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What are the Best Customer Service Engagement Strategies that Work?

Beryl Miller

Many businesses would put most of their resources and energy on how to land new customers. That’s cool and very right. However, has it ever occurred that you also have a priority of holding on to the customer service engagement strategies you have earlier acquired?

Sure, you need to build an effective relationship with your customers to ensure repeat purchases and choose you over your competitors. And that’s where customer service engagement strategies come in.

To convert or land most customers, retain and maintain them, you’ll need to ensure they are engaged. And that every time they interact with your product or services, they feel connected and driven to always shop with you.

In this article, we’ve discussed some of the best ways you can win customers, better their engagement, and foster a lively interaction with them while you execute strategies that enhance their attachment with your business.

But first, let’s find out what customer service engagement involves.

Understanding customer service and engagement

There is no doubt that your customers’ service engagement strategies are the lifeblood of your best business tablets. No matter what you sell or the services you provided, it would be best to have loyal and continuous buyers. Otherwise, your business is bound to fail.

But to have continuous and loyal customers, you must ensure the customers you already acquired feel engaged, loved, and satisfied. Besides, it’s much easy to retain active clients than it would be to develop new ones.

To have engaged customers, you must ensure your customer service relationships are a priority to your business. Therefore, before discussing customer engagement strategies, let’s take a step back and find out more about customer service and what it takes to engage customers.

What is Customer service?

You must have called or contacted any firm concerning a particular product or service. If you were assisted and got what you needed, then you know what customer service is. If you received not much help, all the same, you have something to say about how you were served.

It’s true every person at a given time, either before, during, or after purchase, would ask for support from their products or service providers. However, how great your products and services are won’t matter to your customers if you have poor customer service. Or when your customers don’t feel loved, valued, or cared for.

So what’s customer service?

This is the activity or process of providing support to both prospective and existing customers. In most cases, the service providers would help their customers through information assistance or create a trusting environment.

And all this they can do through different media or channels of interactions like:

For you to gain more profit on your sales or services, you must be customer service oriented.

And that means you value your customers and that you ensure they get the information they need.  In other words, a customer-oriented business keeps the needs of their customers over the business and personal needs.

Any customer service-oriented company must recognize its customers as the business. Therefore, to be customer service-oriented, you must offer an excellent customer service training plan to your staff or customer support team.

So why should you provide adequate customer service training to your staff? Reasons for customers service training program

Customer service is a differentiator and among the things, most customers consider before making purchases. Besides, most research suggests that:

Nearly 97% of customers are likely to tell others about excellent customer services they received from a particular service provider. Also, about 59% of customers would leave their current providers to try new businesses or firms for better customer service.

With this in mind, you must ensure you offer the best customer service training to your staff for the following reasons:

Equip customer support with the product knowledge

It would be very unprofessional for your support team to be unable to answer or effectively engage your customers on particular services you offer due to a lack of enough knowledge of products and services.

Imagine a situation where a customer asks for clarification about some service or products; then your support team constantly requests some time to check about the services offered. For such reasons, you should ensure you provide every employee with the basic level customer skills of product knowledge.

Let your employees and, more so, the customer service support staff have a deep understanding of your company’s offerings. Of courses, most customers can look at the details of your products from your different sites and pages.

However, when your customers need an explanation, they would always contact your customer support team through one of the different channels of interaction mentioned earlier. So your employees must know the details and understand how the products and services meet other customer’s needs.

Therefore, train your customer service staff with full proof product knowledge and understanding so that they may create a lasting impact on your customers’ experiences.

Soft skills

Customer service is about offering products and services and how your customer service team relates with your prospects and loyal customers. So, it would be better if your support staff can efficiently communicate with your customers.

The better communication your customers receive, the higher the boost customers’ satisfaction rate. Also, incorporating soft skills in your programs shows that your organization or business is focused on sales and willing to involve excellent customer service.

Here are some soft skills to train your customer service staff:

It’s widespread for customers to fall in love with a specific brand. However, to remain loyal would depend on how friendly and how well the business representatives treat them.

And that’s why you should consider training your customer service employees on soft skills to help improve your business-customer relationship and build customer brand loyalty.

Emotional intelligence

Customers love healthy relationships, and they will always respond well when they have an emotional connection with a specific brand or business.

Therefore, your staff should beware of relating and creating an emotional connection with any customers, including the angry or frustrated ones. And instead of taking things personally, train your representatives to understand different customers have varied interests and taste intuitively. So they should learn to communicate that empathy them.

Problem solving skills

Something that would always come out clear for any business is that most customers would not always be in a position to self-diagnose their problems and concerns. Likewise, a customer support team exists to help your customers solve their problems and to help you maintain a good business reputation or image.

Therefore you must train your representative to intuit what is wrong with any complaining customers and devise ways to deal with their concerns. Otherwise, you’ll be in for negative reviews, and believe me, the last thing you want to have a business is receiving hostile customers’ reviews. They can harm your business in many ways.

So, it would better if you train your customer support team on proper ways to solve customer concerns and needs.

Here are other skills you need to train your customer representatives:

Acting skills– there are some situations that your staff will come across customers who are hard to make happy. For example, let’s say a customer has a bad/terrible day, so everything does not work well even if you put more of your efforts.

In such situations, your representatives must have applied basic acting skills to enable them to maintain their calm or usual cheery despite dealing with frustrated persons.

Persuasion skills- Often, the customer support team would have to handle customers who want to purchase similar products like what you offer. However, they’ll still be weighing out which better suits their needs. Therefore, your support staff must be equipped with some mastery of persuasion and influence customers to choose your products or services.

Any business or company that provides its representatives with the right customer service skills would benefit from improved customer engagement, resulting in maximum sales and customer satisfaction.

How’s that?

With the right skills, your customer support team would manage and devise better communication and interactions through various channels to engage your customers. In other words, effective customer service would mean that your customers are more engaged and feel part of the business.

So what’s customer engagement?

Customer engagement

There is no doubt your business exists because of your customers.

Meaning in one way or another, you must interact with customers. Either when conducting sales, advertising, or when customers orders some purchase. In short, you have to interact with your customers no matter what area of business you’re based in. And that’s where customer engagement comes in.

Therefore, customer engagement involves all the ways you interact with your customers. Either online or offline.
The same also define customer engagement as the process or activity of interacting with your customers through various communication channels. Like, emails, calls, social media platforms, among others.

The engagement is aimed at fostering your relationship with your customers. Typically, your interactions should cause or drive your customers to act towards your services or products
positively.

To strengthen your relationships with your customers, you must ensure you develop some of the best customer service engagement strategies.

What are customer service engagement strategies?

Customer service engagement strategies are a collection of processes, activities, tools, and resources that a business uses to strengthen its relationships with customers.

Another definition would be a plan or workout scheme to increase customer experience and satisfaction by having more communication or interactions.

In other words, customer service engagement strategies provide a blueprint of focus on ways of encouraging customers to engage with your brand through delivering personal messages. In addition, they include how your customer support team interacts with your customers, including when they reach out for help.

Also, ways through which your business can initiate interactions and actively engage your customers. The interaction and engagement can be through various channels and mediums of communication.
So how can you develop effective customer engagement strategies?
Simple!

Here are customer service engagement strategies you need to consider

Effective and efficient strategies would take your customers from reactive to proactive and would set your business apart from your competitors.

The following are effective customer engagement techniques you need for your business:

1.  Know your customers’ journey and identify the quiet ones

The fact here is, it’s never wise to start a business without knowing whom you’re going to sell or serve. Likewise, you can’t begin developing customer service engagement strategies without knowing who your customers are or how they’ll interact with your business.

For first, you identify your customers. Of course, there are different types of customers with various needs. However, it would be best to know your customers from their level of education, job title or income, and demographic data age, location, or gender.

The best way to do that is by mapping your customers’ journey. Although you get to know the essential touchpoints and pain points through mapping, you’ll also find out more about your customers’ behaviors or traits for engagement opportunities.

After you have mapped your customers, you’ll have the chance to interact with the target ones at different service or product purchase levels. Meaning you can get to know the most active and dormant customers depending on their interaction levels.

That brings us to identifying the quiet ones!

There are several reasons why customers may decide to go silent. So, when you realize your customers no longer interact with you as they used to do, you must reach out to them. Thank them for their support and let them know you miss their interactions and would love to understand their concerns and reasons for silence.

The chances are high that they’ll feel acknowledged and part of your business. Besides, what else does a customer need if not valued and reminded that they hold a more significant part of your business?

2. Reward engagements

Any business or company that wants to get a sincere commitment and loyalty from their customers must ensure they step up their games. But, of course, stepping up your game would mean you know your customers, and you have identified both the active and silent ones.

However, if you want something that would help keep your customer engagement high and help you meet your business objectives, you should organize reward programs.

So, what type of rewards can you offer?

Here are a few ideas:

Personalization is among the most common strategies most business uses to entice their customers. There’s no doubt most customers like services and products tailored to their interests or needs.

Ensure you have your customers’ data and the information to create relevant or unique experiences to gain their attention.

With personal data like name, age, gender, and location, you can:

Do you know the reason why most business does not attract many customers?

Simple, most firms would delay responding to their customers’ needs. And it’s not like your customers would love to wait to get a response for their needs and concerns every time they reach out for help.

Through live chats, you get to gain more than you can imagine. Real-time engagement would mean immediate feedback. With immediate feedback, you’ll be able to understand:

The shortcomings making your customers unsatisfied with your service or products

In the customer service industry, agility should be your best friend. You must be able to reach out to our customers across all the media ad interaction platforms.

Remember, some customers would start interacting with you in one channel but would want to continue conversations across other favorable channels.

Therefore, you should be able to respond to your customers across a variety of platforms. This would help build your brand image and reputation of being a responsible business that is ready to assist its customers at any time. But, how does that sounds on the ears of other prospecting customers?

So how can you offer Omnichannel customer engagement? Simple, apart from the usual calls and emails, you can deploy channels like websites, live chats, social media, and phone apps.

Let’s have a look at how you can use them:

The world’s current population of those using social media stands at 50.64%. So what do you think all these people want?

We can never assume that the population is on social media to connect with friends worldwide.

Listen up! Some of the individuals that follow or liked your social media pages can be your potential customers that are in dire need of your help. You only need to follow up on them, build some rapport with them and find out the services they need.

Here are some social media platforms that allow you to connect with customers:

Through such platforms, you can connect with customers by hosting various giveaways, organizing contests to help build your brand. They also provide better ways of identifying your strengths and weakness on the services you aren’t offering well.

How’s that? You can agree with me that most customers would take their dissatisfactions to social media. And most would have awful reviews for the companies that they feel never gave them the quality services they needed.

At the same time, other customers would like to share the feeling they got from interacting with a particular product or service and how they felt about the interactions.

Therefore, you should use social media as more of an engagement tool than simply a platform. Be fully active to get to answer and know what your customers are thinking of your business while offering the best and immediate responses to their needs.

Again on the world’s population, out of 3.96 billion social media users, 99% accesses different websites and apps through their mobile devices. Meaning chances are high that you can interact and easily engage your customers through various apps.

You’ll be able to directly engage your customers, know what they need, how they feel, and what makes them happy. This offers you an additional benefit of retaining your engaged customers because they can easily reach out to your services and products at the touch of a button on their mobile devices.

3. Offer your customers’ real value

There’s no price tag for real value or relevant content and services. So, ensure your customers first and always think about their welfare by delivering enormous value no matter what niche you operate.

How can you do that?

During your customer mapping, you understand your customers, their challenges, wishes, and needs. After that, you can use the information you have to create engaging business content that addresses pressing customer concerns.

The content you produce should genuinely be helpful to your customers.  Therefore, please pay attention to your customers’ questions, listen with focus, and help deliver exceptional results that help improve their experience. In doing so, you’ll be able to build an army of your brand advocates.

Conclusion

Your customers need to be engaged throughout your business process. And it’s your responsibility to ensure you devise the best customer service engagement strategies to help you more customers satisfied and pleased with your business.

Therefore, please know your customers, including the silent ones, reward any effort of engagement. At the same time, you provide Omnichannel means of interactions for your customers. Also, provide your customers with genuine value content that solves their concerns. On the other hand, you can provide real-time engagement with live chats.

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