Customer engagement is the emotional connection between your customer and your business. Highly engaged customers buy more, promote more, and demonstrate more loyalty. Hence, providing a fine quality customer experience is an essential component in your customer engagement strategy. 

This is ensured by making use of customer service software, ideally, a service CRM.

Now that you know how CRM helps you learn about your customers let’s see how it helps your company provide delightful experiences.

Easier Customer Engagement

The foremost thing that customers require is the ease of interaction with your company. With extreme awareness among the buyers, they tend to self-educate before making a purchase. If a potential customer doesn’t find the solution to what they’re looking for with your company, they won’t waste time switching over to your competitor.

Thus, once a customer has found what they are looking for, any company must be in a position to engage directly. Here come CRM solutions to the rescue. They can efficiently help companies offer easy means of interaction to their customers while facilitating an ongoing conversation.

Capturing details about a prospective customer via a tweet, inquiry, or feedback will increase your ability to provide a better customer experience. This functionality of the CRM makes your business more intelligent, responsive, and better informed.

Better Engagement Options

To maximize reach, organizations need compelling and no-error experiences for their customers. Large-sized corporations must have more sophisticated customer interaction processes. They need to tell an end-to-end story of engagement and deliver more by enabling customer engagement and commerce. 

CRM can help businesses engage with customers by offering ways to tackle the inefficient internal processes that hinder customer engagement management. The best CRM for customer service integrates each process, be it sales, marketing, lead management, and interactive options, into one, making it more efficient to store and analyze the information facilitating better customer engagement.

Personalized Approach

The emotional bond created through engagement is invaluable as more businesses become aware of the value of customer engagement, the subsequent need to form a bond with the customer increases. Intelligent business owners identify the loopholes and pain points their customers face and put CRM to good use. 

This empowers their representatives to make each customer feel valued. In addition, CRM can integrate the feedback received with the data from chat conversations, social media posts, and call recordings and analyze them through algorithms.

Functionality Beyond CRM

Be it providing customer insights or predicting changes in market trends, CRM is the way to go. Customer engagement needs the reliability of CRM. It broadens the connection between a client and the company as it captures every single meeting and touchpoint.

In conclusion, CRM could easily be known as the building block of its customer experience strategy focused on serving them and enabling customer retention. The brands must explore all opportunities to interact with their consumers. To achieve this, one needs a comprehensive, end-to-end customer management tool.

15 Expert Tips To Increase Customer Engagement Like a Pro

So, how do you increase customer engagement and reap all those benefits that will help you grow your business? Below we cover 15 customer engagement tips and best practices that will inspire and empower you to take your customer engagement efforts to new heights.

1. Focus first and foremost on the overall customer experience

As mentioned above, a great customer experience is only possible if you consistently engage your customers. And like I said, a great customer experience leads to elevated levels of customer satisfaction, which should be one of the most important objectives of any business.

It is all interrelated. Customer engagement produces a better customer experience, which leads to higher levels of customer satisfaction. Check out this article to learn how to boost customer satisfaction levels.

2. Use the right software

To engage customers effectively, you need automation tools that streamline processes and focus more on the customer and less on routine administrative tasks. The key among them is a customer relationship management (CRM) solution. It helps you store all your customer data to personalize their experience and increase engagement (more on that below).

These days, many businesses are opting for an all-in-one CRM because they provide marketing automation, sales enablement, and customer service all on the same platform.

With marketing automation, you can more easily communicate with and engage customers. And with a customer service help desk module, your customer support team can automate processes and spend more time engaging customers.

3. Ask for feedback and do it often

Ask your clients how you are doing and what you could improve to facilitate their product’s success. Send a follow-up survey after customer support calls. Send annual surveys to uncover customer pain points that you were not aware of.

Then implement changes based on their feedback and tell them about it. If they see you making the improvements they asked for; they will engage more and become more loyal.

4. Listen to your clients and display empathy

Empathy is essential in life in general, and the same goes for business. So when you speak to your clients, the conversation should revolve around their needs and challenges.

Ask them questions that will allow them to be candid and tell you what they need to use your product better. Listen intently. If they tell you something that is insulting to your company, try to relate to their frustration. Tell them you understand and will escalate their issue to the appropriate person.

Always put yourself in your customers’ shoes and empathize with them. As the adage goes: you catch more flies with honey than vinegar.

5. Always reply to comments on social media

Social media is arguably the best place to engage customers. As millennials overtake baby boomers as the largest consumer demographic, we will continue to see increased social media usage.

When someone takes the time to comment on your post, you must respond quickly and in a polite, encouraging manner. Thank them. Compliment them. Stroke their ego, and they will continue to come back and engage with you. Ignore them, and they’re gone.

You can use social listening tools to be alerted when someone mentions your brand or comments on your social media posts. Leverage those tools to reply as quickly as possible. Engage your audience right when they engage with you, and you’ll have a dialogue started.

6. Follow high-value clients and comment on their social posts

Just as clients engage with you on your social media pages, you can engage with them on their pages. Follow your high-value customers so their posts appear in your feed.

Comment whenever possible. If they ask a question in their post, answer it. This will engage your most important customers, ensuring that they stick with your brand over the long run.

7. Create compelling content that solves real problems

One of the best examples of super-effective customer engagement strategies is to produce great inbound content. This refers to blogs, eBooks, and other content that does not try to sell your product.

Instead, it educates your audience. It solves common problems they face. And it helps keep them on the cutting edge of emerging trends. If the content is engaging, your customers will be the ones engaging with it. Read more about leveraging inbound content marketing to increase engagement.

8. Leverage personalization in all your customer interactions

With so much personal data on each contact stored in your CRM, you can personalize every interaction you have with them. This will make them feel that you know them, make them comfortable with you, and encourage them to engage with you.

Use personalization in your marketing efforts. For example, use it on sales and customer support calls. Find personal data that you can use to speak to them like an old friend, not a company that only wants their money.

Despite its proven benefits, not many companies are taking advantage of personalization. 

Companies can create relevant and unique experiences to gain customers’ attention with the intelligent use of personalized data. This will help you gain their loyalty in the long run.  

According to a study by SalesForce, 57% of customers are willing to share personal data in exchange for personalized offers and discounts. But, unfortunately, creating generic content for all types of users doesn’t produce an excellent success rate. 

People see tens of advertisements daily. To stand out among others, you ought to offer something that surprises them, and what better way than personalization. 

The Kelton Global survey revealed that 40% of users had spent more because of the personalized shopping experience.

You can use their location, gender, interests, past purchases, etc., to send personalized offers and messages.

9. Use Gamification

Gamification is a great way to motivate, influence, and improve the loyalty of customers. 

It helps boost customer engagement by dealing with people’s natural tendencies to socialize, learn, master, compete, and achieve.

Gamification is embedding game mechanics into existing business processes to motivate users’ participation and engagement.

The data-driven techniques used by game designers to engage players are applied to non-game real-world scenarios to produce better results.

Once a user signs up, you can offer them rewards for new referrals. In addition, to attract new users, you can host a contest that requires them to register on your site.

The main aim of Gamification is to make the loyalty program fun and enticing. It should inspire and motivate customers to take part in the program.

Thus, Gamification is used in creating new games and modifying the already existing processes that help you achieve high customer satisfaction and better ROI. 

10. Make Proper Use of Social Media

You can use social media platforms as an effective engagement tool. 

According to a survey by We, Are Social, over 2.3 billion people worldwide are active social media users. That’s huge!

Social media platforms can help you connect with several users and significantly boost customer satisfaction.  It allows you to build a rapport with your audiences and connect with them on a personal level. 

Furthermore, social media are a great platform to host various giveaways, organize contests, and provide customer support. Today, customers take to social media to share their grievances. 

You need to be fully active on social media so that you can respond to them immediately. 

But it’s essential first to describe your buyer’s persona and find out where they are the most active. 

If you are active on Facebook, but your primary audience is on Twitter, you can have difficulty engaging with them. Keep a check on where your customers are mentioning you the most. 

You can even use social media to obtain customer data and then analyze it to get ahead of your competitors.

11. Focus on Converting Free Trial Users to Paid Ones

Even if you are offering your product for free, only the interested ones will use it. These days, accessible trial prospects are more than just onlookers. 

They are spending their time on your product to understand how it can be beneficial for their businesses. 

A recent study by Sixteen Ventures found that users who are more active in the first three days of signing up for a product have a higher chance of converting than inactive users. 

Your customer engagement strategy should focus on enticing free trial users to upgrade to premium accounts. 

Personalized communication can help a lot in this process. For example, if your company’s sales representatives know a customer by their name, they will feel more connected to the brand. 

12. Generate Interactive Content

Interactive content is a great way to boost customer engagement by educating users about your products and services. Once the customers know your brand and the value that it will bring to them, they become more engaged and are willing to take action.

Even if you have a small business, you should try to incorporate the latest technology. 

For example, you can use Augmented Reality (AR) to give users an immersive walk-through into the functioning of your product. 

Customers love it when brands generate interactive, creative, unconventional, and informative content at the same time.

Remember, when you bring your products online, content is king. 

With the right content, you can not only engage better but also generate more leads and sales. 

Besides, your primary focus should be on the quality of content and not the quantity. So rather than increasing the frequency of your posts, improving the quality will generate better results.

13. Implement In-product Messaging

Apart from email marketing, a relatively newer communication channel called in-product messaging is slowly gaining popularity. 

In-product messages are highly targeted. They are messages placed directly on the product used to nudge customers to complete an already started action.

In-product messaging is influential in helping new customers get acquainted with the product. You can use it for a variety of things, such as — 

i. Displaying a message with due invoices

ii. Encouraging free-trial prospects to use premium features

iii. Sending personalized offers and discounts

The main motive of using in-product messaging is to improve customer engagement and encourage them to use your product more.

14. Take Surveys and Polls

Surveys and polls help you engage with your customers and find out if they like your product. 

Every product or service is intended to cater to the needs of customers and solve their problems. But how would you know if it is working for them or not? 

Ask your customers to fill up survey forms by sending them via emails or posting on social media. 

Besides knowing how satisfied people are with your products and services, customer surveys are a great way to understand what needs improvement. Any negative review can help you further improve your product. 

Conducting polls is also a great way to gather information about your customers and their behaviors and interests. 

When the customers visit your site, you can ask them a few questions to know them better and, in turn, improve their experience.

15. Use Omnichannel Approach for Constant User Engagement

Customers today interact with a brand through various channels, including websites, social media, email, web forms, mobile apps, and retail stores. 

Omnichannel customer engagement is all about streamlining all the customer interactions across multiple communication channels under one platform. 

The best way to do that is by using marketing automation software such as CRM (customer relationship management) tool. It can help you get a complete 360-degree view of every interaction you ever had with your customers. 

About Us

Focus on Force is the ideal preparation for your Salesforce Certification. I’ve spent more than 10 years working with the Salesforce platform in various roles (including business analyst, project manager, consultant, solutions designer, and solutions architect), and worked my way through 12 certifications in order to move up the career ladder. 

Salesforce Certifications are Tough!

Martin Gessner

Martin Gessner is the Founder of Focus on Force.

He has spent over 10 years working in various Salesforce roles including business analyst, project manager, consultant and solutions architect. Along the way he has earned twelve certifications, published "The Salesforce Career Playbook", and helps Salesforce professionals learn more about Salesforce, develop their career and prepare for certifications.