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Digital customer engagement is all the ways a customer interacts with your organisation and how you interact with them. Interactions include each digital touchpoint such as email, social media, chat, and your website. Each experience comes together and can either build or harm your relationship with your customers.
What happens when your customer has a negative experience? According to the 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report, 80% of customers say they’d switch to a competitor after more than one bad experience.
So how do you prevent this from happening and provide an excellent experience for your customers?
Customers want to be treated as individuals—they expect companies to know their preferences and purchase history. To do that, companies need to be able to harness their customer interactions across platforms and turn that data into actionable insights.
If a customer thinks it’s in their best interest (i.e., they’ll have a better experience in dealing with you), they’re happy for you to keep track of their data. Better digital customer engagement leads to more customer data and better customer experiences, which can lead to higher profits.
How can you improve digital customer engagement?
1. Start with understanding the customer journey
To understand how to improve the digital experience for your customer, you first have to understand who your customers are and their behaviours. The best way to do that is to map the customer journey for your different buyer personas—look at how they interact with your organisation, the touchpoints they go through, and how they would feel at each interaction.
2. Focus on self-service
As businesses or organisations become more tech-savvy, so do their customers. Increasingly, customers want to manage things themselves and look to use self-service options where possible. Things that can help improve this area include search functionality, FAQ, Knowledge Base, and a chatbot.
3. Omnichannel customer interactions
Customers want to be able to contact you on their terms. Omnichannel doesn’t just mean a wider selection of avenues for customers to reach you (such as email, phone, chat, social media)—it’s also important that these channels are integrated and tracked across your contact centre solution so you can provide your customers with a unified buying and support experience. There’s nothing worse than a customer having to repeat their enquiry and provide the same information every time they contact you.
Good customer experiences drive loyalty, and bad ones devastate it.
As competition increases amongst ever-present economic uncertainty, one thing is certain: customer loyalty can help drive the success of your business.
Loyal customers will continue to do business with you while referring others to your company—and when the going gets tough, they’ll give you the benefit of the doubt.
From simple self-service FAQs to conversational AI and proactive support, investing in digital engagement will position your business for success now and for years to come.
