Customer Engagement

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement refers to any two-way interaction between a brand and its customer on a communication channel. Several brands engage with customers consistently — even after they’ve made a purchase — to build customer loyalty and win repeat business. Social media, community forums, websites, and emails are some commonly used digital channels for customer engagement.

Providing value to your customers through active interactions is the core of customer engagement.

What are the benefits of customer engagement?

Customer engagement can benefit your brand in the following ways:

Gather valuable customer feedback

Customer engagement helps your brand uncover customers’ true feelings about your products and services. It helps identify your most valuable products and pinpoints areas that need to be improved in order to offer a consistent experience across touchpoints.

Improve customer retention

Engaged customers build a long-term relationship with a brand because they feel heard and appreciated. By engaging respectfully with your customers, resolving their concerns, and improving your product based on their feedback, you give them reasons to stay — brands retain 89% of customers when they deliver consistent service across all channels.

Create better upsell opportunities

Consistent customer engagement creates a loyal customer base over time. These customers not only become your brand advocates and fuel your word-of-mouth marketing, but it is also easier for you to sell your other products to them. Upselling to loyal customers improves sales velocity, saves time, and reduces the costs involved in converting a new lead.

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Why is customer engagement important?

Keeping customers engaged throughout their purchase journey (and beyond) helps brands improve business metrics such as revenue, CSAT, customer retention, etc. Over time, this engagement fosters customer loyalty and advocacy, making it easier to collect valuable customer insights and create data-driven marketing strategies, including retargeting, content development, email, and more. Customer insights further improve sales processes by empowering outreach messages and pitch decks with relevant data.

Learn more: 3 Effective Ways to Improve Customer Engagement on Social Media

Customer engagement best practices

To reap the benefits of customer engagement, you need to create an efficient customer engagement strategy, the core elements of which include:

One brand voice

Brands receive massive volumes of inbound messages from chats, comments, communities, and more, thus increasing the risks of off-brand voice. Maintaining one brand voice across channels lends you credibility, bolstering customer engagement with consistent and cohesive conversations. 

Consumer behavior analysis

Studying consumer behavior across various channels allows you to identify inefficiencies in your customer engagement strategy. Analyze interactions that resulted in a bad customer experience and learn which channels customers engaged with the most, and fine-tune your strategy accordingly.

Content creation

When you create content that educates and resonates with customers, they are more likely to engage with it. By understanding their likes and preferences, you can create targeted content that further increases customer engagement. Engaged and happy customers can help you create UGC (User-generated Content) by voicing their satisfaction on social media platforms or product review websites, thereby establishing a credible online presence.

Learn more about review management.

Publish, Engage, Unify: 18 Ways to Fuel Your Social Media Strategy

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Engage your customers where they are with Sprinklr Social Engagement & Sales

Engaging effectively with customers on social media and other digital touchpoints is easier said than done. But, if done right, customer engagement can reduce your brand’s negative sentiment by 73% and generate $700k in annual retention-driven revenue from sales, delivering a positive experience for every customer.

Sprinklr’s Social Engagement & Sales lets you deliver positive experiences on 30+ digital channels and measure performance at scale by:

Making it cost-efficient to convert leads via automation

Brands receive thousands of messages every day and must quickly identify conversations that matter most. Sprinklr helps you filter out spam messages and low-intent feedback, allowing your teams to proactively identify engageable conversations containing leads, complaints, and more, thereby reducing response time and making it cost-efficient to convert leads even with a modest workforce.

Empowering your teams to respond faster with AI

Responding to engageable customer conversations can be labor-intensive, resulting in delayed responses — 75% of customers expect a response from brands within five minutes. Sprinklr’s AI gauges a customer’s intent behind a direct message or comment and enables you to respond with the right message and reduce average handling time (AHT). Such capabilities have enabled brands like Microsoft to respond 30% faster to their customers.

Reducing risks by maintaining an on-brand voice

AI-powered compliance checks can help you and your teams maintain compliance with brand guidelines to ensure your responses are never off-brand, ensuring the content is relevant and flagging any bias before it reaches the customer.