Guest Post: The Salient Approaches to Have Better Customer Engagement

This week we feature an article by Abinaya Ramakrishnan, a digital marketer at FreshWorks. She discusses multiple steps businesses can take to further develop their customer engagement strategies.

If you happen to have a product and you’re selling it, you tend to get some people attracted to it for its features and the usefulness of it. With that they want to buy it and eventually, you earn through it. One fine day, the same buyer returns with an issue. What happens then? This is where the reality of customer engagement lies. Probably through a customer communication platform, you review the issue that they are addressing, act on it and resolve it for them. All this seems to fit in three to four sentences while the whole process is of months or sometimes even in a count of years. The real challenge lies in how it all gets done.

Suppose if the issue doesn’t get resolved or if it takes too long, it could make the customer angry and an angry customer is a lost customer. In that case, the problem lies in the engagement part. The agent from the product side must have taken up the responsibility to have it resolved as soon as possible. In worst cases, if the same customer finds a better product,  S/he would definitely want to switch because let’s face it, it’s “​either the best or nothing​”  mindset if money is being spent. So, how do you make sure that the customer is still your prospect? It isn’t really fair to blame it on the software meant for customer communication or to rather blame for not having one in the first place. Here are a few solutions to solve common misconceptions and mistakes for the betterment of a great customer engagement process.

TREAT THEM LIKE A CUSTOMER, NOT A SALE

As an excuse to make the customer your prospect, many agents who represent the support team for the product tend to make deals or offers to try to sell the product just for the sake of selling it out. As cunning as that seems to be,  it is never an ethical approach to engage a prospective customer on your premises. Always treat them as your customer for whom you’re solving problems. They are the prospects of the product and in turn the same for the company, not a sale to bargain for. Make sure to use a ​customer communication platform rightly and not take it as an advantage to bargain with or retain customers.

ACT ON THEIR FEEDBACKS PROACTIVELY

Upon using a service or a product, there are a ton of possibilities that the customer would face issues or would have doubts by being unaware of how to use a particular feature or functionality, or of what to use when,  etcetera. S/he might even be satisfied with the product. For all these, they give feedback. It is possible that a  major chunk of these might actually end up being negative. But the way to approach it is essential, and how quickly they are being approached is an added advantage for the customers to feel that their queries and requests are being acknowledged. Feedbacks can be categorized to be dealt with, by using the right software for customer communication.

MAKE IT PERSONALIZED TO THEIR INTENTS

Talking to a known person or to a friend with a close relationship seems to add comfort to and also makes one feel more approachable. The same applies to the random person who happens to be a customer in this case. The way of engagement varies from customer to customer where each of them must be approached in a  certain way. By making that approach very peculiar to their expectations and personalizing it in the best possible ways makes it seem very friendly and shows that you, as a random support person, are approachable. Every customer who also happens to use the same platform for communication as yours would have distinctive intentions. Understanding that intent, individualizing them and dealing with them is the mastery path for an excellent customer engagement betterment. Terminally, the customer experience must always be the prime target.

BE CONSISTENT AND SANE WITH BLOGS AND SOCIAL  MEDIA

People read. They really do, especially the customers whose intent is to buy your product. In that case, having irrelevant content on your pages portrays a  poor content management system (​CMS​), which might have very good chances to drive away even the affirmative and prospective customers away. Also, if the pages are very well built too, curating remarkable content and maintaining it effectively requires consistency. Having regular background checks on the web pages and handling the social media channels with high engagement content such as participatory events, online contests and many more, could be incorporated.

OFFER INCENTIVES BY CONDUCTING CONTESTS

This method is one hell of a roller coaster ride that only goes up and up. Your engagement scales would only keep growing if incentives are sponsored because in reality, who would not want to win free stuff and goodies? That being done, more customers would definitely want to pitch in for more and more. This, in turn, would create an impression on the products or at least create curiosity towards it for starters. Engagement rates on social media when handled effectively would drive their interest insanely towards your product(s) or service(s).

LISTEN. HEAR THEM OUT BEFORE REACTING

A general method to solve anything would be to listen first before acting or reacting out.  This is very essential when it comes to complaints. If it happens to be a poor listening practice, then the fixture wouldn’t be what the customer wanted it to be. Customer communication channels are built solely for that purpose only.  Bots would initially collect the complaint or feedback from the customers’ end, and only then an agent is assigned to resolve the issue. It works circularly inside the software for the agents to be assigned once their line-queue is freed. To listen and resolve, one must be aware of the product inside out. So, this is also quite a  noteworthy approach for great customer engagement.

MAKE THE CUSTOMER THE HERO OF YOUR STORY

Anything and everything to be done apart from all the tactics, tips and tricks, is to always remember the pro-tip that the customer is the protagonist. S/he uses your product. They play the protagonist role and every supporting actor becomes one of the following  –  product support, service assistance,  customer engagement,  social media support and many more. Everything must go on well in order to satisfy the hero and not make him or her the contender!

THE FINAL CALL

It’s your call now, to act upon the above points in order to have an eminent engagement with your customers. Choose the right path and use the right app or platform for your customer communications with better features and ease of access. Ideally, try your best to have any customer experience strategy that you employ to be consistent enough and always focus on engaging better with your customers. Their end-to-end experience from the very first interaction is crucial. Aim to provide them with exceptional and consistent customer experience for the reward of trust and loyalty from them.

Being an avid writer and a Digital Marketer, Abinaya Ramakrishnan writes SEO articles and follows multiple blogs to keep in touch with current trends. She reveals her way of expressing communication as “making everyone understand what’s happening by embedding one’s talent to make that happen”, and she has been following that sincerely through her writings.

For more articles from Shep Hyken and his guest contributors go to customerserviceblog.com.

Read Shep’s latest Forbes article: Coronavirus Update: Necessity Is The Mother Of Adaptation