Customer Engagement vs Experience: How to Get the Best From Both Worlds
Some customers need to be supported at every stage in the buyer’s journey. When they have any challenge, they need to talk to someone at the company or access some form of educational content. Studies have revealed that Omni-channel customer engagement is preferred by almost 78% of the customers. Not providing this opportunity can lead to a bad customer experience.
Yet, some businesses tend to focus solely on improving customer engagement without figuring out how to drive better experiences for customers. So, how do customer experience and customer engagement fit together? What is the difference?
In this article, we’ll explain the customer engagement vs customer experience concept. You’ll learn some of the best strategies to make them work together.
Table of content
- Customer Experience vs Customer Engagement: what is the difference?
- Why do the two work well together?
- 6 ways to bring more customer engagement to your customer experience strategy
- Wrapping up
Customer Experience vs Customer Engagement: what is the difference?
Customer experience vs customer engagement is a popular concept in marketing. While they may seem like they have the same meaning, they do not. Both terms play an important role in the success of your marketing and sales efforts. To get the best return from both worlds, it's important to understand the difference between the two.
What is customer experience?
Customer experience is defined by every interaction and experience a customer has with your brand through all stages of the buyer’s journey. It refers to the perception of a customer towards a brand. This perception is developed based on how your business treats customers.
For example, think of the last time you had a really positive experience and interaction with a brand- maybe the attention customer support gave you to solve a problem. Remember the way the experience made you feel.
Customer experience isn’t always positive. It can also be negative. Ever had a bad experience with a brand? Chances are that you have. No doubt, it didn’t leave a positive feeling for you.
A positive customer experience is crucial for the success of your business. When a customer is happy with your brand, they won’t hesitate to use more of your service and refer your business to friends and family.
What is customer engagement?
Customer engagement represents the way your brand interacts with customers through different touchpoints. For example, comments on a social media page, email, community forums, websites, and surveys.
The goal of customer engagement is to offer customers relevant content, which can make them stick around. It’s all about connecting with customers on a deeper level and showing that you have value to offer to them.
When you actively engage with your customers, they are more likely to buy more and generate referrals for your business. A solid customer engagement also helps you stand out from the competition because you’ll be able to capture your customer’s attention in a crowded content system.
Why do the two work well together?
Solid customer engagement helps to improve customer experience in the long run. When your customers are actively engaged, they provide better feedback, connect with your brand on a personal level and perceive your brand as valuable.
By communicating with customer support, personalized content, customers have a better experience. As a result, they become more invested in your brand.
The combined effort of the two creates an upward spiral from a positive feedback loop. The better the customer experience, the more engaged your customer becomes. The same goes for improved customer engagement.
6 ways to bring More Customer Engagement to Your Customer Experience Strategy
Customer experience vs customer engagement. How can you make them work together? This is an important question most businesses are still struggling to answer. Customer engagement and experience can work well together as long as you use the right strategy.
Here are 6 ways that you can provide your customers with more ways to engage and improve their overall experience with your brand.
1. Use The Right Tools to Better Engage Your Audience
If you want to engage with your customer better, manual work will not cut it. You need the right tools to automate workflows and systems. With an effective marketing automation tool like Engage, you can automate your strategy to optimize each touchpoint and improve the entire customer journey. Engage can help you to improve customer experience, make team members in various departments more productive in their efforts by automating workflows and repetitive tasks.
2. Personalize Interactions
If you don’t personalize your interaction with customers, you’ll miss out on the opportunity to connect with them. Personalization is no longer an option for businesses today, it is a crucial customer engagement strategy. 66% of consumers expect the companies they shop from to understand their needs and preferences. In other words, customers want products and services that are tailored to solve their problems and help them achieve their goals.
However, you need to understand your customer well enough before you can personalize your interaction with them. By analyzing your customer data, you can identify important information you can use to personalize your messaging. It could be as simple as sending an email offering other product suggestions similar to the ones they previously purchased or using their location. For example, a person who buys an automatic mixing bowl can be served other product suggestions for baking and cooking.
3. Use push notifications
One way to improve customer engagement is by giving customers relevant offers and push notifications can help you to accomplish that. Push notifications are short messages that pop up on a user’s mobile or desktop screen notifying them of a special offer, important event, or news. One thing about push notification is that it is permission-based, this means that customers must agree to opt-in to receive notifications from your brand.
But it doesn’t end there. To keep your customer further engaged with your brand, you need to deliver compelling valuable messages to them. Customers will not hesitate to opt out if your messages are not helping them in any way.
Remember your customers are individuals with different behaviors, goals, interests, motivations, and challenges. So It's good practice to segment your customer base into users that can be targeted with relevant messaging.
4. Understand your customer journey
You need to understand your customer journey before you can engage them better and improve their experience.
What problems do your customers experience along the buying journey? What touchpoints do they engage with? A good way to find answers to these questions is by using a customer journey map. It helps you identify important touchpoints, goals, and challenges that customers meet along the buying journey.
With a detailed customer journey map, you can create accurate customer personas and segment your user base. You can understand buyer behavior, purchase history, motivation, preferred communication channels, and more.
This information will help you come up with ideas to engage each customer segment in a personalized way.
5. Use a conversational service
One thing that can make a customer unhappy is not getting sufficient support when dealing with a problem. Customers want to communicate with brands whenever and wherever is convenient for them. If you fail to meet up, it could lead to a negative customer experience. It may not be convenient for you to provide that level of engagement, this is where you leverage conversational services like chatbots.
Chatbots are automated chat services that operate based on artificial intelligence that mimic human conversational patterns to improve the overall customer experience. Even if the customer is aware that you use chatbots to engage with them, they won’t mind as long as the conversation is effective. What matters is that the customer is being supported to achieve whatever they need.
6. Capture analytics
Analytics is what drives your customer engagement efforts. How do you know what works and doesn’t work for your audience? Customer data can provide answers to these questions. You need to dig into customer data to figure out the best ways to optimize your customer engagement efforts.
You can obtain customer feedback data from customer satisfaction surveys, complaint forms, and NSP surveys. Even if the feedback is negative, you can use it as an opportunity to improve your interactions with customers.
You also need to measure customer engagement metrics to track the success of your engagement efforts.
Wrapping up
The customer engagement vs customer experience concept is a complementary one when executed the right way. When you give customers the opportunity to engage with your brand on their own terms, you improve the overall customer experience.
Remember, when a customer is actively engaged with your brand, you can get valuable feedback that will help create a better customer experience throughout the buyer’s journey. You must make customer engagement an important part of your customer experience strategy if you want to improve your marketing and sales efforts.
With Engage, you can give your customers a positive experience and interaction through different touchpoints, creating unique segments for targeted messaging via email, SMS, Push Notifications, and In-App messages.