Table of contents:
- Reasons to Automate Customer Engagement
- What Parts of Customer Engagement Can be Automated and How?
- Why Pipedrive for Customer Engagement Automation
- Why Automaly to help with Pipedrive Customer Engagement Automation?
- Final Thoughts
Today’s customers are demanding, digital-first individuals not settling for anything less than a frictionless experience. To keep up with their changing needs, organizations must focus on streamlining their customer engagement processes as they aim to retain their existing customers.
Keeping your customers happy and engaged requires a significant amount of time, energy, and resources, no matter the size of your customer base. That’s where customer engagement automation comes in. About 40% of customer interactions will be automated by 2023 as the business landscape edges to the growing adoption of automated tools to manage every step of the customer journey.
In this article, we provide deeper insights into the customer engagement process, why it’s important to automate customer engagement, and the automation tools you need to deploy in your customer engagement process to reduce manual tasks. Keep reading!
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement refers to how you interact with your customers from the moment they sign up for your product or service until the end of their relationship with your brand. The idea behind the customer engagement process is that keeping in touch with existing customers should provide a seamless experience and boost their trust in your business. This way, you can worry less about the high costs of acquiring a new customer.
The customer engagement process is not just about selling products; it’s also about establishing everlasting relationships with customers on a personal level. They help you understand their behavior and preferences in your mutually beneficial relationship so you can cater to them better in the future.
📌Pro Tip: To establish a strong relationship with your customers, you must have an idea of who they are, what they like, and what drives their buying decisions. This also helps you identify what type of content they will enjoy and how best to communicate with them more often.
Why is Customer Engagement Important?
Customer engagement is not just about keeping the sales numbers at an all-time high – although that is the end goal. Whether you have one customer or a thousand, keeping them happy, their questions answered, and their problems solved will go a long way in keeping them loyal to your business (that’s because it’s nice to see people enjoying your product; and happy, engaged customers are much more likely to spend money with you again).
That said, here is why you desperately need to automate customer engagement if you’re not already doing it:
- To know your customer better: Engaging with your customers allows you to better understand their needs and requirements. You’ll have a better idea of what challenges and obstacles your customers face and offer solutions through your products and services.
For example, let’s say you run an eCommerce store that sells various home and kitchen appliances. If you’re actively engaging with your customers, you’ll be able to ask questions and take note of what appliances they’re desperately looking for. At the end of the day, you’ll cross-reference your customers’ desired features with the products you have for sale and make sure you have a balanced and diverse selection of appliances that suit their needs.
- To spot trends and discover new opportunities: When actively engaging with your customers, you’ll be able to identify emerging (and outdated) trends in your industry. This will allow you to prepare yourself for the future and even take advantage of new opportunities. It will also allow you to better understand your customer base and what they might be looking for in the future.
- To increase customer retention rate: Engaging with your customers is a start to identifying and resolving any issues they might have with your products or services. Being proactive and taking note of your customers’ needs, expectations, and preferences will allow you to see clearly what issues they face and respond quickly. This way, your customers will have fewer reasons to turn to your competition.
- To build trust with your customers: One of the best ways to build trust with your customers is by giving them a voice. Providing your customers with an opportunity to give feedback and share their thoughts on your offerings will show them that you’re actively listening.
For example, let’s say you run a software development company. You can actively engage with your clients by allowing them to provide feedback on their experience working with your company. This will allow you to better understand how your customers feel about you and how you can improve your product or service. It will also build trust with your customers by showing them that you care about their experience.
- To understand the value of specific products or services: Here, feedback has a major role to play. When actively engaging with your customers, you can ask them to provide their thoughts on the products and services you offer. This will allow you to better understand how your customers value your offerings and why.
For example, let’s say you’re an online travel agency that has been operating for several years. By actively engaging with your clients, you can ask them to provide feedback on their travel experiences. This will allow you to better understand how your customers value your travel packages and where you could improve. This will help you understand which travel packages are the most valuable and which ones should be improved upon.
The customer engagement process, if done well, can also save you a lot of time and money in the long term, thanks to increased customer lifetime value. And the more you automate customer engagement, the less time you’ll spend on manual tasks.
Reasons to Automate Customer Engagement
There’s so much to think about when executing a successful customer engagement strategy. From setting up the right user experience for your customers to keeping track of how you’re engaging with them – there’s just too much to keep in mind.
Automation reduces the manual workload through the use of machines or computer software that operates automatically rather than requiring human intervention. Business processes can be automated by adopting artificial intelligence, machine learning algorithms, and other advanced technologies.
Here are a few reasons why you might want to automate the customer engagement process if you still haven’t jumped on the bandwagon:
- Reduce manual tasks – One reason to automate customer engagement is that it helps you reduce recurring manual tasks done regularly.
- More time to focus on important, higher-value tasks – Automating customer engagement means less time spent on tedious customer service tasks, manual lead generation, and other tasks that are better suited for computer automation.
- Get more done – Another reason to automate customer engagement is that it frees up time to get more done – for instance, creating content, reaching out to new customers, monitoring your campaigns, and edging closer to your goals.
- Save money – New customer acquisition comes at a cost. Acquiring a new customer can cost five times more than retaining an existing one. Automating customer engagement keeps you in touch with your customers more efficiently and ensures that their needs are always taken care of.
Customer engagement automation entails handling repetitive customer interactions with the help of artificial intelligence and other software tools so that employees can focus on more complex and challenging tasks.
Benefits of Customer Engagement Automation
Customer engagement automation enables marketers to measure customer loyalty and see where improvements need to be made. With the right tools in place, your business can achieve peak performance by streamlining customer engagement activities, whether it’s via email or automated phone calls.
The benefits?
- Increased customer lifetime value: By keeping your customers happy, you maintain their lifetime value since they’ll stick around for more of your goods and services.
- Better brand reputation: Customers are more likely to share positive experiences with brands they like – brands that dedicate their time to their needs. And when customers have a positive experience with your brand, they are more likely to engage with you.
- Reduced churn rates: By automating customer engagement, answering your customer’s questions, and solving their problems faster and more efficiently, you are more likely to retain customers and keep them coming back
- More efficient tracking of customer behaviour: Customer engagement automation allows you to track and measure customer behaviour in real-time – so you can see how customers are interacting with your brand. You can track how many times a customer has been in contact with your sales and marketing team, what they’re enquiring about, and their level of satisfaction. This allows you to identify what areas of your business need improving.
- Optimise your marketing campaigns: Marketing budgets are growing at an exponential rate, and companies are constantly looking for ways to make their marketing spending worth it. Customer engagement automation allows you to capture customer information so that you can create targeted marketing campaigns. This ensures that your marketing is reaching the right people.
Customer engagement automation also allows you to monitor key performance indicators (KPIs): the metrics that show how effective your business is. Customer engagement automation allows you to monitor KPIs such as customer retention, customer acquisition, and the customer journey as a whole. This will help you to identify areas that need improving and create strategies to fix them.
