Top 7 tools to increase customer engagement

Every relationship needs constant work to make it last.

So, whether it is between friends or business and customers.

Creating a positive experience with your customers is highly imperative. Customers will continue to engage with you as your brand makes them feel. They will stay loyal to your brand and also share their experiences with their friends, becoming your brand advocates.

Forrester reports say 72% of businesses say that improving the customer experience is their top priority.

Good customer engagement encourages customers to share the positive experiences you create for them. When executed in the right way, a strong customer engagement strategy will foster brand growth and loyalty.

Top 7 tools to increase customer engagement

Customer engagement is evolving. With so many opportunities and tools to engage customers today, it is quite difficult to identify which one is most effective for your business.

So without further ado, here is my list of the seven best tools to keep your customers engaged and retain your brand for a long time.

1. Chatbots

Forrester’s report says, we have already stepped into the era of automated and strategic customer service. Customers prefer prompt actions delivered by chatbots fueled with artificial intelligence for better customer engagement.

Implementing chatbots as the first point of contact with your customers helps to engage them with immediate one-on-one responses, which boosts customer satisfaction. The instant problem-solving assistance and effective guidance delight your customers and they become loyal to your brand for a longer time.

How AI chatbots accelerate customer engagement?

• Chatbots are best for customers who expect an instant response, typically less than 30 seconds.
• AI bots are active 24×7 to engage customers to handle basic questions and reduce support tickets.
• Chatbots are easily scalable during the busy hours to engage customers and deliver better customer experience.

Let’s see how Emirates Vacations deployed chatbots for boosting customer engagement.

Considering the average CTR for display ads is low with.35%, Emirates Vacations built a chatbot within its display ads. The company targets different visuals and bot sequences based on the page someone’s browsing. Engagement rates rose 87% since deployment in 2018.

Pro tips:

• Focus on your user’s goal
• Use relevant messages according to the journey of the users’

2. Co-browsing

Gartner’s study says customer experience is on pace to exceed price and product as the number one differentiator for companies. Your customer expectations align with reality when your business adopts new technology to provide real-time live support to your customers.

The co-browsing tool helps you to collaborate with your customers in real-time without letting customers wait and improves the response time. The sharing of the browser screen during the session helps through complex form fillup and application process, makes conversations interactive, and delivers a virtual in-person experience.

Benefits of co-browsing

• Co-browsing solution helps to deliver real time assistance and remote support to your website visitors and customers in an interactive way by combining with video and voice chat.
• Co-browsing can be combined with video chat and live chat to manage your customer’s browser and proactively guide them in the right direction.
• Co-browsing tool helps to enhance your business KPIs and enhance your team productivity.
• The co-browsing tool makes the customer communication seamless whether is onboarding or product demo.
• The entire communication is secured with enterprise-level encryption standards.

3. Live chat

According to reports by Econsultancy, live chat has the highest level of customer satisfaction- standing at 73% as compared to 61% for emails and 44% for phones.

Live chat software is a powerful and cost-effective way to enhance customer engagement on your website and provide visitors & customers personalized service.

How does live chat engage customers?

• Live chat is real time – With live chat you can connect with your customers in real time and engage them by resolving their problems faster.
• Live chat is multi-tasking – Live chat allows agents to handle three to four chats simultaneously to deliver instant support.

Live chat can be combined with video chat and co-browsing to make customer engagement interactive. You can also learn about Chatbot vs Live Chat: The Pros & Cons for Your Business here.

4. Video and voice chat

Video and voice chat help to enhance customer engagement by allowing you to have a face-to-face conversation with your customers. Interacting directly with the customers gives you first-hand knowledge of the problem and an effective solution.

Video chat levels up customer engagement by:

• Personalize your customer conversations – You can engage your customers with personalized conversations in real time to build trust and loyalty. Loyal customers retain your brand and advocate with a good word of mouth.
• Give sales demos with video chat – Allows agents to help customers to understand your product or service much better way. You can improve customer experience by real time sales assistance right on the customer’s browser.

5. Social media

Delivering personalized service in real-time across all touchpoints is challenging. It is a tough task to meet customer demands without using the right tool and strategy.

81% of marketers have increased their website traffic using social media websites to promote their business. Social media is one of the best ways to engage customers. You can communicate with your audience on different social platforms, and helps you build a positive brand perception.

Here are some tips to engage customers over media in an effective way:

• Identify your social audience helps to create special marketing campaigns and successfully engage customers via social media.
• Know where your target audience is talking about you and engage them over that platform.
• Try engaging customers on a regular basis is very important as faster response really matters for customers.
• Social engagement also means analyzing the reactions to your marketing campaigns. It is important to monitor how customers feel about it by using social media sentiment analysis.

6. In-app support

Providing in-app support, right inside your web or mobile app, is an excellent way to boost customer engagement and product support.

Suppose, you are a SaaS product, probably your customers may look for help while they are inside your product.

So when it comes to delivering a great customer experience, excellent customer product support is a vital factor for a software business that drives customer retention. There are a few areas where live chat messaging helps in maximizing your customer retention.

Here are some tips:

• Integrate live chat inside your SaaS app to provide in-app help desk support. It helps to boost your product stickiness and hence increase your retention rate.
• Use in-app messaging to provide users with a solid app onboarding that educates about using core features and hence increases mobile engagement.

Final thoughts:

Customer engagement is all about encouraging customers to interact and share the experiences you create for them as a brand. Businesses have to focus on customer engagement not only for revenue generation but also for value creation.

The bottom line is trying to know your customer’s expectations, preferences, and not just what they buy. Provide your customers with a delightful customer experience and keep getting to know them every chance you get. Engage in their conversations and show them that they are really important for your business.