Enhancing Customer Engagement through Digital Channels

Should you look at digital channels for your customer engagement?

In the past, most organizations were passive and reactive to customer needs, but things have changed drastically in the past two decades towards being proactive.

A multitude of engagement channels has evolved, and the use of digital channels has skyrocketed.

The objective of proactively engaging with customers is to offer the best possible customer experiences. When your products or services are comparable to your competitor’s offerings, you know that you need to differentiate, and the only differentiator is the experience you provide.

So, how well you engage with your customers has become the competitive differentiator today.

I am sure that every organization has some form of digital engagement with its customers. But is it sufficient or optimal?

When Should You up Your Digital Customer Engagement Activities?

Imagine a situation where the only channel of engagement you have is the voice channel. Your agents are overwhelmed with the number of calls and find it difficult to address customer needs.

You’d definitely need digital channels, more so the asynchronous channels like email, helpdesk, FAQs, and knowledge bases. Voice and video communication requires you to be present physically.

Besides this, look at what your competition is doing. Do they have more channels to service their customers than you do? Some critical questions that you should ask yourself about your competition include:

• Does your competition have self-service tools to address customer needs?
• Have you gone through the customer reviews of your competition? Do the reviews praise their customer service?
• Do they offer omnichannel engagement?

These are pointers that you should look at and up your digital play regarding customer engagement. I’d say that you should go one-up on your competition in enhancing your customer engagement to stay relevant for your customers.

Well, I am sure that all of us agree that an improved engagement strategy will create stronger customer relationships.

This would mean that you could retain your customers, and they would likely become advocates of your offerings.

How to Boost Customer Engagement through Digital Channels?

Here are the best ways to improve your customer engagement through digital channels.

1. Live Chat

I wanted to check on information on my health policy. I went to my insurance provider’s website, and I had a chat. It had both an automated option and the option to chat with an agent. I had a conversation and got my issue addressed within 2 minutes.

It is so important to have this digital channel for better customer engagement. Ensure that you provide the option for your customers to switch to the voice channel whenever they need it.

This removes a lot of headaches and gives the customer confidence that they are being taken care of.

2. Messaging Service

Access to digital channels like WhatApp messenger or Facebook messenger makes it very convenient for both the customers and your organization.

You can proactively send out offers, deals, and even downtimes on WhatsApp. WhatsApp is an active and real-time channel for your customers to avoid missing them.

We use that for our customer service as they are assured of getting responses within minutes from us on WhatsApp.

You can choose any messenger app as a part of your digital channel, which would make it very convenient for you to engage your customers proactively.

3. Social Media

60% of the world’s population uses some form of social media. I assume that at least 60% of your customers will use it.

Given this data, it is a no-brainer to be present and respond to customer needs on social platforms. Besides, you can also do promotions of your new offerings that your customers might find interesting.

Improving your social media with interesting content and one-to-one chat interactions greatly enhances customer engagement.

4. Chatbots

About 70 to 80% of your customer needs in most industries are standard and repeatable. All of them can be automated, which can be addressed by chatbots.

The advantage is that your customer service works 24×7 without the need for human beings to man every channel. Besides, customers can be transferred to human agents if the need arises.

5. Email

A responsive email channel is critical for customer engagement.

Assume that you send an email complaint about the product functionality. Within seconds, you receive an email stating that your complaint has been registered and assigned to a customer support executive. The executive will respond to you in the next 60 minutes.

This response would give you so much confidence and reassurance that your needs would be addressed. Besides, you can email regular updates on the status of the updates till it gets resolved.

After all, don’t you agree that every customer conversation is an opportunity to enhance customer relationships?

This is the most basic digital channel that every organization should definitely have.

6. FAQs and Knowledge Bases

Not every customer wants to reach out to you for every small need of theirs. Often, they would like to sort things out themselves.

What is the best way for them to sort out their needs?

Please provide them with FAQs and knowledge bases to address most things your customers want on your website.

This would considerably reduce the workload of your agents on other channels, allowing them to delight your customers by addressing complex problems.

Read more on: Digital Customer Experience

Ensure that you provide an omnichannel experience, allowing you to carry the context of customer support and buying journeys across your digital and non-digital channels.