Customer Engagement 3.0: How to create value to customers in the digital age

What is customer engagement?

Running a successful business in the world of today involves optimizing not only the sales interactions but also the methods of engagement, the types of content created, and the channels used to carry out this engagement. Customer engagement focuses on providing personalized on demand experience seamlessly distributed across different channels.

According to Aberdeen Group Inc research, companies with strong customer engagement strategies retain an average of 89% of their customer, as compared to the 33% of companies with weak customer engagement.

Meet of customer 3.0: Digitally connected, highly-informed

To better understand the evolution of the Customer Engagement, let’s first understand the previous generations.

• Engagement 1.0: spreading coupons and promotions everywhere on mail and e-mail
• Engagement 2.0: using Google and Facebook ads to attract customers and grow your audience
• Engagement 3.0: personalized engagement with your customers to make them feel important.

Customer 3.0 has evolved from a position of accepting the demands made by companies, to that of a power player reshaping the consumer landscape. They are a hyper-connected, highly informed, shared experience generation who businesses can’t afford to ignore. This customer no longer responds to mass marketing techniques. Instead he demands a highly personalized approach.

Customer engagement 3.0 is about encouraging your customers to interact and share the experiences you create for them as a business. Businesses need to look beyond the traditional ‘one size fits all’ approach, to do so, they need to fundamentally transform their digital operating models and start thinking like a customer. When executed well, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster your company’s growth and loyalty.

4 ways businesses can boost loyalty and increase engagement across multiple channels.

1. Content:

The new marketing relies on earning people’s interest instead of buying it. And it’s all about creating content and interacting with your customers in a two-way communication. Here are few examples how to create the right content to inspire engagement:

• Focus on certain niche-specific quality content to educate your customers and connect them to your brand and products. For example, offer relevant services that will make your customers’ lives easier.
• Post images of customers using your product and give examples how to do it. 91% of consumers are more likely to shop with brands that provide relevant recommendations
• Use videos of your new product and services to interact with your customers. Video increases end user customer engagement by 33%.

2. Distribution:

Messaging apps are the new content distribution channel, what do WhatsApp, Fb Messenger, Slack and We Chat have in common, they’re all messaging platforms. They saw more active users than social media did in 2017.

3. Chatbot & Automation:

Gartner predicts that by 2020, 85% of customer interactions will be managed without human interaction. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella declared that bots are the new apps, and the “next big thing”.

They are more personal than email, more targeted than Twitter, and have the ability to showcase your personality way more effectively than any other marketing channel. However, chat-bot marketing strategy should be done carefully, a marketing chatbot should never push over advertising or, even worse, promotions.

4. Data analytics:

Most companies are using data to manage transactions, not relationships. In 2019 businesses will begin to recognize the problem and will start shifting the focus from short-term transactional view to long-term customer relationships.

You will want to capture, aggregate, and integrate data from multiple sources to garner new customer insights and deepen your relationships. Best examples in practice would possibly be a mix of loyalty programs, reward cards, code-enabled offers, newsletters for leads and prospects identification. Moving quickly from this data to customer insights will require some form of automation of your data analysis.

Final thoughts:

You can’t win over today’s empowered customers with yesterday’s fragmented engagement approach. The customer now has access to information which is readily available and easily accessible.

In this new age of empowered customers, it's no longer good enough to just think about the monetary value of the relationships that we have with customers and how we can increase spend and frequency of spend. To stand out, firm's need to go deeper, be braver and think differently if they are to develop the sort of relationships with their customers that they want.