If you’re ready to build strong, lasting relationships with customers, but you aren’t sure where to begin, it’s all about prioritizing your customers and employees in every aspect of your business.
Here are five key ways to help you create and scale your digital engagement in personal ways.
1. Be Aware of Your Customer Journey
An accurate and complete customer journey map is the basis of a successful digital engagement strategy. With this invaluable resource, you can ensure your sales and marketing teams are targeting the right content, to the right customer, at the right time.
To create a customer journey map that’s functional and relevant, you must focus on your target customer’s critical moments. Of course, not everything matters to your customer, so you must find important moments in your customer’s journey that will truly resonate with them, encouraging them to buy what you’re selling. Remember, less is more, so start small 2-3 touchpoints and iterate with time. In addition, your customers and products are constantly evolving, so you must frequently tend to them and their journey. Armed with this vital information, you can ensure that your team delivers the most relevant content to your customer base. This will help you scale your business by growing your revenue faster than your costs.
2. Work With Your Team
Happy customer service representatives result in satisfied customers. For instance, 73% of consumers fall in love with a business because of friendly customer support agents.
Customer-facing employees play a crucial role in keeping customers engaged in your products and services. Yet, many businesses forget to support and work their staff like they support their customers, hurting customer and digital engagement strategies.
So, employ one of the most forgotten digital engagement strategies: work with your team and care for them. Equip your team with adequate training and the right technology, motivate them, and reward them for positive achievements. Only once your employees are taken care of can you deliver exceptional customer experiences and build lasting relationships with your customers.
So, if you want your staff to do their best to make your customers happy, they must feel appreciated and respected. Only then will they find intrinsic motivation for doing their best and offering your customers the best service, which will make your customers feel more appreciated and respected, resulting in more sales and revenue.
3. Offer Personalized Service
Excellent customer service is no longer a luxury; it’s mandatory. To attract and keep loyal customers today and experience long-term growth and success, companies must offer customers unique and memorable experiences, including their customer support experience. Personalization is fundamental in delivering attentive customer service and can give you an advantage over your competitors in today’s crowded marketplace.
Research by Forrester shows that customers have chosen, referred brands, or paid more for brands that offer personalized service. In addition, millennials are more likely to do business with brands that provide exceptional service and are likely to spend 21% more.
So, offering personalized service can have many positive benefits, including improving customer satisfaction, loyalty, engagement, retention, and revenue. Personalization is a fundamental digital engagement strategy for your team to implement now as consumer expectations continue to change and competition remains stiff.
To deliver personalized service:
- Address each customer by their name. Customers feel more valued, and they find interactions with businesses that refer them by their name more memorable and unique. To achieve this, ensure your customer support software has customer recognition capabilities across all digital channels, so your customer support agents know who they’re talking to the moment a customer reaches out. Also, have your customer support staff use their own name when dealing with customers; whether it’s on chat or over the phone, it’s equally important. This builds a more meaningful connection between your staff and your customers.
- Offer multiple customer service channels. Some consumers prefer specific communication channels; others prefer whatever platform that’s more convenient to them when they need help. Offering your customers multiple choices when they reach out to your customer support team shows them you’re considerate enough to notice their preferences and needs. In addition, implementing various ways for customers to get in touch with you creates a sense of personalization by allowing customers to use whatever channel they prefer.
- Leverage customer data. One of the most crucial aspects of delivering personalized service is making your customers feel like you know them, their preferences, and their history with your brand. No consumer wants to repeat themselves or feel like they’re just a ticket number to your company; consumers want to feel like your brand cares about them personally. To achieve this and make your customers feel appreciated, you must leverage the data you have on your customers while helping them. So, you must implement customer support software that can display relevant data about your customers from other systems to your customer support agents.
4. Track Business Analytics
Business analytics is the backbone of effective digital engagement strategies. What works and what doesn’t? What exactly do your customers want? Only by tracking and analyzing customer feedback data can you answer these questions.
You can collect customer feedback data and analyze it from different touchpoints. By monitoring customer metrics, such as customer satisfaction scores and NPS, you can serve your customers better and scale your digital engagement strategy.
Although time- and date-related data points (such as your customer’s renewal date and launch date) are good starting points, you must get more specific to build a successful digital engagement strategy. Search for insights on product engagement, use cases, and other quantifiable data that help you determine where your customer is on the purchase funnel. This will ensure you deliver the right content to your customers using the right medium at the right time.
5. Strategize Content
Pam Micznik notes, “organizational content strategy is key to scaling customer success with customer education.”
To scale your digital engagement strategy, you must also produce high-quality, interactive content to satisfy customer demand. According to a study by Demand Metric, creating interactive content is an effective way to educate customers. When customers are educated about your products or services, they become excited, engage with your brand, and take actions that drive more sales.
So, your ability to create strategic and interactive content is your one-way ticket to generating more prospects and more leads. However, creating high-quality content is easier said than done. The Content Marketing Institute reports that over 52% of B2B businesses struggle to create content that keeps their customers engaged. To craft interactive and engaging content, you must create content that resonates and talks back to your target audience. Engaging and interactive content engages readers by answering their questions, exploring scenarios, and motivating them to make choices and take action. It forces readers to think and respond to it; they can’t just skim through it.
Final Thoughts
Building an effective digital engagement strategy must be the foundation of every company. As the competition becomes stiffer, you should pay attention to your customer wants and needs, identify your core message, and leverage powerful customer service software to help you deliver exceptional customer experiences and improve customer retention rates.
Zight (formerly CloudApp)’s customer support software scales digital engagement by improving your customer satisfaction and retention rates via visual communications. For instance, Help Sout’s VP of sales has saved over 110 hours after using Zight (formerly CloudApp). Zight (formerly CloudApp) can help you create engaging and interactive content to keep your prospects engaged with your brand. The entire company saves nearly 34 hours weekly after using Zight (formerly CloudApp). Help Scout’s sales team also uses Zight (formerly CloudApp) to answer customers’ queries by annotating screenshots and screen recordings directly into emails. Not only does this reduce customer support response times, but also it improves customer satisfaction and retention rates . That’s because consumers love easy-to-digest content and personalization.
