An Increase in the Number of Product Reviews Be a Good Example of Consumer Engagement

What is customer date?

The concept of customer date only fully emerged in the digital era. Engagement became more prevalent and more visible as two-manner communication between client and brand developed over online channels. Engagement isn't only digital, of grade – it can also happen in person and through traditional advice channels.

Simply what exactly practice companies and idea-leaders mean when they talk most customer date? Well, information technology varies.

Out on the web, definitions are scattered, but they serve to highlight a few unlike dimensions of customer engagement.

Customer.com's definition paints CE as incremental and holistic, something made up of many modest interactions, each with an influence on the whole:

Customer engagement is the extent of the human relationship a customer has with a brand. It tin be strengthened – or diminished – with every interaction. From making a buy to writing a review to join a loyalty programme , the depth of customer engagement increases and becomes more than mutually beneficial the more closely a make can connect with customers' preferences.

Academic Linda Hollebeek, writing in the Periodical of Strategic Marketing, defines it in terms of personal investment:

CBE is defined as 'the level of a customer'south cognitive, emotional and behavioral investment in specific brand interactions'. Further, three key CBE themes are identified, including 'immersion', 'passion', and 'activation'.

Amazon Spider web Services links date with loyalty, and frames it as a concern-led activity:

Customer date strategy refers to the practices that organizations apply to go on users coming dorsum to their applications. Maximizing customer engagement is vital in today's digital market place, where an ever-increasing number of brands are competing for a finite corporeality of customer attending.

How do we define it, then?

Customer engagement is the emotional connectedness between a customer and a brand. Broadly speaking, customer engagement (CE), or customer-brand engagement (CBE) encompasses the customer's relationship with a business concern.

When we look at customer engagement we're exploring the quality of that relationship – positive or negative – how customer participation occurs, and how often it happens.

For most companies, an exploration of the topic will also involve trying to understand how client engagement relates to the success of the business in terms of sales, loyalty, and whether the client is a detractor or promoter of the brand. Highly engaged customers buy more than, promote more, and demonstrate more than loyalty. Providing a high-quality customer feel is an of import component of your customer date strategy.

Dimensions of customer engagement could include:

• Longevity: The length of time over which interactions are spread
• Proactiveness: Whether a customer engages with a brand of their own accord, without prompting
• Repetition and frequency: Whether the interactions are frequent and similar, or desultory and varied
• Context: The state of affairs where interactions happen, for example, postal service-purchase, during consideration, merely when at that place'due south a promotion happening, etc.
• Volume: How much interaction takes place over the whole customer lifecycle

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Customer date, customer satisfaction, and customer experience (CX)

To understand what customer engagement is all about, we have to separate it from a few related concepts.

Client experience (CX) vs customer date

CX describes everything that happens for a client in relation to a brand, from seeing its billboard ads abreast the highway to visiting the bathrooms of a flagship shop.

Working on CX is well-nigh putting yourself in the customer's shoes and considering how to provide the best possible feel across all touchpoints.

Customer engagement, however, brings in the client'south ain agency and choice, non just what the brand presents to them. In CE, the customer is seen every bit an agile participant rather than a recipient of an experience. CE explores how they react and respond, how they reach out to you, their relationship to your content and marketing, how they talk nigh yous to others, and whether they promote or detract. Put simply – it'due south a dialogue.

Customer satisfaction vs customer engagement

Client satisfaction and customer engagement might sound like two sides of the same coin, but the overlap between them shouldn't be taken for granted.

A satisfied customer might not always become engaged. They could be a lifelong shopper at your hardware depot simply never take role in a customer loyalty program, follow the brand on social media, or make a complaint. Likewise, an engaged customer might make few purchases from a luxury department store, but spend hours chatting on a brand-owned forum or interacting with the visitor'south aspirational posts on Instagram.

So client date isn't the aforementioned as client satisfaction. But client satisfaction can be an issue of customer engagement, and it tin can be a precursor for it too.

What does client engagement wait like?

It's both general and selective

Your target audience might engage with your business organization at different levels. For some, it happens at the product level (for instance, a new car heir-apparent joining a Mustang owners group on Facebook). For others, it'south at the level of the brand. (Apple enthusiasts may exist able to chronicle to this).

Date may be quite abstruse – expressing a preference for Visa or Mastercard, for example – or highly specific, such as visiting a particular store branch in their region because information technology'south better managed and more welcoming than others.

It's online and offline

Your customer engagement strategies will also vary on and offline, depending on the kind of offering a business provides. In a traditional model, where sales are discrete events and products and services are used away from the signal of auction, engagement may not happen at all. In a situation where products and services may be supplied and consumed online, date with the brand happens every bit a matter of course.

It's sometimes integrated with product use

Information technology may in some cases exist indivisible from the production or service itself. In these cases, the question is not whether or not the client engages but how meaningful those engaged moments are.

Hither are a few examples of what engagement might look like in practice.

one. Making a complaint

A dissatisfied customer reaches out to give feedback or ask for a problem to be remedied. Whether they complain in a public forum or approach you via email, can exist a telling mensurate of a customer's loyalty and sentiment towards your make. Notably, if a client cares enough to complain, the stakes are loftier and there's a valuable opportunity to shut the experience gap and win their loyalty by taking steps to meet their expectations.

two. Responding to marketing with a comment on Facebook

An engaged customer seeing an ad for a production they've recently bought may add a comment along the lines of "this is the affair I was telling y'all almost, Sandra!" or "bought three of these, no idea how to use them". It's a word-of-mouth moment that reflects positively or negatively on both the client and the brand – a course of social proof.

3. Reviewing on a third-party site

A client waits for hours on hold to a utility company, and while the minutes laissez passer, leaves a one-star review on a site similar ReviewCenter or TrustPilot. In this scenario, the customer is a detractor of the brand, but unlike the social media example, they are not sharing their opinion with friends and family in their sphere of influence but doing it anonymously.

iv. Participation in loyalty programs

A customer signs upwards for a loyalty carte or app which they use to collect points on future purchases. They savor collecting points and achieving rewards, which becomes a secondary motivation in itself. They will choose your brand higher up others because they tin collect points with yous but not others.

5. Contributing ideas, suggestions, and requests to a brand's social spaces

A loyal customer comments on your Instagram post asking if and when you lot'll exist restocking a production they love. They also make contributions like "would love to see this in green!" or "can we please have a gift gear up with this, the purple, and the blue?"

vi. Using online back up and customer service

A subscriber to a SaaS platform wants to know how to employ the tool to solve a specific trouble. Unable to find the answers in the product's knowledge base, she contacts client service via live chat to ask for advice and is referred to a product specialist who answers her question. This is an instance of someone engaging deeply with a service they've paid for, and having a better experience every bit a outcome.

Some individuals become engaged with a brand to the extent that it's part of their lifestyle or belief arrangement. Large and long-standing consumer brands like Disney and Coca-Cola have 'super fans' whose lives revolve effectually their attachment to the make and their collections of products or memorabilia.

Then there are the disengaged customers. They might exist positive, like the satisfied hardware store customer we described higher up. Or they may be negative towards your brand, for example, customers of a competitor who take developed an thought of your products and services only through the lens of someone else's products and marketing.

What does better client engagement mean for your business?

We know that client appointment is broadly associated with positive business outcomes. A oftentimes-cited 2010 study by brand research consultants Hall & Partners found that up to two-thirds of a make's profits stemmed from effective consumer appointment. Gallup research shows that a fully-engaged customer represents 23% more revenue than boilerplate.

Merely don't take their word for information technology.

Tiptop-line findings from other businesses can signal you in the right direction, but to really empathize what customer engagement strategies tin can mean for your business, it's necessary to investigate what types of engagement predict what kind of outcomes.

Before you invest in increasing customer engagement, you lot demand to understand how it relates to your business growth. That manner you can target your efforts where they are almost assisting and maximize outcomes that are sustainable and positive over the long term.

Your goals might be

• Word-of-mouth marketing
• Brand strengthening
• Loyalty
• Increased sales
• Better knowledge of your customer

Yous also need to know what profitable engagement looks like in your specific business, taking into account the corporeality of variation that'southward possible and the benefits y'all could accomplish. For example, does social media sharing go manus in paw with increased loyalty? Do customers who contact you with an consequence finish up more likely to repurchase afterwards your resolution or less?

"Information is the fuel of customer appointment," according to SAP's Volker Hildebrand. Date, unlike traditional CRM, is something that happens in the moment, much like a person-to-person chat. For this to happen, the relevant data must be instantly accessible at the moment of connection, giving the customer an effortless experience.

Why practice yous need a client engagement strategy?

If you don't have a client date strategy, yous could be missing opportunities to interact with customers and build a relationship with them.

At that place is no single client engagement method that works for every visitor beyond all industries; nonetheless, a sincere focus on empathy, clarity, and simplicity in your dealings with customers and prospects should exist the basis for all of your customer appointment activities.

At that place are many positive customer engagement examples that can be used to model a customer engagement strategy; major brands use everything from funny, responsive social media agents to personalized discounts and offerings to inspire loyalty and amore in their customers.

No matter the approach you take, customer engagement strategies provide you lot with a solid framework for client retention that your team – and the wider business – can get behind.

Three steps to smarter customer engagement and increasing client retention

Step 1. Research

Collect that data. Know what engagement looks like in your unique business. As well every bit collecting operational data like loyalty program numbers, social shares, likes and comments, and support cases, find out nigh the context of date from your customer's perspective. Explore what motivates customers to appoint with you lot by collecting experience information from them via surveys, intercepts, and other feedback channels.

Step 2. Analyze

Having explored the kinds of engagement that are happening in your business organization, the next step is to relate them to business outcomes such as sales, NPS, CSAT, and client endeavour scores.

Step 3. Iterate and introduce

Now yous're prepare to put your findings into action and close the loop betwixt action, measurement, and results.

Customer engagement strategies for more loyal customers

The kind of customer engagement strategy you cull will depend on your enquiry findings, your resource, and the kind of industry yous're in. It's too important to consider how to meliorate customer date on a channel-past-channel ground. There's a big difference between online and offline date, for example. How your client engages likewise has implications for how you nurture the relationship.

An unengaged only positive customer might reply to invitations to engage that focus on price, value, and ease – 'bring together our loyalty plan and save v% on these regular purchases'. A customer who is already heavily engaged could become part of a brand ambassadorship plan where they are rewarded for recruiting a friend.

Here are a few ideas for boosting appointment to inspire you for your future customer date strategies.

one. Build engagement opportunities into your UX and CX

User experience and client experience are built from the get-go interaction customers e'er have with your brand. When designing and implementing new or updating existing UX and CX elements, make sure yous have engagement in mind. How your user interface looks, sounds, and feels tin take a huge touch on on how a customer engages with your brand.

Something as unproblematic as a thumbs up / thumbs down button on the bottom of a self-service back up article can boost engagement and make a customer experience more involved and listened to. Consider updating your blueprint following feedback to really meet your customers' needs, and ensure you're using UX metrics as well as customer date metrics to provide a shine experience on your digital platforms and in your physical spaces.

2. Commencement a customer loyalty plan if y'all don't already take i

From fully-fledged tiered points systems to a humble ten-coffee postage stamp carte, customer loyalty programs are a proven machinery for boosting retention. They are a measurable way of making sure a loyal customer feels appreciated, which helps you lot to sympathize your audience better.

Loyalty programs can also be used every bit a testing ground for customer appointment initiatives, products, and services you're thinking of extending to your entire audience. For example, initiating a customer "club" that gets early admission to your output means you can get feedback before you lot send it further afield.

Better your customer loyalty with our ultimate guide

iii. Invite feedback

Let customers know you care what they call back and provide plenty of opportunities to be heard.

Online, you could apply site intercepts, scoring, or feedback buttons to gather contextual experience data. Brand your feedback touchpoints quick and like shooting fish in a barrel to go data on client satisfaction without disrupting the journey. You tin fifty-fifty open the floor to online client reviews on your website and social media platforms – but ensure that y'all're moderating whatever customer feedback.

Offline? Put a feedback box and some cards by the till, encourage staff to ask customers about their experience, or add a feedback e-mail address to till receipts and promotional flyers. Again, this feedback outreach should exist designed with customer service in mind to prevent any negative responses.

4. Model engaged behaviors

Showcase existing engagements with customers in your customer engagement marketing, using storytelling and instance studies to illustrate how other customers have contributed and participated. Providing proof points and evidence can assistance convince new customers of your high quality and inspire client relationships to form. Much every bit you inquire your customers to recommend y'all to their contacts, you lot as well need to model the aforementioned appointment beliefs.

Customer Feedback Resource:

• Customer Feedback – What to Collect and When
• Omni Channel Client Feedback
• 7 Ways to Boost Customer Survey Response

5. Strengthen your brand vocalism

Customers are more likely to appoint with a brand they feel has a strong identity that they can recognize, no matter where they run into their products or services. By strengthening your make voice through customer date marketing strategies, you can ensure that your existing customers tin can hands find your brand and engage with you.

Try identifying the key reasons why your fans dearest your brand through customer feedback and develop your identity appropriately. Customers beloved your direct service fashion and easy-to-use products? Simplify your branding and projection a sincere and competent persona through your social media channels. Your products are more fun than utility-focused? Make your customer service tone of phonation helpful, but calorie-free-hearted.

Using your outreach channels to build an emotional connexion between your brand identity and your audition is an easy way to increment customer engagement.

6. Try visually engaging video marketing campaigns

Visual client engagement marketing is key for attracting and retaining your target audience.

Wyzowl's State of Video Marketing Survey 2021 constitute 84% of video marketers say this visual medium has helped them generate leads, with explainer videos and social media videos being the most useful tools for engaging customers.

Google has found that when it comes to ownership, 63% of YouTube viewers have bought from a make because they had seen it on YouTube. According to the digital giant, "Video is the new shop window, and it's ane that is e'er open."

Epitome from Unsplash.com

7. Offer personalization

Using your customer engagement metrics as a guide, y'all can improve your client loyalty in the long term, but there are short-term means to utilise metrics to better your audience's experience. Offer tailored options to your customers when they initially interact with your make – such as a quick survey on their personal preferences – can help you to immediately guide them towards products and services they'll love. This, in plough, should lead to ameliorate client retention over time.

8. Focus on human connexion

Your customer engagement strategies should experience human. With more than 60% of consumers feeling like brands need to care more about them, engaging customers with marketing and social media efforts that feel emotionally accurate is vital.

For example, during the COVID-xix pandemic, Coors Light noted the situation that many of their customers were going through with a tongue-in-cheek customer engagement campaign around the hashtag #coulduseabeer. Showing that they understood their customers' feelings at that time meant that their client engagement marketing resonated emotionally. For 500,000 complimentary beers, the brand connected with customers and developed loyalty.

Paradigm from Twitter

ix. Use engineering to manage client engagement

Technology can assist you empower your team to implement customer engagement strategies without adding unnecessary legwork. Every bit an instance, brands such as Netflix and Amazon have perfected the fine art of hyper-personalization with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). They're able to deliver viewers suggestions tailored to them, using the data they have on other customer relationships. The "Customers who bought this item also bought" suggestions and "We think yous'd like" options show customers you empathise their tastes and needs, just your team doesn't have to individually implement the strategy to personalize customer experiences.

Image from Netflix.com

Client engagement metrics

As mentioned previously, there are several ways to measure out your client appointment to get specific metrics and understand which of your strategies are working well.

Here are a few metrics that y'all can use to tailor your customer engagement strategy for meliorate results.

one. Customer loyalty

You tin can measure customer loyalty with the NPS metric, using a unmarried-question survey that gives you a number from -100 to +100. The college the Internet Promoter Score, the more loyal the customer.

2. Customer satisfaction

Your customer satisfaction can be measured using the CSAT method – adding into a survey a variation on this question:

"How would you rate your overall satisfaction with the [goods/services] you lot received?"

The more satisfied your customers, the more likely information technology is that they volition buy from you once more and become a loyal customer.

Approximate your client satisfaction with our free Customer Satisfaction Survey template

3. Client effort

Measuring how hard your customer has to work to go their issues fixed or requests answered is central for making sure customers' experiences are positives. Customer effort scores mensurate how hard information technology is for customers to resolve issues or get answers on a scale of "very like shooting fish in a barrel" to "very difficult", helping you to improve your client service. With better customer service, your customers are more than likely to return for another purchase.

iv. Sales

The easiest metric to measure out is likely sales. The more sales of your production or service that occur, the more than likely information technology is that your customers are engaged with your brand. However, sales numbers are non a holistic indicator of what's working – you don't know if your product is great but your service is terrible, or if your customers love your brand but don't dearest the purchasing process. Information technology should form role of your client appointment strategy, but sales are non the only metric that matters.

5. Frequency of contact

How often do customers achieve out to get in touch? Whether information technology'due south by your customer service email, your phone line, or via social media comments, brands that have engaged customers volition probable meet higher levels of contact. Nevertheless, high contact might besides be due to negative experiences, so information technology's worth making sure it's the result of successful customer engagement rather than a negative trend.

6. Subscriber numbers

If you've set upwardly an email newsletter or a loyalty program, you can measure how engaging your offering is by the number of subscribers you have to your content. Personalization is key for success in this metric – Hubspot found that bulletin personalization is the number i tactic used in customer engagement marketing to improve engagement rates.

7. Client reviews

Do you accept many reviews online for your products and services? No matter how many you have, the ratio should e'er exist more positive than negative. Taking the time to accost any issues flagged in negative reviews is a good way to ensure that new and existing customers see that yous listen, encouraging more than engagement with your brand.

8. Dwell fourth dimension and repeat visits

Among other factors, how long customers spend on your website or in-store and how often they come dorsum is a very useful metric to empathize both how appealing your offer is, but likewise how well your engagement strategies are working.

9. Social media appointment metrics

Do you inspire regular customer appointment on your social media channels? Evaluating how well yous are performing by each social channel'southward metrics and overlaying that data with your sales and operational data can aid you to judge which approaches are best to engage customers in the future.

Using customer engagement metrics to ameliorate your strategy

There are many ways to improve your customer experience strategy, but using metrics such as the ones mentioned can assist you to detect tangible show of what's working and what'south not. All-time of all, many of these metrics are simple to implement through UX or CX design and tin form a cohesive office of your customer journey.

Using industry-standard metrics is helpful to know how you compare to your competitors, but the most important use for metrics is to continually arrange and tailor your customer engagement strategy for meliorate customer satisfaction, college levels of interaction, and ideally, more than sales.

Create a customer engagement strategy with Qualtrics

Client engagement is often the consequence of positive customer experiences. Qualtrics – now powered with Clarabridge – helps you capture and analyze data from every customer touchpoint, allowing you to empathize which interactions are increasing engagement and which are hurting it. This in-depth analysis of brand loyalty and the customer lifecycle means your customer engagement marketing strategies are more targeted and more effective.

With the insights yous gain, you can create a customer engagement model that outlines what kinds of experiences y'all want to deploy at each stage of the customer journey. Not only that, but with a single platform for all kinds of client analysis, Qualtrics and Clarabridge give you the wisdom to correct your missteps and plan future client engagement activities so that you lot can reap the benefits of fully engaged, loyal customers.

Program, execute and measure customer date with Qualtrics' comprehensive digital CX software. Attempt it for yourself at present.

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Source: https://www.qualtrics.com/experience-management/customer/customer-engagement/

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