LiveVox : Achieving and Maintaining a Dynamic Customer Engagement Strategy

An effective customer engagement strategy leads to more satisfying customer experiences, more effective marketing campaigns, and more profitable performance all year long. It ensures that customers interact with and purchase from your brand not just during peak season or when you're running a sale, but all the time.

Many assume that strong customer engagement is simply a byproduct of delivering great service, and to be sure, that plays a role. But the companies with the most engaged fan bases make customer engagement strategy an ongoing effort. They focus on it at every point of the customer journey and are constantly taking steps to improve it.

In this article, we'll share tips for tackling customer engagement strategy from all angles, including your website, your customer service agents, your leadership team, and more.

What is a customer engagement strategy?

A customer engagement strategy is a long-term road map for attracting and communicating with prospective customers. One obvious goal is to turn prospects into buyers, but a customer engagement strategy has other objectives, too, like creating the best possible customer experience, winning great reviews, and generating word-of-mouth referrals.

A customer engagement strategy should be mapped out in alignment with an omnichannel customer experience. This means that it unfolds across all available channels customers use to communicate with your brand. Further, the strategy should be integrated across all of them to maintain a consistent brand voice and reinforce your brand values.

One major advantage modern companies have in creating customer engagement strategies is the wealth of customer data available. You can take into consideration how and where customers interact with you, which channels they prefer when they're most likely to engage, and even their demographic data when mapping out your strategy. All of this contributes to a more personalized experience, which yields better results.

The final point to note about a customer engagement strategy is that it's dynamic and ongoing. It doesn't end at the point of purchase. Rather, it continues to evolve over the entire lifetime of the customer relationship with your brand, encouraging user-generated content, winning repeat purchases, and turning ordinary customers into brand evangelists.

Tips to maintaining customer engagement

A proper engagement strategy coincides with and complements your customer journey as a whole, helping customers relate to and feel connected with your brand whether you're reaching out to them or they're contacting you. . Map out specific strategies you'll use to engage people at every stage of the funnel: attracting leads through marketing efforts, informing prospects with sales materials, delivering a product that meets their needs, providing robust customer support, offering rewards and incentives for sharing their success stories, and winning repeat sales. Diagrams like flowcharts can be helpful in visualizing this journey to make sure no parts are overlooked.

Optimize your onsite experience

Your website is one of your most valuable tools for engaging customers. First, make sure every part of it is in proper working order-all buttons lead where they're supposed to, images load as expected, and so on.

Then, turn your attention toward tailoring your site to your users' specific situations. For users on a smartphone, display a version of the site that's customized for small screens. Show repeat visitors dynamic content based on their last visit, like reminders of the products they viewed but did not purchase. Make it easy for visitors to take the next step in engaging with your brand, like by signing up for your email list or receiving text alerts.

Leverage the right technology

These days, most customers are comfortable hopping between channels and platforms when engaging with brands. For example, an interaction that began on your website might turn into a conversation on live chat, which might then result in a phone call. Your customer engagement strategy should reflect this behavior.

The right technology makes it easy to engage customers seamlessly from one platform to the next. Use a unified desktop that bridges the divide between platforms and ensures that all the pieces in your engagement infrastructure can "talk to one another" properly so the customer is never left hanging.

Follow the data

Another benefit of technology is that it allows you to capture a vast set of business analytics. You can use these to analyze how effective your engagement strategy is and make tweaks to improve performance.

Here are a few core customer engagement metrics to track:

• Monthly active users
• Visit frequency
• Average session duration
• Email open rate
• Social media engagement
• Customer satisfaction rating
• Net promoter score
• Customer lifetime value
• Churn rate

Focus on agent experience

It wouldn't make much sense to talk about customer engagement without discussing the front-line representatives who carry out your strategy: your employees. Companies with highly engaged employees outperform their competitors by nearly 150%, which means it pays to invest in supporting your staff. An all-in-one contact center platform puts the tools agents need to do their jobs at their fingertips, so they can spend less time on tedious, manual tasks and more time having meaningful interactions with customers.

The benefits of maintaining customer engagement

There's no scenario where investing in customer engagement doesn't bring positive results. Here are just a few of the many ways it can benefit your organization.

Builds customer loyalty

Customers increasingly want to spend their money with brands they trust. When you engage with your customers in a meaningful, authentic way, they'll be more likely to stick around for the long haul. Plus, having a long-term engagement strategy continues to nurture the customer relationship even after the first transaction, which means more repeat buyers that come back again and again.

Increases brand recognition

Customer engagement doesn't just apply to people who've shopped with you. It also touches everyone in your target demographic who engages with your brand. A strategic engagement plan ensures you make a positive impression on them even if they're not ready to buy just yet, which means when they are ready to purchase, your brand will be top of mind. They'll also be more likely to share their good opinion with friends and family.

Tap valuable customer insights

The best way to maximize your sales performance is to look to the people responsible for those sales: your customers. Engaging them at every stage of the customer journey will yield valuable insights you might not have picked up on otherwise, like the pain points that drive them to seek out your brand and the selling points that finally convince them to buy. Incorporating feedback surveys into your customer engagement strategy is a great idea to gather as much feedback as you can and show your customers you're listening to them.

Accelerates your sales funnel

We all want to get to the sale as efficiently as possible. A customer engagement strategy helps you do so by being an active participant in the process. Instead of sitting back and waiting for prospects to bring their problems and questions to you (and risking that the relationship goes stagnant along the way), engaging them keeps them involved with your brand and moving steadily through the pipeline you've designed.

How LiveVox can help

LiveVox helps clients deliver more effective service by unifying data and giving agents a single view of the customer. Our true omnichannel contact center platform lets you communicate with customers on the channels of their choice, adding additional channels as needed without lots of heavy lifting in the technical department.

As a solutions-first company, we're constantly looking for ways to make life easier not only for your customers but for your agents. When agents are empowered with useful, intuitive technology, they're more efficient at their work and happier with their jobs. Both of these things contribute to better service, which means more satisfied customers.

Chat with us today

It's clear that prioritizing customer engagement pays off, but deciding which actions to take can be challenging. Our team can help you take the next step toward building stronger customer relationships, which fuel long-term growth. Schedule your complimentary demo today or contact us directly to speak with one of our helpful team members.