Are you really engaging your customers?

You can’t build engagement without first building relationships. Strong relationships with customers are the saving grace your business can draw upon when inevitable problems arise, or when there is temptation from the competition.

Customer engagement is the conscious effort to build trust and relationships with the people who are buying what you are selling. It encompasses all the ways you connect with customers - face-to-face, emails, phone calls, conversations via social media, websites, community forums, and more. Creating a strategy around these interactions is a great way to build loyalty.

Think of suburban restaurants during the COVID lockdown periods. Overnight most restaurateurs had to shut their doors to diners and rely completely on take-away. Those that had a customer engagement strategy in place with communication channels in operation were immediately able to contact their customers with take-away offers, home delivery options, and more. No doubt they fared much better than those who had to wait for their customers to contact them.

Five ways to create better customer experiences

Here are a few tips for creating high-value engagement and delivering a better customer experience. Follow these and you’ll unlock customer experiences that deliver value where your customers most crave it.

Develop emotional connections by making your marketing more human

Customers find it much easier to engage with a brand that has a personality, and you can achieve this by making your company more relatable and more memorable.

One of the most effective ways to build emotional connections and show your personality is to prove that your customers are dealing with an actual person and not just a nameless, faceless corporation.

You can do this by introducing the people that work for your organisation through channels like email, social media, your company website, or more. Instead of replying to social comments with an anonymous brand logo and no name, use a real person’s name for a strong impact.

The same applies to blog posts on your website. By including author bylines (name and title) and short biographies, you allow your customers to get to know you and begin building a relationship. You can also invite some of your people to become brand ambassadors so they are the face of the community, which further personalises your brand. This can also work for the business owner or CEO.