Updated on July 13, 2023
Mobile apps and web resources that want to boost brand awareness and improve customer/prospect experience need to focus on customer engagement techniques. When a customer checks out your website/app you have only a few seconds to ensure that they find exactly what they came looking for. If they leave your site or app, and move over to a competitor or call up your contact center (raising customer service cost).
Companies that want to build and retain a respectable customer base need to deploy customer engagement best practices that are an absolute must in today’s day and age. So if you haven’t tried any of the following ideas yet, leverage the winter lull to implement them and enable.
Five simple and effective customer engagement techniques you can deploy right away:
Increase your customer credibility by rewarding them whenever they visit your website
Every customer prefers websites and apps that incentivize them with offers. Companies should identify levels of engagement e.g. comments, app installs etc. and then develop incentives for each level. At the highest level of engagement, existing customers will be incentivized to refer and bring in other prospective customers by way of word-of-mouth or online referrals.
The referral incentives needn’t be thought of purely in terms of cash/rewards but also in terms of experience e.g. a very successful incentive may involve free access to premium features or showcasing a customer or their work.
Introduce live chat apps
Chat apps are an extremely useful and low-cost solution for increasing customer engagement. You can use them to ensure that customers spend more time on your website or app and receive quality support from the time they spend there. This will reduce the need for the company to maintain a large team of customer representatives who need to support customers over phone calls.
Actually, surveys have revealed that in comparison to emails and phones, live chat has the greatest level of efficiency when it comes to satisfying the customers. The primary reason for this is that live chat is able to collect vital customer-related information and solve their queries and problems at the same time. With the help of this information, you can enhance your efficiency of providing quality services to your customers in future or target them much more accurately and precisely in all your future marketing campaigns.
Live chat enables you to provide individualized services to your customers on the basis of various factors such as locations and time zones. Also, it assists you in following your customer’s activities exactly from the time or point wherein they entered your website/app to the point of time when they bounced off. Live chat apps also recognize new customers or old customers who have returned to your app and so you are able to go to leverage their history to provide a custom experience.
Leverage social media for customer interactions
Traditionally, companies have used social media to build brand awareness and acquire new customers. But it can also serve to engage your existing customers who follow you there. You should consistently request customers to like your pages or follow your company on various social media platforms.
Once you have a healthy customer following, leverage it to share content and useful tips with customers. If they need urgent support, prove that your social presence is alert enough to respond to them.
Conduct regular customer surveys for effectively gauging their intentions and preferences
If you conduct polls and consumer surveys on a regular basis, then there will be more customer engagement and also more retention. You will do well to put up a standard or general poll in the center or the side of your webpage/app or else you can also make use of a courteous pop-up to invite the customer to participate in the poll.
In the survey, you should ideally ask your customers about their reasons or intentions behind visiting your company’s web pages and apps, their experience of using your services, and feedback they may have. Always remember to include options which have got check-in boxes in order to make it quick and easy. Another crucial aspect of this is that if you have also got a comments section, always make it non-compulsory so that only those customers who are interested can post their comments and others can easily skip that section.
Keep web and app content always updated and world-class
High-quality and interactive content can make your customers spend more time with your brand/product. In order for content to be engaging it has to be either of the following — helpful, thought-provoking, humorous, or entertaining.
Forums and discussion threads are useful kinds of content generation methods that also involve your customers. This increases engagement because not only are you providing them with content but also the other way around. Customers are known to provide their opinions more freely in forums than in other forms of communication like email.
There are also certain other methods of increasing customer engagement like notifications, tips & suggestions, podcasts, and live streaming. But if you are not able to provide the customer Return on Time (ROT, not ROI), chances are that your customer engagement will wane over time. In today’s competitive internet world, everyone is competing hard to gain customer time and hence it is important that you deploy your best tactics to engage them and engage them well.
At Kommunicate, we are envisioning a world-beating customer support solution to empower the new era of customer support. We would love to have you on board to have a first-hand experience of Kommunicate. You can signup here and start delighting your customers right away.
