Why Customer Engagement Is A Digital Priority

According to new research conducted by Frost & Sullivan in collaboration with Avaya, ‘80% of companies in any stage of digital transformation cite improving customer engagement as a priority’.

What Is Customer Engagement?

Engaging with customers is something that companies should view as a long term goal. Those who are looking for a quick sale in order to boost the next quarter’s profit sheets are probably more focussed on maximising digital conversions rather than establishing excellent customer engagement. However, this pushy sales approach can dissuade customers from making repeat purchases from a company. Instead, brands who have engaged with their consumers and understand the repeated interactions that strengthen the emotional, psychological or physical investment that customers have placed in a brand, are more likely to benefit in the long run. It is these companies that will enjoy better long-term growth and increased profitability.

Customer Engagement Activities

There are many ways for a company to successfully engage with its customers. Digital loyalty programs allow companies to personalise the experience of their customers which will ultimately lead to better sales conversions. In a recent report from Boston Retailers, which surveyed over five hundred retailers about the mind-set related to customer loyalty, it was discovered that 62% of those businesses plan to increase the allocation of funds towards their customer loyalty programs this year, whilst 76% included customer experience and engagement as a brand priority.

Communication is another indispensable tool which can be used to engage customers with online. Social media channels which provide your customers with offers, news and company developments allow your followers to stay connected to you. Social platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram also provide excellent ways in which a customer can recommend your brand on to their own connections, particularly if you supply them with voucher codes, promotions or interesting viral content. Digital newsletters and personalised email offers that introduce the customer to the right product, at the right time, at a price which is acceptable to them, are another excellent way to engage with your digital customers and retain their business.

Successful customer engagement often uses a multi-channel approach, where a blend of digital media is used in conjunction with traditional media such as TV commercials or billboards to attract an interested customer.

Customer Lifetime Value

Avaya and Frost & Sullivan’s new calculator tool is able to measure Customer Lifetime Value (CLV). It is known that companies who are able to track CLV significantly outperform those who choose not to, in terms of profitability and growth.

CLV is a complex set of calculations that involve the current value of all future cash flows which are associated with a customer relationship. These include variables such as the projected amount of money that the customer will spend, savings made from customer retention, the likelihood that a customer will refer the company on to others and the cost of the customer’s loyalty. It can, of course be extremely challenging to accurately measure the true value of your long-term customers due to difficulties that arise with incomplete data and disjointed systems as well as knowing which elements to track and the best ways of obtaining the data.

This is what makes the CLV tool so invaluable, as it assists brands in highlighting the areas of customer engagement that are most important to them and how they would like to monitor them going forward.

One of the most common areas for successful CLV businesses to focus on is the customer service centre. This is seen as a hub for managing and monitoring the customer-level experience and relationship. Customer service staff and the digital technology that support them are an essential cog in the customer engagement process. The management of customer experience at this level improves the chances of longevity of the customer relationship, in addition to better revenue and brand advocacy.

Big Data For Customer Engagement

The analysis of big data or data insights is another way to define customer engagement on a digital level. It allows brands to use data in order to find out who their consumers are, what they want out of the customer experience and how they can adapt to match their needs. In order to use big data to discover customers’ motivations and preferences, companies must keep a clean and current database of customer information, monitor their marketing opportunities, or ‘touch points’, and maintain a unified view of their customers across all digital marketing channels that they might visit.

If you’re looking for a big data specialist who is able to radically improve your business processes and increase your digital customer engagement, then get in touch. We have a strong pool of talented data technicians who are experts in data mining, sentiment analysis and user behaviour. If you’d like us to assist you in hand-picking the perfect data specialist for your customer engagement process, then get in touch today.