Everyone’s talking about Customer Engagement. All of us have become marketers; the interactive touch points with the customers are now spread across various departments. Hence, customer engagement has become everyone’s responsibility. Engagement can happen through many channels, including content consumption, website page views, email opens, paid and organic search clicks, call centre interactions, likes and follows, tweets and retweets and referrals.

Increasingly, customers are driving companies to be more proactive and customer centric. Providing a positive customer engagement and valuable experience is a key differentiator for companies that will drive customer loyalty.  With the added action of advocacy, the best customer engagement allows companies to build a truly virtuous cycle. Customers disclose so that your company can learn even more about them… you create offerings that your customers like even more… and your customers become even stronger advocates of your products and brands.

Companies are facing a huge challenge to move beyond a function-by-function view of their customer to improving the coordination of customer interaction across the increasing the number of touch points. Underpinning technology will play a crucial role for companies that strive for this improvement and we believe that if they start by validating their technology and business model against the 4 points as mentioned below, they are going to achieve a superior customer engagement model:

Consistent service and message across all channels

Customers are looking for a continuous, integrated, effortless and seamless experience across all touch points, interactions and devices, especially in the self-service and mobile support channels. To meet these expectations, companies need to streamline the internal customer engagement process to deliver quality support and relevant information to answer questions at the right moment of need in the customer’s journey. The goal should be to deliver the same level of sensitivity, responsiveness and knowledge in each channel, and provide consistent answers across all channels. This means all channels must draw on the same knowledge base and customer profiles.

Real time Analytics along with predictive analysis

Customers are looking for proactive engagement and service in terms of best offers, product recommendations and the next best actions. These must be based on their profile, past interactions and their purchase history. Customer support organisations will need to provide automated proactive and pre-emptive engagement and build upon an accurate customer marketing, sales and support data. They will also need to gather necessary business insights and continuously improve customer support and engagement processes in order to drive operational performance improvement and predict the customer’s future behaviour and needs.

Central Repository of Data

Companies need to empower their support agents with integrated, modern and robust customer engagement tools that provide them with a full 360 degree view of their customers. This must include sales and marketing data, guided support tools, automated scripts, discovery expertise and the ability to retrieve relevant information quickly and easily from all sources.

Personalised and Contextual Marketing

A ’One size fits all’ approach to customer service and communication might seem convenient and cost effective for a business but it will ultimately not be the most rewarding one. Customers expect organisations to understand their needs and personalise their interactions. Ultimately, the best channels and approaches for engagement are not necessarily the ones that are the cheapest, but those that deliver the necessary information to their customers, when and where they are seeking. And these are surely the organisations that customers prefer.

By widening the view that companies use to examine customer engagement needs, several things happen: more rapid responses are enabled, better internal lines of communication are built and more pervasive marketing is executed by a nimbler organisation.

Infact, Customer Engagement goes beyond managing the interactive touch points. It must include all of the ways in which companies motivate customers to invest in an ongoing relationship with their product or brand.

As a dynamic SAP Partner with recognised expertise in CRM, Gauri has been advising its customers about the developing trends in the area of customer engagement. Gauri works alongside its customers to establish their roadmap strategies and implementation plans that will enable them to move their customer interactions forwards into the world that is now Customer Engagement, rather than just CRM. SAP’s solutions and platforms are ready to enable and we at Gauri are ready to strategise and implement it for you.

Are you ready to engage?