1. What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is communication and connection between a business organisation and its customers through various channels. This process also involves sharing information with customers of the said business organisation about their brand, product or service.  Many experts will provide useful definitions about customer engagement and one thing you will find in common with all of them is; establishing brand loyalty and trust amongst customers. Brand loyalty is what businesses should strive to achieve, not just getting customers to purchase their products. With ecommerce development on the rise, online customer engagement is starting to take the centre stage. This differs from offline customer engagement by the means of interaction between businesses and customers and between customers themselves. One important factor to note about customer engagement is that it is a choice. A customer chooses to engage the business. Although there are times that interaction occurs due to necessity, (like making complaints about faulty products) it is important for the business to encourage the customer to engage with them about any questions they may have. This begins to bring up issues like customer relations and public relations. What companies should strive to achieve is for their customers to say good things about their brands to them and to other customers (whether online or offline). Questions surrounding this topic include

• Why does a business need customer engagement?
• How can a business improve customer engagement?

This article answers those questions and tells you why customer engagement is indispensable for business growth.

2. Why is customer engagement so important for business growth?

If your business is not a non-profit organisation, customer engagement should be spun into the fabric of your business. Why? Because well engaged customers purchase more, refer more, and demonstrate loyalty. According to statistics from Forbes Insights/Pegasystems, companies that operationalised customer engagement and built in accountability to achieve their business objectives recorded the following results;

• 4 times more likely to experience growth of over 10%
• 3 times more likely to be in the top quartile of net promoter score
• 3 times more likely to see high acquisition rates- an increase of annual rate between 5 to 25 percent.
• Less than 10% more likely to experience a churn rate of less than 10%

Also, research by Hall and Partners showed that up to 2/3 of a brand’s profits may rely on effective customer engagement. These numbers show how businesses that makes customer engagement a top priority can excel. Other reasons include

• Highly engaged customers buy more.
• Highly engaged customers build brand loyalty and continue to buy from you despite the swarm of competitors that may available. They will stick to you no matter how juicy the competitive offer might be.
• Loyal customers refer your brand/products to their friends and family. This helps to increase your customer base and helps your business grow.
• Highly engaged customers are passionate and stick with your business through rough patches.

3. How can a business improve customer engagement?

The key to successful customer engagement is to align customer engagement with your business objectives. The business should focus on customer satisfaction and invest in people that demonstrate the skills needed to keep customers happy. Finding ways to measure customer satisfaction and engagement will help keep a focus on improving and make the team feel more empowered to make a difference. Examples of customer engagement measurements could be social reach metrics on social media channels or return views of your website. NPS scores or reviews are ways to measure customer satisfaction that quickly gives you a clear view of how you are making your customers feel.

It does not matter what business you are into as long as you need customers to succeed, customer engagement is a top priority for you. Further ways to improve on customer engagement;

• Create consistent and personalised customer experiences across all channels
• Pay attention to customer reviews and enquiries
• Make customer satisfaction a goal
• Collect and analyse data, make good use of them
• Not be sale focused but be customer focused. If customers feel cared for they will trust your brand more
• Make customer engagement a long time plan. Make it part of the company objectives.

Junaid Ali Qureshi (guest writer)

is leader/representative/frontrunner of an expert magento development team and an experienced digital marketing specialist dedicated to developing intuitive, well crafted, smart websites that have huge success on search engine(s) making time and money worthwhile. His current ventures include magentodevelopers.online ,Elephantation, eLabelz, Smart Leads.ae, Progos Tech and eCig.