Customer Engagement on Social Media: Why does it matter?

Transcript.

Customer engagement in a digital world. Part 1.

What exactly is customer engagement? and why is it so important?

Caroline James, Head of Social Media, Microsoft, U.K.

So when I think about customer engagement and it’s very much about having an ongoing and meaningful relationship with your customer.

When you think about the explosion of social and mobile technology now, there’s a real expectation on businesses to be there for their customers on their terms and answering them to meet their expectations.

There’s a great Socialbakers report that talks about how 42% of customers now expect businesses to respond to them within an hour on social.

So the customers that are doing well are the ones responding on their terms and meeting their needs and if your not in that space and not able to engage with your customers successfully, there are many competitors that they could move too quite easily with just a few taps of their mobile, or whatever it might be.

We recently surveyed about 200 S.M.B.s and 52% of them that focused on customer engagement have seen an increase in net turnover.

So it’s really important for your business strategy to think about how you put customers at the heart.

What are growing businesses doing differently from their competitors?

When I think about S.M.B.s thinking to grow their business, it’s really about the differentiation from your competitors and we’ve noticed that there’s a direct correlation between S.M.B.s growing their business and those focusing on customer engagement. So that could be on approach you might take.

And I think the companies doing it really well are the ones that realise the amount of choice out there for customers.

There’s a really good Forrester report about the purchasing follow and the complexity that digital and social has now brought to businesses because of the choice that customers now have and how they can interact with businesses and brands.

What’s really important is to think about, with that choice thats available to customers, how you create that really consistent experience for the customer, whether thats on the shop floor through to your web presence through to your social channels and whoever might be picking up the phone.

The companies that are doing well are the ones making that experience really consistent across the board.

The other factor thats working really well is the S.M.B.s that have a single customer view, so they’ve got that end to end view of their engagement with their customer.

It just means that they can have a better, more meaningful conversation when they realise this customer has already bought this product, what their feedback was, this is maybe what they are looking to do next.

When they’ve got that knowledge it just means they can have a better, more insightful driven conversation with their customer.

So those are, I’d say, the two factors that are helping S.M.B.s grow when they are trying to differentiate themselves using customer engagement.

References

Socialbakers website (external link)

Forrestor website (external link)