How to Build an Effective Customer Engagement Strategy?

Customer engagement is a process that leads to positive engagement of customers with company or a brand. It also defines customer relationship management (CRM).  The main objective of customer engagement is to develop customer loyalty, deliver customer service and anticipate customers’ needs.

Customer Engagement is about more than increasing brand awareness and providing great customer service. It’s about creating a meaningful, long-term relationship with customers that effortlessly extends throughout every channel of communication.

Engaged customers ensures you a business of sustained and profitable growth. Engaged customers buy more products and give more referrals. Actively engaged customers provide better quality feedback and stay connected for longer periods. Most companies do not understand what to do and how to create an effective customer engagement. To understand customer behavior, their specific purchase triggers will help you to optimize their behavior. Customer engagement components consist of following-

Involvement – The presence of the customer

Interaction - The action of customer

 Intimacy – The affection of customer with the brand

Influence – The chances of a customer to advocate on behalf of the brand

Involvement

Customer involvement takes the customer engagement to a new level. It is all about identifying and increasing the possibilities to engage customers in business. It can be, involving customers in product design, sales and marketing. Customer involvement is one of the major factors responsible for any product’s success. It becomes necessary when your business entails a great degree of customer contacts.

For example, in order to fill orders accurately and efficiently, Starbucks trains its counter clerks to call out orders to beverage makers in a particular sequence. It is even better when customers themselves can do so. Starbucks attempts to teach customers it's ordering protocol. First, it provides a "guide-to-ordering pamphlet" for customers to look over. Second, it trains clerks to repeat the order in the correct sequence for the beverage makers, which may not be how the customer presented it. This process not only makes it easier for the beverage makers, but also indirectly "trains" the customers in how to place their orders.(Source: Krajewski, L, Ritzman, L & Malhotra, M 2010, Operations management: processes and supply chains, 9th edn, Prentice Hall, N.J.)

Customer involvement can lead to better quality, cost-effectiveness, fast delivery of the products, and flexibility. Now with the advent of technology, companies can involve their customers and communicate and interact with them easily. This helps in creating values and predicting the future demands.  

Interaction

Customer interaction is the interaction between an organization and its customers. In this section businesses pay more attention to interact with customers. Customer interaction is all about knowing your customers so that you can later express that understanding in developing a product or service. Here are some basic elements of customer interaction:

-          Identify your customers

-          Build trust

-          Be open

-          Be reliable 

-          Listen to your customers

Knowing and understanding your customers is the main ingredient to run a successful business. Once you have developed this understanding, you can easily influence your customers. Whenever you interact with your customers, there is a possibility to build trust. Remember that customers want to know everything about you, don’t lie, don’t mislead and don’t overpromise. Make the promises that you can keep on. For effective customer interaction you need to listen to your customers, so that customers will feel valued.

Intimacy

Customer intimacy is all about letting a customer know that he or she is the only one who matters the most. The intimate knowledge about a customer will be helpful in developing and maintaining a close and long term relationship with customers. Customer intimacy takes place on all levels of the interaction. The stronger the intimacy, the happier the customers will be. It is very important to build strong relationship between supplier and customers.  No matter what you are selling or giving away, knowing your customers like no one else will bring them back every time. As a business owner you should look forward to find the ways to learn more about your existing customers plus your potential customers.

Influence

According to Peter Clark, there are six major factors that play key role in influencing the loyalty and commitment of customers:

-          Core offering

-          Satisfaction

-          Elasticity level

-          Share of wallet

-          The marketplace

-          Demographics

To influence customers, you need to offer the products and services that appeal customers. Additionally you need to provide them lots of information. Customers look for reliable and detailed information before making purchase. Customer satisfaction is an evaluation of how well a product or service meets customer expectation. It is one of the key factors of business strategy.  Elasticity level states the significance of purchase decision. Share of wallet is the amount that a company gets from a specific customer.

A successful customer engagement leads to customer delight, and customer delight leads to a long term relationship with customers. Customer engagement is a relationship that a customer builds during the ongoing interaction with a company. Today, customer engagement is one of the most emerging business principles that cannot be overlooked.