Category: Experts Talk

Think hard about how you want to make your customers feel. Think also about the opportunities you offer them to connect and engage with your brand. Why is this “exercise” important? Because good branding is -at its core- about personal connections and human emotions. And customer engagement is the process that helps you create meaningful interactions that will make your customers return to you, time after time.

What are the benefits of customer engagement?

In 2021, with a plethora of e-shops and products to choose from and the pandemic making online shopping the norm, present-day customers are not easy to acquire. In fact, acquiring a new customer can now cost five times more than retaining an existing customer.

With acquisition becoming harder to achieve, CX experts have turned their attention to a more elusive, but powerful concept: customer engagement. And this part of customer experience is increasingly becoming more important and competitive since it leads to customer retention and allows brands to stand out and attract new customers.

Let’s explore the most important customer engagement benefits further:

A. Engaged customers boost retention rates!

Satisfied customers will be back for more. And as long as their experiences with a brand remain positive, they will not only repurchase, they will also be more inclined to share their opinions of the brand and recommend it to others. According to Bain & Co, a mere 5% increase in customer retention can increase a company’s profitability by 25%-95%! 

B. Engaged customers boost loyalty!

Satisfied customers also have a positive effect on word of mouth (WoM). This results in an increase in the number of promoters and an enhanced Net Promoter Score (NPS). NPS is also a metric that can provide satisfactory predictions about customer loyalty levels and offer useful info on what customers want from a brand. And why do you need customer loyalty predictions? Because, loyal customers are five times more likely to purchase again and four times more likely to refer a friend to the company, according to Experience Matters.

C. Engaged customers are more willing to provide feedback!

The benefits of customer feedback are so numerous they deserve their own article, but one of them is the insights generated from feedback analysis that create opportunities for customer engagement and retention. However, if you want to achieve a significant survey response rate and get those valuable insights, you need to make sure you engage your customers in ways they will appreciate. If done right, the results may astonish you!

Customer engagement is an elusive concept, a process that takes time and constant adjustments to hit the spot and help brands and online retailers forge relationships with their buyers. 

Now, you may know what customer engagement is and you may also have already made efforts to boost yours. The question is: have you measured your engagement? If so, did you use the right metrics?

As is the case with everything engagement-related, there is no “one-solution-fits-all”, even in the case of its calculation. This stems from the fact that there are different ways to engage your customers via numerous different channels. Choosing your engagement metrics based on the channels used is a good first step towards generating reliable and valuable insights.

 

What are the most important engagement metrics?

 

Α. Conversion Rate

A conversion rate is the percentage of people that completed the desired action out of the number of people that were exposed to a specific campaign (e.g. Download e-Book, Subscribe to a Newsletter, Click a Link to a Website Page, Provide Feedback, Leave a Review etc.)  A high conversion rate means that your audience engaged with the content of your campaign and is eager to act when asked by your brand.

How can e-satisfaction.com help with your conversion rate?

e-satisfaction.com offers you a suite of features that help you inspire the actions of your customers. Specifically, gatoskilo.gr, an online pet shop, activated our Refer a Friend and Review mechanisms. The results? It became the most reviewed pet shop on skroutz.gr and was recommended to customers’ friends more than 200 times!

 

B. Website Metrics (Sessions, Pages/Session, Average time on page, Bounce Rate)

Session metrics measure the behaviour of a website visitor. The metric Sessions is the total number of sessions. The metric Pages/Session is the average number of pages viewed per session. Average time on page measures the amount of time (on average) users spend on your website and the bounce rate measures the percentage of sessions that leave your website without taking any additional action. Google Analytics is a great tool to measure the metrics mentioned above and see how your visitors interact and engage with your website content. 

C. Net Promoter Score (NPS)

NPS measures of consumers to recommend your product to someone they know. Ιt is also a good way to calculate your potential Word of Mouth (WoM) and diagnose if your customers are OK with their choice. Furthermore, NPS is a valid metric to check whether your customers are becoming loyal to the brand/store.

All you need to do is ask your customers a simple -but very important- question:

If you pair this question with additional, open-ended questions you can ask customers to justify their choice and offer you more feedback on what they like or dislike about your brand or products. 

NPS surveys also prove that asking for customer feedback is a great way to engage your customers: customers chose to offer their opinion because they feel valued and heard by the brand, while the brand obtains valuable insights that can be used to engage them in even more meaningful ways and earn their trust.

How can e-satisfaction.com help with your NPS surveys?

With e-satisfaction.com, you can create fully-customizable, branded and responsive NPS surveys. A range of survey templates and ready-to-use questions is at your disposal, along with a real-time dashboard, featuring a carefully selected set of charts. Segmenting and exporting your survey results becomes a simple process and if you want to compare your metrics with that of similar companies, you do so via our benchmarking mechanism. 

If you feel that the term “customer engagement” is everywhere you look, you’re not alone! You probably already know that it leads to customer loyalty and retention, but -still- if someone asked you to define customer engagement, you would not be able to come up with a comprehensive answer. So, let’s cut to the chase and attempt to shine a light on what engagement means and how it creates value for your customers.

If you go through a list of attempted definitions of customer engagement by CX experts, it becomes apparent that most of them mention the words “interactions” and “relationships”. In the rather illuminating words of HubSpot’s Paul Greenberg: “Customer engagement is the ongoing interactions between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.” 

Through these interactions, companies seek to create and strengthen their relationships with their customers. There are different ways to engage your customers, depending on their stage on the buyer’s journey, and there are also various channels, strategies, content formats and tools you can use.

However, no customer engagement effort can be successful unless online retailers, companies and brands realize that engagement goes hand in hand with the creation of value for their customers, even after the point of purchase. 

Simply put, you need to show your customers that you care about your relationship with them and that this relationship is not solely based on the number of transactions they have completed on your e-shop.  

Offering high-quality products and service is sure to get their attention in the first place, but offering them reasons to engage with your brand is what makes customers keep coming back or staying close to you.

Of course, smaller businesses cannot afford such a bombastic and costly implementation, but that does not mean that simpler engagement approaches, like online surveys, personalized emails with content based on customer history or a seasonal social media contest, don’t result in significant results. 

At the end of the day, whether we are talking about tech giants or small e-shops, it is customers that get to decide when, where and how they will interact with a brand. And you want to be offering them the opportunity to do so!

Best Case Scenario: You purchased a product online and you received it, properly packaged, looking exactly like its photos and at the expected time of delivery. Plus, you got a handwritten note from the online store with a personalized message!

Doesn’t this make you even happier for choosing this particular online store? Now, think of the people that you will recommend this store to: how would you describe your purchase experience to them and what thoughts and feelings will be cultivated by the mention of such a positive experience?

Worst Case Scenario: You purchased a product online. Your order has been delayed, you have already contacted the store/brand via phone to find out what is wrong. After all this trouble, you received your product, which looks like its online image, but it came in a package whose condition is far from mint. 

Things could have been worse if the received product did not resemble the one you chose online, but you still feel more or less angry and you will probably recount the whole ordeal to more people in the next few days, as compared to the people you would share your best case scenario experience. It is also highly likely that you will advise your peers to avoid making a purchase at this particular e-shop. 

Those two scenarios can be used to describe customer experience (also known as CX) in a nutshell! To use a more formal definition, customer experience is the sentiment that is formed from a customer’s overall purchase experience: from e-shop browsing to getting in touch with the contact centre, from placing an order to receiving it, from the delivery method to the after-sales process.

Now, you may think that you are already offering your customers a satisfactory experience but studies have shown that there is a gap dividing what brands and customers believe:

And to bridge that gap, brands need to realize that their customers’ perception is influenced by multiple touchpoints in the buyer’s journey. This determines whether they will keep interacting with a brand/product and the ways they will choose to communicate their experience.

It has also been proven that an improved customer experience results in better feedback.
Download our new eBook and learn more about CX! It is the starting point to make better thinks happen for your brand, store and products!

 

What makes someone describe a customer experience as good?

The general rule is that good experiences are the products of simple processes that are also easy to carry out. These processes mimic the average user’s thinking process and lead him to the desired outcome and the fulfilment of his/her expectations. 

List of good customer experience characteristics:

• Easy and user-friendly search, purchase, delivery and return processes.
• Various brand communication options with a low estimated response rate.
• Access to informational material that helps customers solve a problem or find the answer to a question (e.g. FAQs), since not all customers wish to communicate via telephone, regardless of the average call wait time.
• Creative, out of the box problem-solving approach, proven not only to reduce churned customers but also to create customers committed for life.
• Brand communication that shows empathy, understanding and inclusivity.
• Proactive messaging about known issues.
• Personalized communication, treating the customer as a human being instead of a number. Knowing your customers’ birthdays, zodiac sign or interests sure shows more interest than just knowing their names.
• Coherent, comprehensive product description with no grammatical/syntax errors.
• Short waiting time (delivery, reps response, social media response, customer service response etc.)
• Brand departments that communicate effectively to provide a seamless and consistent customer experience.
• Empowered employees with customer insights. This is a sign of a business culture that helps to meet customers’ expectations for personalized, easy and dynamic experiences.

CX Tip: Keep your word, be consistent, be customer-centric, be creative!

What makes someone describe a customer experience as bad?

Anything that makes the buying and after-sales process difficult results in diminishing customer satisfaction and does no wonders WoM-wise.

List of bad customer experience characteristics:

• Hidden charges, difficult shipping cost calculation, extra charges on the check out stage.
• “Siloed” brand departments with no internal communication. In such cases, customers have to repeat information, something that makes their journey longer and complicated.
• Fragmented customer experience management. A more holistic and organizational approach, where all the relevant factors are taken into account, can lead to better customer satisfaction and loyalty. 

In a nutshell, a good customer experience is all about reducing the element of unpleasant surprises in business transactions so that there are no recurring after-sales expenses or unpleasant customer grievances.

Download our eBook and learn more about CX! It is the starting point to make better thinks happen for your brand, store and products!