Customer engagement is emerging as one of the most important aspects of business today. Businesses that improve their customer engagement are able to successfully create customer loyalty. This is a process that boosts sales and creates longer and more profitable business relationships. But while some tenets of customer engagement management may seem simple, a truly successful customer engagement management initiative requires careful analysis of each department in your business, not just from customer relations or sales.

This blog investigates customer engagement management, explains what it is, why it is important, and how you can use it in your business, plus we show real examples of successful customer engagement management that you can use as inspiration in your business. Let’s get started!

What Is Customer Engagement Management?

Customer engagement management is a process that drives increased customer value through enhanced engagement with a business and with its products and services. Customer engagement management can be used to increase conversions, lengthen customer retention, and boost customer satisfaction. Doing these things successfully will improve a business’ reputation and, by extension, its revenue. It can increase the referrals a company gets, help to pick up slack during market downturns and make it much easier and simpler when it comes time to advertise, initiate campaigns, or introduce new products and services.

 Of course, a term as huge as customer engagement does not have one simple definition, but all efforts at developing and sustaining customer engagement will have roughly the same results. Customer engagement can be just the practices that a business employs to keep users coming back – whether that is to buy more products or to get more information. It can also be expressed as an emotional connection between a brand and the customers, one that can stand for the customer’s emotional investment in a company and what it sells.

With customer engagement management tools like those from Airkit, a business can drive revenue, solve any issues that customers may have, gain insight to determine which customers are ready to buy what, which ones may be ready to switch to a competitor and promote the business' unique selling points so they can more easily compete in crowded markets.

 Customer engagement management can be put to use as part of a broader conversion to digital operations and tie together functional but disparate digital management solutions such as CRM, engagement scores, churn rates, customer contact databases, and many others.

Why Is Customer Engagement Management Important?

Customer engagement management is important for businesses looking to successfully navigate crowded markets in the digital era. Engagement is now seen as a two-way business relationship between the seller and the customer, one where a brand is developed over a variety of online channels.

 As noted by Gartner, customer engagement and overall customer experience drive more than two-thirds of customer loyalty, which is more than brand and price combined. Furthermore, reports Epsilon, a staggering 80 percent of consumers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences.

 While customer engagement can be a term whose definition varies slightly depending on what the end goal is, there are a handful of rather universal dimensions to the concept. They include:

• Context: Where do these interactions take place? Are they occurring before a purchase? After a purchase? Are they nurture campaigns? Are they a part of a drip campaign? Are they occurring when there is a sale, an announcement, or a promotion or special event?
• Amount: How much interaction takes place, and how can that be expressed over the life cycle of the customer? Do customers come to you for a specific need and then move on? Or do customers engage with the business and its products and services multiple times?
• Proactiveness: Simply put, does the customer go to the business, or does the business go to the customer? The answer to that question will dictate how customer engagement management takes place and on what platforms.
• Longevity: In what length of time does the interaction take place? Is the business engaged in a single purchase type of transaction? Does the customer need to be nurtured before they become a warm lead? Or does the customer visit once and become a customer for life?
• Repetition and frequency: Are the interactions frequent? Or are there large spaces in between each interaction? Does the business send an email to the customer every day at 6 a.m.? Or just when there is a sale? Or only when a new product is launched?

 Real Examples of Customer Engagement Management

Are you ready to see some real examples of customer engagement management? Here are some examples that show how the practice is put into use.

• Customer engagement campaigns take place across a variety of channels, from Facebook to pay-per-click ads to email campaigns.
• Engagement of customers on social media channels, with full monitoring of all brand mentions and fast responses when and where appropriate.
• Converting a website into a lead generation channel through chatbots or texting to engage with customers in real-time as they land on a website.
• Providing warm leads with personalized engagement tools that can fix problems, give quick answers, and offer live guidance to sign up for services or complete a sale.
• Collecting customer feedback and using that intelligence to inform future ad campaigns.

 Summary and Key Takeaways

Customer engagement management is a key tool for businesses looking to deepen their relationships with customers. Customers today are empowered and usually have a lot of choices when it comes to buying. Meeting them on their terms is one of the best ways to drive engagement and your bottom line.

 To learn more about how to enact customer engagement management tools, and to learn about how tools like those from Airkit work, contact Symplicity.