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Customer Engagement6 MINS READ

A Comprehensive Guide to Customer Engagement

October 4, 2021 By Julie Hsu
  • Julie Hsu
  • October 4, 2021

Customer engagement is one of the most important areas of focus for a small business, particularly if you’re selling online. Customer engagement can be thought of as the ways in which you interact with your customers, and how you respond to their questions and concerns. The more engaged they are with your brand, the more likely they are to purchase from you again or recommend you to others. In this comprehensive guide you’ll learn everything there is to know about customer engagement: why it’s so important for small businesses and how LinkLive can help

The customer engagement spectrum.

Customer engagement is a spectrum, not a binary. It isn’t just about email or phone calls, or even social media or chatbots for that matter.

A customer can be engaged with your brand in a variety of ways and those interactions all have their place on the spectrum:

  • Not engaging at all (or in this case, disengaged). The customer doesn’t know you exist
  • Being aware of you but not interacting with you (or “top-of-mind awareness”). The customer has heard of your business but doesn’t know much beyond that
  • Having direct communication with your company – either via phone/live chat/email/chatbot(s)…etc (i.e., being “directly engaged”)

 

The importance of customer engagement for small business owners.

Customer engagement is important for all businesses, no matter how large or small. This is because it allows you to build a relationship with your customers and communicate with them on an individual level. If you don’t have that relationship, then it will be hard for them to buy from you in the future.

Small businesses are less likely to have the resources needed for customer engagement than larger companies do. This can make it even more difficult for them to reach their potential customers with this strategy and turn their business into a success story.

That’s why we’re going over everything there is about how small businesses can use customer engagement tactics as part of their growth plan today.

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is the process of interacting with customers, and it’s the backbone of customer service. It isn’t enough for businesses to simply provide excellent products or services—they need to show them off in a way that makes their customers feel good about their choice. This can take many forms, from ensuring that your website is easy to navigate to providing helpful reviews and testimonials on social media platforms like Facebook or Twitter.

Customer engagement helps build trust between you and your target audience. That’s why so many companies choose LinkLive as their customer engagement platform of choice for chatbot (also called conversational commerce), IVR (interactive voice response), virtual contact center, AI powered customer engagement, CCaaS (contact center as a service), UCaaS (unified communications as a service) and cobrowse video conferencing solutions.

Why is customer engagement important?

Customer engagement is important because it helps you build a relationship with your customers. Knowing what your customers want, how they feel, and what they do on a daily basis gives you a better understanding of who they are and what makes them tick. It also allows you to communicate more effectively with them by sending tailored messages that will resonate with specific segments of the audience based on their interests or preferences. Because it’s personalized, this type of communication drives home the message that you care about each customer as an individual—and that’s what everyone wants: to feel special.

How can a company improve its customer engagement?

If you want to improve your customer engagement, the first thing you need is a clear and detailed strategy. This means that every aspect of your organization’s interaction with customers should be driven by a single objective: improving their experience. The next step is to create an actionable plan that follows through on this goal.

This can be done by creating specific goals for each department within your company (e.g., sales, customer service), as well as specific metrics for measuring success in those departments (e.g., number of calls answered). You’ll also want to make sure that these goals are aligned with higher-level objectives—and always keep an eye out for areas where they overlap or conflict with each other so that nothing slips through the cracks accidentally.

How does LinkLive help its customers engage with customers?

LinkLive provides a platform for customer engagement. It can be used for chatbot, IVR, virtual contact center, ai powered customer engagement, CCaaS, UCaaS and unified communications. LinkLive is also compatible with co-browsing, video conferencing and other collaboration spaces to provide the ultimate customer experience through any channel channel including voice or chatbot.

The platform offers enterprises strategic advantages that include:

  • Integrated experience: LinkLive can integrate with CRMs and social media so you don’t have to build each connection from scratch
  • Comprehensive data analysis: The platform provides real-time reports on all calls received by the business including average call length or how many calls were abandoned before being answered by an agent

 

Customer Engagement in Action

Customer engagement is the key to business success. Customer engagement is an important component of business because it helps you build relationships with your customers, which in turn can lead to increased sales and profit.

Customer engagement requires you to reach out and make contact with your customers, whether it’s through email or social media posts, phone calls, or even old-fashioned snail mail. The most successful brands are ones that engage their customers on a regular basis—and they do so through various methods:

  • Email newsletters that provide useful information about products and services
  • Promotional offers that encourage people to spend money (like coupons)
  • Exclusive content made available only for subscribers

 

Think about customer engagement in terms of the different ways you can reach out and make contact with your customers, including phone calls, live chat, social media and more.

Customer engagement is a broad term that encompasses the ways you can communicate with your customers. It’s important to think about this in terms of both the different ways you can reach out and make contact with your customers, as well as what kinds of touchpoints they’ll use when they’re communicating with you.

Here are some examples:

  • Phone calls – These are best used when there’s something urgent or complicated happening that requires a back-and-forth conversation between customer service agents and customers.
  • Live chat – This is an excellent way for companies to engage their audience at scale, because it allows for two-way communication between the company and its users. It also creates a space where people who aren’t comfortable speaking over the phone can get help from someone else at their company (this could be a salesperson) without ever having to pick up the phone.

 

Conclusion

A customer-centric approach is critical to keeping your small business thriving. The bottom line is that customer engagement is a crucial part of every business’s success, and the best way to do this is by putting yourself in their shoes. If you can find ways to make communication with your customers more personal and accessible, then you’re bound for success.

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