Engaging Customers is Critical for Business
Growth
This week we'll be spending some time looking at Customer Engagement. We all have stories about how we try to engage our customers better than ever before. We all know that successfully engaging customers is critical
to an organization’s business success. We also know that engaging our customers
is more challenging today than ever before. There is so much noise to compete with for getting anyone's attention. Over the last decade and a half
we’ve watched as the online channel became
a primary one for conducting our business and even managing our lives. And
during this whole process or evolution, the customer journey has grown
increasingly complex. Customers themselves have assumed increasing power and
influence over the purchase process and for setting the tone and pace of the
relationships they have with brands and you see the evidence of this in the
really high expectations that customers have today. They expect brand
experiences that are personalized and relevant -- In other words they want
experiences that demonstrate that the brand understands their interests,
preferences and past interactions with them. They also expect their experience
with a brand and the community surrounding it to be social and interactive –
it’s no longer acceptable to have a static, one-way dialogue with your customer
base or to fail to connect your customers with fellow customers, or with your
employees and partners. And on top of all this, customers expect us to deliver
this rich and engaging, personalized and interactive experience, in a
consistent way across a variety of channels including web, mobile and social channels
or even offline venues such as in-store or via a call center. And as a result,
we see that delivery on these expectations and successfully engaging your
customers is a great challenge today.
Customers expect a personal, engaging and consistent online
customer experience. Today’s consumer expects to engage with your brand and the
community surrounding it in an interactive and social way. Customers have come to expect a
lot for the online customer experience.
·
They expect it to be personal:
o Accessible: - Regardless of my device Via my existing online identities
o Relevant: Content that interests me
o Customized: To be able to tailor my online
experience
·
They expect it to be engaging:
o Social: So I can share content with my social
networks
o Intuitive: To easily find what I need
o
Interactive: So I can interact with online communities
And they expect it to be consistent across the online
experience – so you better have your brand and information ducks in a row.
These expectations are not only limited to your
customers by any means. Your employees (and partners) are also expecting
to be empowered
with engagement tools across their internal and external communications and
interactions with customers, partners and other employees. We had a great conversation with Ted Schadler from Forrester Research entitled: "Mobile is the New Face of Engagement" that is now available On-Demand. Take a look at all the webcasts available to watch from our Social Business Thought Leader Series.
Social capabilities have become so pervasive and changed
customers’ expectations for their online experiences. The days of one-direction
communication with customers are at an end. Today’s customers expect to engage
in a dialogue with your brand and the community surrounding it in an
interactive and social way. You have at a very short window of opportunity to engage a customer before they go to another site in their pursuit of information, product, or services. In fact,
customers who engage with brands via social media tend to spend more that
customers who don’t, between 20% and 40% more.
And your customers are also increasingly influenced by their social
networks too – 40% of consumers say they factor in Facebook recommendations
when making purchasing decisions. This
means a few different things for today’s businesses. Incorporating forms of
social interaction such as commenting or reviews as well as tightly integrating your online
experience with your customers’ social networking experiences into the online customer
experience are crucial for maintaining the eyeballs on your desired pages.
--- Notes/Sources:
93% - Cone Finds that Americans Expect Companies
to Have a Presence in Social Media -
http://www.coneinc.com/content1182
40% of consumers factor in Facebook recommendations
when making decisions about purchasing (Increasing Campaign Effectiveness with
Social Media, Syncapse, March 2011) 20%-40% - Customers who engage with a company via social media spend this
percentage more with that company than other customers (Source: Bain &
Company Report – Putting Social Media to Work)
