Technology is a powerful tool. If you want your business to remain resilient and competitive, it is vital to incorporate ways for technology to effectively engage customers. You can also shape your business processes, anticipate customer needs, and streamline operations by harnessing this technology. With the intelligent use of technology, you drive your organization into the future, so let’s take a look at how technology impacts that customer experience.
Are you looking to improve customer engagement for your company? BrainCX has the solutions your business needs!
What Is Customer Engagement?
What does customer engagement mean to you? Customer service involves an individual seeking out assistance, information, or solving a problem in many cases. Customer service also entails how a member of your staff interacts with that customer. Many of these traditional forms of customer engagements take place through a phone or physical presence, though they are also happening via email, mobile applications, and the internet with changing technology.
When the customer obtains the answer or assistance to their questions, you can achieve higher satisfaction levels. For a business to remain viable, there are a wide range of customer service objectives that must be met.
Is There a Difference between Customer Engagement and Satisfaction?
In most cases, customer engagement offers more to your clients than standard customer service. There is a greater emphasis on cultivating a deep relationship between the customers and the brand (or business) through optimal customer engagement. Engagement is the process of learning more about your customers and leveraging that information to provide a sense of connection and loyalty to the brand. Think of customer engagement more like a cycle and not a single interaction. With improved communication efforts from your business, you can learn more about your customers’ needs while ensuring your customers feel understood and valued. In turn, customers are more likely to provide referrals to your company and continue to do business with you.
The Role of Technology
When you have a greater understanding of the customer engagement cycle, you can use technology at various engagement stages. First, you want to understand customer intent and know why they’re contacting your brand in the first place, so you can use technology to address their concerns and issues. If you want to raise your quality of customer engagement, make sure to focus on key technology uses, such as:
- Data management and analytics that use data to understand customer preferences.
- Insight-driven marketing to target customers by using collected customer data.
- Marketing automation can help to minimize costs and improve efficiency by automating your business practices.
- Self-service optimization provides your customers the chance to use AI (artificial intelligence) that allows them to have their issues addressed without speaking to a live person.
- Workforce effectiveness can provide the training and tools to help your staff improve customer engagement.
Related: Video Experience
Using Technology To Boost Customer Engagement
Now that you know about customer engagement, here are a few ways to use technology to increase that engagement.
Business Intelligence
With business intelligence, you can use technology to get a complete view of your organization’s critical information. Business intelligence allows you to see the health of your business while allowing you to satisfy the needs of customers.
Speech Analytics
When you use artificial intelligence to interact with customers, you can help categorize their moods and analyze some of their behaviors. Along with that, you can also understand your customers’ requests, needs, and responses. Speech analytics can become a litmus test to see how your business meets those levels of customer engagement.
Using the Cloud
By implementing cloud computing, you can scale the pace of your business and help to unify channels for optimal customer engagement without taking on substantial capital expenses.
Using Social Media
You can also use social media for customer engagement purposes. Along with keeping an eye on your own accounts, social media can help you pay attention to your competitors, industry leaders, partners, and of course, your customers. From there, you can develop your very own personalized focus group to learn about the best practices in your particular industry. Social media can allow you to create a strategy that will keep up with those current trends and keep a pulse on the engagement levels of your customers.
Build Your Relationship
Use technology to build effective customer relationships, such as by sending thanks to inboxes or smartphones. Some businesses have used tech to solicit in-depth feedback to help improve consumer engagement.
Adding a Personalized Touch
Many people believe that technology is impersonal, but it can be used to your benefit by connecting you with your customers in unique, personalized ways. In some situations, companies are using technology to connect customers with a designated service rep to provide a personalized service that not everyone is offering. This gives the customer a way to feel appreciated and strengthens customer engagement. Using historical data with predictive analytics can connect customers with your business, and you can gather information to solidify interactions and boost engagement levels.
Identify Certain Keywords
You can use speech analytics to identify specific keywords that are important to your customers and their needs. Think about using the technology to reach out to your customers to make suggestions about your services or products. When you get that data, make sure to recognize those customers for their efforts. Now you have a data bank that can be analyzed for better engagement.
Empower Your Staff
Think about capitalizing on innovative technologies to improve your customer call center. Report generalizations can be accessed from the cloud, so your IT has no unnecessary downtimes to make changes or analyze reports. In addition to that, your customer service reps can have all of that information at their fingertips so that they can easily access the needs of your customers.
Value-Added Opportunities
When you move to cloud technology, you can allow your IT department to improve on “value-added” activities like business analytics, enterprise architecture, software development, and vendor relationship management. While this technology is used on the backend, your IT department can work efficiently on their tasks, which creates a win-win for your company and customers.
Related: Customer Experience
With all of the technological advances, you can enhance your customer engagement opportunities to build stronger relationships between your brand, your business, and your regular consumers. Stronger customer engagement will ultimately increase your revenue and keep your clients happy.
Do you need to make customer engagement your top priority? Find out how BrainCX can help!
