Customer Engagement

Customer expectations are growing every day. That’s why customer engagement across all stages of the customer journey determines the success of your e-commerce endeavours. And since first impressions count, you’ll need to ensure you understand your end-customers’ needs from the start.

The benefits of Customer Engagement

Guaranteeing your digital success goes beyond simply knowing who your audience is. It also demands you understand how to attract, convert, and retain your audience. Regardless if you operate an established company or have only recently started on the road to business success, customer-centricity and digital marketing lead to many customer engagement benefits; such as building traffic, developing your brand’s reputation, and ultimately creating more awareness and engagement for your brand, products and services in general.

Benefits of customer engagement from a business point of view:

• Build brand loyalty
• Gather data on customer behaviour 
• Gain cross-channel insights
• Create audiences and segment consumers
• Increase transparency on brand performance
• Your business aligns with their needs and behaviour
• Sustain an emotional brand

Customer expectations are growing every day. That’s why a customer experience strategy is critical to the success of your business. You’ll need to start with understanding your customer needs at every stage of the customer journey.

Customer Experience strategies are best defined and executed when data is gathered at scale by holistic measurement. This is just your first step, once you have the data about customer behaviour flowing in, this data is only as good as your ability to understand it.

Data should be the foundation to define a successful customer engagement strategy

Focus on both, operational & experience data:

• Operational data: Data can generally be gathered from an operational point of view – revenue, number of visitors, conversion rate etc. –  
• Experience data: Data from and experience point of view – Net Promotor Score, Customer Satisfaction Score, Customer Effort Score, etc.   

Since in most companies operational data is readily available, typically there is a lack of availability on data around customer behavior. To define a customer experience strategy, it is important to get to know the anxieties & motivations of buyers and learn what drives and triggers the customer journey. 

Business Transformation and Customer Engagement

Going through a successful digital business transformation is essential for organisations who want to survive, as digital is now a customer requirement rather than a preference. Research shows that even though 92% of companies acknowledged the need for digital change, over 70% of companies fall short of their objectives (BCG, 2020), and therefore fall to provide business value.

The challenges that companies currently face in digital lie, as always, in aligning inside-out processes with the external environment in order to stay relevant to the customer. Customer behavior has changed dramatically and continues to change, due to developments in the digital channel, having higher expectations of what companies' experiences should be. This offers many possibilities to grow the business, but also requires a ‘customer obsessed’ mindset. 

Therefore, using customer engagement and customer-centricity as the driving forces for your business and digital transformation will likely help you achieve customer value, which in return, will generate higher business value in terms of revenue and sales. Companies that are capable of meeting the needs of their customers, will gain a strong competitive advantage in the market.

Digital Experience Platform

Nowadays, organizations aim to deliver the best customer engagement possible, but often fall short of their goal. This can be caused by failing to attract the right audience, not offering the right experience, your digital product missing essential features, or your product simply failing to perform according to expectations. As a company, if any of these reasons apply to you, then consider upgrading to a Digital Experience Platform (DXP). This will allow you to offer an optimized Customer Experience (CX) and turn things around.

A DXP is a centralized software platform, designed to enable optimal digital experiences to a variety of customers through websites, apps, portals, billboards, kiosks, IoT devices … actually any digital touchpoint. (Gartner)

The DXP is in the center, it orchestrates, using APIs. It aggregates data from all different technologies to steer the customer on the right path every time he steps through the (digital) door.  However, achieving customer-centricity and providing the right experience requires more than technology,

Real digital transformation spans both the experience layer and the operations core. (Forrest analyst, Liz Herbes)

Regardless if you operate an established company or have only recently started on the road to business success, customer-centricity and digital marketing enable you to build traffic, develop your brand’s reputation, and ultimately create more awareness and engagement for your brand, products and services in general. SQLI can support you with crafting a tailor-made Digital Engagement Strategy, which will serve as both the guide for all these efforts as well as the foundation for the successful deployment of all your customer engagement services.

With more than 30 years of experience in designing and building digital products, we are an award winning team of technical and creative thinkers. We know the best results are achieved when both design and development start and finish together.