Engagement can increase the number of loyal and recurring customers in your business. Find out the important role your CRM can play in improving your customer engagement initiatives.
If you want incredible growth in your business, you now need to look beyond ensuring customer satisfaction.
It’s no longer enough to just meet the expectations of your target market. These days, it’s all about engagement and building relationships.
Gone are the days when you just had to worry about delivering solutions. You now have to think about the overall experience of your customers when they interact with your business.
The modern-day customer wants more than just your offer. They want to feel heard and have a connection with you. Only then will they consider staying loyal to you.
So, how can you do all that?
One effective way is by utilising the data in your CRM to boost your efforts in customer engagement.
And in this article, you’ll learn how to use your current CRM to do just that so you can win your customers’ loyalty and establish long-term relationships with them.
4 Characteristics of Customer Engagement
Before anything else, what exactly does customer engagement mean?
Simply put, it’s about focusing on building a long-term relationship with your customers. With customer engagement, you don’t want them to simply buy from you once and then say goodbye. The goal is to make that relationship go beyond one transaction.
Customer engagement is all about regular interactions so they’ll never forget about your business. It’s about constantly communicating with them so you can stay on top of their minds.
This then begs the question: why should you go through all the trouble?
Because this is how you’ll turn them into loyal customers. It’s how you can make them unofficial brand ambassadors who’ll recommend your business to people they know.
But before you work on boosting your customer engagement, you have to understand the four different characteristics that define it.
Characteristic #1. Active
When we talk about active customer engagement, this is about directly communicating with your customers.
For example, you can engage with them when they like or comment on your post. Or, you can set up a Facebook group where you can interact with them.
Also, you can create forums and channels where you can build a community and regularly interact with your customers. It’s where you can ask for comments and feedback, and share insights about your business.
You want to get to know your customers so you can learn how to improve your products and services.
Characteristic #2. Emotional
This characteristic is about connecting with customers on an emotional level.
The truth is, it takes time to develop this level of engagement. You have to consistently communicate with them until they feel like they can trust you.
But when you reach this point, they’re more likely to give you more compliments than complaints. Not only that but they also won’t hesitate to share their thoughts and information with you. That’s because they know you can be trusted to value and protect it.
Characteristic #3. Rational
The rational characteristic of customer engagement is all about knowledge and understanding.
You see, customers won’t buy from you without knowing more about your business and what you have to offer. They first want to know that you are the right company to buy from or work with.
So, be generous with the information. Make it easy and convenient for your customers to know more about you and your business. Talk about your product or service, brand story, company profile, and sometimes, even stories about your leaders.
Give customers an official platform to get relevant details about you, such as a business website. And remember, the information you provide may be the key to pushing potential customers to do business with you.
Characteristic #4. Ethical
This is all about meeting the standards that customers demand from businesses they want to support. As such, you have to be vocal with your practices and advocacies.
Make sure you have clear and definite guidelines that reflect your company values. You want your ideal customers to resonate with them. Because if they know your values and find them aligned with the values they find agreeable, they can easily decide to become loyal to you.
Now that you know the four characteristics of customer engagement, it’s time to find out how you can improve on them so you can connect with your customers better.
The key is to have a thorough understanding of who your customers are and what they need. And there is one place where you can get all this information:
Your CRM.
7 Ways to Use CRM to Improve Customer Engagement
If you want to improve your customer engagement so you can get better sales, you have to utilise your CRM. Here are seven ways to do that:
Way #1. Ensure Faster Responses to Customer Inquiries
It’s normal for customers to have a lot of questions about your product or services. But you have to respond to their inquiries quickly if you want them to complete the sale.
After all, people have shorter attention spans these days. That means if you take long to respond to their questions, you might lose the sale. Worse, they might end up going to your competitor instead.
To avoid that, set up your CRM so you can be alerted of customer inquiries.
But that’s not all.
Use your CRM to keep communicating with customers. Because even if they’ve already availed of your product or service, they’ll still have questions about it. What more for prospects?
You can make things easier by making sure customer communications end up in one specific place. This way, you and your team can monitor all inquiries and questions, and you can answer them as soon as possible.
Way #2. Maximise Collection and Implementation of Customer Feedback
The best way to improve your business is by directly asking your customers for their feedback about your products, services, and even your business. You can do it through email, but you can also encourage your customers to answer surveys on your website, among others.
Make sure to leverage the customer data you have in your CRM by sending out an email asking for feedback to your email list. You can do it as an annual survey, then implement the feedback that they give you.
Once that’s done, send out another email detailing the improvements you’ve made. This will give your email subscribers the impression that you listen to them and you value their feedback.
The next time you send out a survey, they’ll be most likely to participate since they know that their opinions will be given importance.
Way #3. Efficiently Track Customer Details
How do you build rapport with potential customers?
Salespeople do it by being relatable.
You can use the same principle to improve customer engagement. Get to know your customers through your CRM. That way, you can position your business as something that’s relatable to your target audience.
But don’t focus on their demographics alone. Also consider the common complaints, compliments, and other feedback. Use these to improve your offer, even your existing products and services.
Way #4. Have a Better Understanding of Evolving Customer Preferences
The thing about your target market is they have evolving preferences. You may know what they want now, but that can change next year.
Use CRM to help you keep up with the changing needs of your customers.
So, find a CRM that can record how your customers communicate. You want to make sure every interaction, specifically the parts where they describe themselves and the problems they want you to solve, gets recorded. It can reveal a lot of things about their preferences.
Then, as you track customer preferences, you can identify the changes that could give you ideas for new marketing campaigns, product developments, etc.
Ultimately, your CRM can help you come up with better campaigns that’ll resonate with your ideal market, not to mention improve conversions and customer satisfaction.
Way #5. Identify High-Value Customers And Personally Engage With Them
Did you know that you can use your CRM to identify who your high-value customers are?
These are the people who’ll help your business profit. And the data you get from your CRM will help you know who they are.
To initiate personal engagement with them, make sure you follow their accounts on social media. This will ensure that you will see their posts when you look at your feed. That way, you can leave a comment or a reaction – and do it consistently.
When high-value customers feel important, it will reaffirm their commitment to you. It’ll strengthen their loyalty to your business because they know that you hear them and you value them.
Way #6. Come Up With Content That’ll Trigger Customer Engagement
Your CRM can also be useful in identifying the types of content your customers often react to. In doing so, you’ll understand what they want and be able to provide the content they’ll really read.
But this isn’t about giving them content that ends with a sales pitch. It’s more about giving them valuable content that they can learn from. In doing so, you can enrich their knowledge so they’ll know how to use your products or utilise your services better.
By giving your customers this type of content, it’ll make them feel that you’re genuinely concerned about them. After all, you’re willing to give them free content that you know will make their lives better.
And that kind of valuable content will motivate them to keep engaging with you and your business.
Way #7. Leverage Personalised Engagement
With the right CRM, personalised engagement becomes easier.
The data provided by your CRM will let you get to know your customers better. That means you can interact with them in a manner that’ll make it seem you know them personally. This will then encourage them to open up and be comfortable with you.
When that happens, you can get valuable and unfiltered feedback from them. It’ll then help you improve your business in such a way that’ll surely get their support.
Benefits of Better Customer Engagement to the Business
Once you learn how to use your CRM to improve customer engagement, you’ll get three important benefits.
First of all, your CRM can automate the interaction in a way that feels authentic. This will ensure that your response to questions and inquiries happens fast enough so customers feel that you can anticipate their needs.
Second, your CRM can lessen the manual labour exerted by your team to strengthen customer relationships. This will allow them to focus on other tasks and be more productive and allow your business to be more profitable.
Third, your CRM can improve and streamline communications within your team. By referring to a single and automated source of information, everyone can work cohesively. After all, they’ll be using the same data to improve your business’s customer engagement initiatives.
There are a lot of CRM programs that you can use. Keap and InfusionSoft are only a few of the tools that we use at Automation Agency. So, it’s what we keep recommending to our clients over the years.
Grab the Opportunity to Boost Customer Engagement
Customer engagement is a crucial part of your sales and marketing strategy. Fortunately, you don’t have to look far to find a tool to help you improve engagement. You just have to leverage your CRM and use the data it provides to get to know and engage your customers better.
The more you know about them, the better your customer engagement efforts will be.
But if you need help in using your CRM to engage your customers better, get in touch with our helpful Concierge Service. You can rely on our efficient Automation Agency Heroes to help you set up your CRM in a way that’ll improve your customer engagement initiatives.
