Customer engagement is one of the most vital ingredients of a healthy business. When customers are using your products frequently, it’s a strong indicator that they are getting value from your products — meaning your organization is doing something right. If your customers are not using your products as frequently as you’d like, there is almost surely a reason for the low customer engagement — meaning it’s time to identify what’s going wrong and fix the problems. 

However, it isn’t always so easy to determine how to increase customer engagement. There are many kinds of client engagement activities you can try, and studying customer engagement use cases can help, but you should strive to understand your customers’ unique needs as well.

What's Customer Engagement?

Before we move any further — what is customer engagement? And how does it differ from satisfaction? Customer engagement is the relationship between a customer and a business that actively develops throughout the course of their interactions. Customer satisfaction is simply a measure of whether or not customers are happy with your products, services or experiences.

Why's Customer Engagement Important?

Customer engagement activities are some of the most important actions for ensuring customer success at your organization. But why is customer engagement important? Boosting customer engagement can contribute to many different positive outcomes for businesses and customers alike. Here are a few examples of the benefits of different types of customer engagement:

Maintain Interest in Your Products and Services

If your products are not serving your customers’ needs, your customers will be much less likely to stick with your products long-term. Finding out what kinds of features or experiences encourage customer engagement can help you position your products to appeal to your customers’ needs and wants and hold their interest for a long time to come.

Build Relationships with Customers

One of the primary goals of improving customer engagement is to develop better relationships with customers. Today’s customers care a lot about the kind of experiences they receive from brands. Providing customers with plenty of opportunities for active, meaningful engagement is a great way to foster lasting brand loyalty that pays off in the form of long-term retention, repeat purchases, and word-of-mouth marketing.

Drive Growth

Speaking of word-of-mouth marketing, another great benefit of investing in your business’s customer engagement strategy is that it can help grow your customer base. Increased customer engagement can improve customer loyalty, which can lead to more brand advocates in your customer base. When customers are engaged and having positive experiences with your brand, they are more likely to recommend your business to other people and help your brand grow naturally.

Boost Revenue

When customers are more engaged, it means they are using your products more frequently, getting more value from your products and interacting with your brand in more meaningful ways. Increased product usage and more interaction from customers can ultimately lead to more sales and higher revenue. Providing opportunities for customer engagement shows customers that you care about their customer experience and can encourage them to remain committed to your company and continue making repeat purchases.

What Are Customer Engagement Examples?

There are many different ways to create a more engaged customer base. Every different customer engagement strategy example has different benefits and could work best in different situations. Let’s break down a few of the best customer engagement examples you can use at your organization:

Omnichannel Engagement

Today’s customers have a ton of choices when it comes to the channels they use to interact with businesses. It should be easy for them to engage whether they’re using social media, email, live chat or any other channel. Using tools to combine every engagement channel from your business’s point of view can make it easier to provide seamless, engaging interactions for customers. 

Chatbot Engagement

Chatbots are a means of automating text-based customer interactions. Bots have the advantage of being able to respond immediately to any number of customers at once. Using bots to answer common questions and filtering more complicated queries toward human agents can help maximize efficiency. Combining digital customer engagement examples with the efforts of human customer support representatives is one of the best ways to boost customer engagement. 

Personalized Engagement

Creating engaging experiences for customers is all about personalization. Customers usually want brands to treat them like unique individuals, not like numbers in a sales strategy. A huge part of showing customers that you value them is providing them with personalized experiences. Learning about each customer’s needs and preferences and incorporating that information into their customer experience is crucial to a successful customer engagement strategy.  Fun customer engagement ideas that are targeted at individual customers are often more successful than generic customer engagement ploys that treat customers as nothing more than a demographic.

5 Tips to Increase Customer Engagement

Your business’s customer engagement won’t improve on its own. You’ll need an effective customer engagement plan to drive the results you want to see. Here are our best 5 tips to increase customer engagement:

1. Focus on Customer Outcomes

Successful customer engagement strategies are often customer-centric. It’s important to consider the buyer’s journey from the customer’s perspective and seek to create experiences that meet customers where they’re at. Customer engagement event ideas should always be planned with a positive customer outcome in mind. Switching providers is easier than ever, especially for SaaS customers. If a business is not providing the outcomes a customer needs, it’s very likely the customer will simply find a company that can provide the desired outcomes. That’s why a huge part of keeping your customers engaged is showing them that you can give them the business outcomes they want to see.

2. Provide Proactive and Personal Support

By the time a customer approaches your customer support team with a question or a problem, they’re likely already frustrated. While it’s good to be ready for this scenario with excellent reactive support, it’s better to avoid the situation altogether by offering proactive support. Personalized support options like a self-service customer academy powered by an LMS (learning management system) can make it possible for customers to take full advantage of the product and avoid common issues. 

3. Introduce a Customer Academy

You can use an LMS like Northpass to implement a cloud-based customer academy where your customers can access information about products anytime they need it. You can completely customize your Northpass-powered learning academy to give your customers an engaging, personalized online education experience. When customers are able to educate themselves and answer their own questions about products, it can help them spend less time waiting for answers and more time engaging with the product and getting real value from it.

4. Collect and Implement Customer Feedback

It would be nearly impossible to create a successful customer engagement strategy without paying any attention to customer feedback. We’ve already established that your customer engagement strategy should be personalized according to your customers’ unique needs. Naturally, you’ll need to direct a large amount of your efforts toward researching what those needs are. Collecting customer feedback directly from your customer base is one of the best ways to do this research. For example, you can look for ways to improve customer engagement in social media interactions with customers that indicate what customers care about. Social media can be a great channel for sourcing customer feedback because customers often use social media to get in touch with brands when they are either very satisfied or very dissatisfied.

5. Invest in Your CSMs

Your customer success managers are the people responsible for guiding customers toward successful outcomes. CSMs are absolutely vital to your business’s customer engagement campaigns. When customers are able to achieve successful outcomes with products, they are more likely to remain engaged. Even when things aren’t going well, a skilled customer success manager can keep the customer engaged and steer them toward the solutions they need to keep getting value from the product. 

Of course, for any of this to be possible, your customer success managers need access to the tools and knowledge to help them support customers. One of the best ways to supply your customer success managers with the resources they need to help improve customer engagement is by using a learning management system to implement an online employee academy. Just as you can use an LMS like Northpass to build a customer academy, you can also use it to provide employees with access to vital training materials and other resources.  

Customer Engagement Programs

Your business’s client engagement strategy is an essential consideration that directly influences customer success and customer relationships. It’s very important for your customer success team to come up with effective customer engagement ideas to drive growth at your organization. Some of the best customer engagement programs remain focused on customer outcomes and providing customers with personalized experiences. You can use a learning management system like Northpass to build an online customer academy that promotes engagement by giving customers access to value-enhancing product knowledge.