactions and improving their expectations at all levels.

On the other hand, customer engagement is how the customer feels about the brand, reacts to its various aspects, their level of loyalty, and how they respond to your marketing efforts. It sheds light on the customers’ choices, not just how the brand presents itself.  

Customer satisfaction vs customer engagement

Customer satisfaction is just one of the metrics used to measure customer engagement. This means that a satisfied customer can be considered engaged, but it’s not the only factor that decides whether they are engaged or not. 

The increasing demand for a higher level of client engagement is why customer support teams across businesses nowadays don’t just stop at offering service and resolution but aim to create memorable experiences for customers. Companies like Zappos and Nordstrom are classic textbook cases of businesses providing fantastic customer support to ensure deeper customer engagement and experience.

While all of the above play a part in getting customer’s attention, they are not the only aspects that determine it. After all, you can be satisfied with a product, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that you engage with them on social media or refer your friends to the brand.

Why your business should invest in customer engagement?

Businesses that invest wisely in building meaningful relationships with their consumers enjoy long-standing benefits.When leveraged well, client engagement is fruitful at all stages of a buyer’s journey leading from prospecting, acquisition, onboarding, and support. It will also lead to better retention rates in the long run.

Simply put, not engaging with customers can lead to high brand attrition. Customers don’t feel the need to stay with a company that doesn’t interest them. 

You can find the most evident instance of customer engagement and its direct impact on consumer behavior with brands that invest heavily in creating and distributing highly engaging social media and video content. This content is created not just for marketing and branding intent but with an aim to inform, educate, and entertain consumers so that there is some level of emotional involvement for consumers to feel the need to take certain actions.

Customer engagement is a valuable tool to help you elevate your brand or company beyond your current market position or above your competition. It is a factor that can be adjusted and perfected to deliver results. A service or product may be defined, but how a customer interacts with you can be adjusted and adapted to find the ideal situation, combination, or channel.

When customers can easily interact with and communicate their thoughts to a brand or company, they are more likely to continue to choose that company or brand. That means it is essential to put a system in place to have conversations, gain insight, gather feedback (customer feedback software), and make announcements or offer information. If an organization fails to do this, customers will begin to feel forgotten, unheard, or isolated. They may begin to view you negatively—no longer offering you as a recommendation, using or purchasing your service or product, or posting a bad review. It may sound low-level, but all of that adds up to have a significant impact on your bottom line.

Brands and companies that choose to put a wall between themselves and their audience do not last long in a market controlled by the consumer.

When you put an efficient and well-oiled customer engagement system or campaign into place, you can begin to harvest and process this data, in most instances directly from your audience. Customer satisfaction surveys, ratings, responses, and more give you insight into the necessary changes you need to make to your product, service, process, sales funnel, customer journey, and even your brand. Cracking the code to customer satisfaction means finding a customer engagement strategy that is scalable, practical, and repeatable.

But before you dive into that, it is important to understand the type of engagement your audience may be looking for, or, the type of engagement you and your business are realistically capable of offering.

Categories of customer engagement

Emotional

This strategic approach captures the tactics, engagements, and moments when a brand is able to build a deeper connection with their customer base. That means any time you are able to elicit positive feelings such as joy, trust, or excitement through an experience or interaction between your brand/business and your audience. Emotional engagement requires taking a step outside of metrics like features or pricing and instead tapping into customer feelings, values, and aspirations.

To excel in emotional engagement, you must understand your audience’s desires and motivations, crafting interactions that resonate with them even after the fact. For example, a clothing brand may evoke a sense of empowerment or confidence in its customers through inclusive marketing campaigns or personalized shopping experiences. Emotional engagement leads to strong feelings of loyalty and advocacy, which can produce long-lasting relationships and repeat business.

Behavioral 

For this approach, the key principles are actions and responses. This includes purchases, referrals, social media engagement, and online interactions. Behavioral engagement focuses on understanding and influencing customer behaviors to produce certain results, like increasing sales or driving web traffic. You’ll need to leverage data analytics and customer insights to track and analyze behavioral patterns, identifying opportunities for action or response in order to foster engagement. By influencing your audience's path of behavior, you can often ensure they move along their customer journey, increasing engagement levels and overall loyalty.

Cognitive

A customer's mental processes and perceptions regarding a brand, business, or service are just as important as their emotional or behavioral approach. Understanding how a customer thinks, perceives, and processes information regarding products, values, and offerings can be very useful. Cognitive engagement takes into account brand awareness, brand image, and brand perception to build a profile of your audience's thoughts about your business or industry. 

From here, you can begin shaping customer perceptions by making adjustments to messaging, marketing, and overall positioning—adjusting how you may relate to the public, to other businesses, or to a trending topic. For instance, a technology company may choose to market themselves as innovative or cutting-edge in order to influence a customer whose interests are only in the latest and greatest offerings. By creating a positive cognitive experience for a customer, you can gain a competitive advantage for winning over potential consumers.

Best practices for engaging with customers

Active listening

• Be present, always paying attention to the customer, working to never interrupt while they express concerns or feedback.

• Be empathetic, with the goal of understanding the underlying emotions and motivations behind the customer issues.

• Ask clarifying questions to ensure a thorough understanding of the customer's needs, preferences, and expectations.

• Paraphrase or summarize the customer's feedback to confirm and show that their input is valued.

Proactive communication

• Anticipate customer needs and concerns before they arise, proactively reach out with relevant information or assistance when possible.

• Provide updates or notifications to keep customers informed about changes, shifts, or events that may impact their experience.

• Offer support or guidance to help customers navigate challenging situations, demonstrating a commitment to their success.

• Use the channels at your disposal such as email, SMS, or live chat to directly contact customers and offer personalized assistance.

A consistent experience

• Work from established standards, processes, and guidelines to deliver a consistent experience across all touchpoints or channels.

• Establish unified company policies, values, and customer service protocols to ensure consistency from interactions to interaction.

• Employ automation when appropriate to streamline processes and help create the aforementioned consistency in baseline customer engagement.

• Monitor and measure performance data regularly to identify areas where improvement is requested or needed.

“Meet the customer where they are”

• Establish multiple channels for customer engagement, including phone, email, chat, social media, or in-person interactions.

• Offer touchpoints for desktop and mobile to ensure accessibility and convenience is never limited.

• Provide self-service options and resources for those who prefer to find answers or solutions on their own.

• Monitor customer engagement across channels and adjust strategies to prioritize where customers are most active or responsive.

How to measure customer engagement?

We have covered a lot when it comes to customer engagement so far, including its definition, its role in a customer's journey or a businesses' success, and the many approaches you can take to begin implementing it. Now, we’ll begin to discuss what comes next once you’ve begun implementing some level of customer engagement strategy—the metrics you should assign value to and track in order to continue to scale your efforts and find success.

Traffic

This primary metric, which may include visits, page views, and timestamps, is as valuable as it is versatile, by tracking website or app traffic you can gauge the level of interest and interaction your customers are having with your business or brand online.

User activity

It’s essential to collect data on user actions such as clicks, downloads, sign-ups, or purchases, to best understand their level of direct, sales cycle, engagement.

Growth

Understanding and keeping record of the increase in the number of customers, subscribers, or followers you have, across platforms is the simplest way to track growth and interaction rates.

Social media actions

Within the same metric of growth, is social media specific engagements such as likes, shares, comments, and mentions which again illustrate interaction rates, as well as positioning.

Feature use

Understanding and tracking the usage of specific features or functions within your products or services helps you establish which are the most valued or most actively utilized.

Opt-outs

Positive data is critical, but so is the other end of the chart — opt-out or unsubscribe rates from any or all active channels show your customer or audience's current level of interest.

Customer sentiment

Data from customer feedback, reviews, or surveys is essential to understand the overall view of your company or the feeling your customers have towards it.

Click-Through-Rates

Tracking the click-through rate (CTR) of campaigns, emails, efforts or advertisements helps you have a realistic understanding of what is or isn’t working when it comes to engagement tactics, strategies, and messaging.

Find the best customer engagement platforms

A customer engagement platform is any application that is used to communicate with customers, track and analyze customer behaviour, enhance user experience, and improve brand loyalty.

A wide category of tools come under customer engagement platforms, some of which are:

Help desks: Software used by customer facing teams to manage customer queries and requests.

Chatbots and in-app messaging tools: Tools used to proactively connect with customers at specific points and chat with them in real-time.

Feedback and survey apps: Software to create customer surveys and other feedback systems to collect, analyze, and respond to feedback.

Social media management software: Platforms used to create, schedule, and post content as well as manage comments on social media platforms. 

Email marketing software: Applications to create and manage email campaigns.

A/B Testing software: Tools that let you test multiple versions of a product, website page, or experience to determine what works best for users or brings the most conversions.

Loyalty platforms: Tools that are for creating and managing customer loyalty programs.

Tools that come under this category have a wide range of functionalities including personalized communication, automated campaigns, social media integration, feedback collection, analytics, and segmentation.

Some tools come with multiple customer engagement features. For example, Freshworks comes with customer support, conversational engagement, and marketing automation features — the power of three different tools combined!

How to implement a customer engagement strategy

We’ve discussed the what, the where, the why, and now it’s time to take a closer look at the how when it comes to customer engagement. Depending on the level of investment you are willing to make, both financially and from a time and resources perspective, this can be as long or short of a process as you feel is necessary to begin efforts or elevate those already in use.

Below is a quick reference guide for customer engagement offering a high-level view of the order of essential steps, the efforts needed, and the outcomes expected:

Identify target customers

Before you can engage, you have to know who you are going after, or maybe even who is out there in general. You’ll need to not only identify your audience as a whole, but the columns within it that can be specifically spoken to, catered to, or have needs and wants you can answer. These may come in the form of personas, demographics, or a specific spend rate that you are looking for.

Research counts here. Ensure you have taken a good look at your company, services, and offerings and that you’ve built what you feel is an accurate profile of your ideal customer. Once you have this, you’ll be able to see what benefits customer engagement can provide them, how you can achieve them, and how you can track results.

Determine key metrics

Speaking of results, you’ll want to establish key performance indicators (KPIs) before any tactics are put in place. How will you measure success? By the number of interactions? It’s not that simple, as it may include CTR, page views, shared links, or simply likes on social media. That opens another door: what channels are you considering? What opportunities do they present for engagement?

How will you measure each metric? How will you track them, organize them, and where will you store it all? These questions are important to answer before the process begins so you can easily see if the right ideas or efforts are in the right place. You don’t want to leave valuable data on the table—so, identify what metrics are most important to you at the beginning and adjust as you develop a strategy.

Optimize strategy

You may already have a game plan in mind, but as you’ve worked your way down this list, it is important to stay flexible and adapt that strategy to best support your target customers, key metrics, and overall goals. Maybe you want to raise brand awareness, convert leads, or change your reputation in the eyes of the public. These all require specific tactics and different approaches to achieve.

Carefully evaluate your current position, your level of customer satisfaction, and needs—then begin to identify opportunities where customer interactions can take place. Align them across channels, evolve messaging, and put in place tools to help as you go.

Encourage interaction and gather feedback

Once the wheels are turning, and your customers are actively engaging with your business, brand, or company, you’ll want to gather, sort, and implement feedback. Whether feedback was part of your original strategy or not, it will eventually come in and it should not be ignored. You’ll have access to greater and greater insights as your customer engagement efforts grow, and with each step forward, you can put more and more of that data to work for your overall benefit.

Whether that is changes to products and services, eliminating features or functions, or even doubling down on success—these analytics give you support for each decision. A healthy collection of feedback is an asset that companies can leverage again and again in a wide variety of ways.

Customer engagement trends in 2024

Personalization is key

Today, through third-party services or even AI, personalization is not only possible but in demand. Customers appreciate small touches that make interactions more conversational, human, or overall just warmer. This can take place through email, social, chat, or SMS.

Omnichannel usage

When it comes to engagement, as we’ve mentioned previously above, consistency is key. Customers love to see continuity, especially when it comes to multiple channels deploying the same features, messaging, capabilities, or offerings in tandem.

Prioritize the customer

There is no sale without the consumer, and to draw them in in 2024, their needs and preferences must come first. That means designing customer engagement strategies that quickly deliver answers, resolutions, or results. Information must be easily accessible, in a variety of ways, and each interaction with a business should strive to be pleasant and positive.

Data collection is key

Change begins with data. Customers expect brands and businesses to not only grow but adapt as they become successful. This means putting analytics to work to quickly adjust or change systems, strategies, or messaging that isn’t working—and to fuel that, you’ll need to be collecting metrics whenever possible.

Conclusion

We’ve discussed what customer engagement is, what it can be, what others are doing — including trends in 2024. So, what’s your next step? Well, it’s a valuable exercise to look at what options exist in terms of helpful software. One option you might consider, which offers a free trial to see if it works for you, is Freshdesk.

A comprehensive platform designed to elevate customer engagement, Freshdesk integrates powerful tools and features to empower your business, organization, or brand to create unrivaled customer engagement across multiple channels. With its user-friendly interface, Freshworks helps streamline low-level tasks, automate responses where possible, and decrease resolution times.

Additionally, Freshdesk leverages AI-driven capabilities to increase productivity and effectiveness. Ultimately, by fostering seamless collaboration, empowering agents with the right tools, and putting data-driven insights to work, Freshdesk elevates businesses to create connections and deliver exceptional experiences — and did we mention it has a free trial?