5 Proven Ways to Drive Customer Engagement and Build Loyalty

Customer engagement and loyalty are crucial for the sustainable growth and success of your business. As regards your customer support function and helpdesk, these factors become even more critical as they directly impact your customer satisfaction, retention, loyalty, and advocacy.

However, providing excellent customer service is no longer enough to win and retain customers. You need to go beyond that and create meaningful interactions that engage and delight your customers. Indeed, you need to exceed their expectations and make them feel valued and appreciated.

In this blog post, we’ll explore some proven ways to drive customer engagement and build loyalty that you can apply to your customer support and helpdesk functions.

1.   Understand your customers

This is the crucial first step in driving customer engagement and loyalty – you must know and understand your customers. You have to be familiar with their needs, preferences, and pain points so you can tailor your services and support to their specific requirements.

Here are some useful ways to gather customer feedback to develop those vital insights into your customers and get to understand them:

• Surveys. Conduct regular surveys to collect feedback on your services, customer support, and your customers’ overall experience. Use tools like SurveyMonkey or Google Forms to create and distribute surveys easily.

• Customer support interactions. Analyse the interactions between your customers and support agents to identify common issues, questions and complaints. Use this information to improve your support documentation and processes, and motivate your staff.

• Social media monitoring. Monitor social media channels to see what customers are saying about your brand, products, and services. Use tools like Hootsuite or Mention to track brand mentions and sentiment to develop valuable insights into your customers.

• Now use these vital customer insights to personalise your technical support services and interactions with your customers. For instance, if you know that a customer has a history of issues with a particular product, proactively provide them with resources and support to avoid future problems.

2.   Provide exceptional customer service

Make no mistake – providing outstanding customer service is the whole foundation of effective customer engagement, loyalty and retention. You may have an excellent brand, but if your customers don’t feel valued and well-served, they’ll go elsewhere.

Here are some best practices to follow in building your exceptional customer service:

• Timely responses
  Respond to customer inquiries and issues as quickly as possible, ideally within minutes or hours, depending on your support channels.

• Empathetic communication
  Make sure your agents show empathy and understanding when communicating with customers, even if they can’t solve their problem immediately.

• Thorough resolutions and follow-up
  Ensure that your agents provide effective and satisfactory resolutions to each customer’s inquiry or issue. They must also follow-up to ensure that the customer is indeed satisfied with the outcome.

• Proactive outreach
  Reach out to customers proactively to offer support, advice, or recommendations. For example, you can send personalised emails with product recommendations based on a customer’s purchase history.

• Surprise and delight gestures
  Surprise your customers with unexpected gifts, gestures, promotions and offers. These can be a discount, a personalised thank-you note for feedback or suggestions, or a personalised birthday card.

• Personalised recommendations
  Provide personalised recommendations based on a customer’s preferences or past behaviour. For example, if a customer frequently buys running shoes, you can recommend related products or accessories, or draw their attention to relevant upcoming promotions of special offers.

• Handle difficult or upset customers with professionalism and tact
  Motivate and train your agents to always remain calm and respectful, and focus on finding a resolution that satisfies the customer.

3. Create a community of loyal customers

If you can create a community of loyal customers that advocate for your brand and promote it online and by word of mouth, you are well on your way to success! Here are some effective strategies to follow to build a customer base that is engaged with and loyal to your brand:

• Develop your brand’s social media engagement
  Engage with your customers on social media channels by sharing relevant content, responding to comments and messages, and running contests, special promotions or giveaways.

• Establish loyalty programmes
  Establish a loyalty programme that rewards loyal customers for their continued support. For example, you can provide points for each purchase that customers can redeem for discounts, exclusive perks of special offers.

• Host customer events that will promote your brand and attract more customers. These can include:
  • Live Q&A sessions with an expert in your industry.
  • Live product demos and tutorials.
  • Webinars that cover the latest trends in your industry.
  • Sharing helpful and interesting research and data with your customers.
  • Sharing success stories from customers and invite customers to share their own.
  • Offering collaborative workshops and host virtual networking events that allow your customers to connect and build relationships.

Related content: Tech support user communities – what are they and should you start one?

4. Leverage technology to build customer engagement and loyalty

Technology offers great tools and opportunities to build customer engagement and loyalty! These include:

• Chatbots that use artificial intelligence to simulate human conversation. They can be used to provide 24/7 support to customers and answer frequently asked questions. They can also help with basic tasks such as resetting passwords or checking a customer’s order status.
• Self-service portals that allow customers to access information, support, product information, tutorials, troubleshooting guides, and other resources that can help them solve problems on their own.
• Gamification uses game-like elements such as points, badges, and leader boards to motivate and engage customers. It’s particularly effective for younger customers who are ‘into’ gaming and social media!

Related content: The Impact of AI on Customer Service: What You Need to Know

One important point we wish to make here, though! Technology should be used to support, augment, and enhance human support, not replace it. Customers who want to speak with a human agent must always have the option to do so.

5. Measure and optimise customer engagement and loyalty

This is another extremely important factor in customer service and engagement. You need to measure how well you are doing so you can improve where necessary. This requires a data-driven approach. Key metrics such as Net Promoter Score, customer lifetime value, and customer satisfaction will provide invaluable insights into the effectiveness of your customer engagement and loyalty strategies. To optimise these metrics, use techniques such as A/B testing, customer segmentation, and continuous improvement.

From the perspective of our extensive experience and expertise in customer service, we know optimising customer engagement and building customer loyalty is a complex and multifaceted endeavour that many businesses struggle with. But Digital Customer Care Company has walked this road successfully many times and with many satisfied clients. Give us a call – we’re always happy to help!