Fail-safe Strategies for Customer Engagement in 2017

Posted by Taniya arya

Let’s face it, there are some customers that perhaps never come for a repeat purchase. You know the ones who have spent half an hour yelling at you about hold times or prices or whatever else that makes them irritated. It is always good to wave goodbye, but you can’t afford to lose any customers. Nowadays it is extremely difficult to ignore those customers because they aren’t just always right, but they also armed with all the power. From Facebook, Twitter to the modern-day of CNET review, there are myriad of online platforms for dissatisfied customers to outburst their frustration. The damage incurred on brand reputation could continue to lose opportunities and slow down your business productivity– after all, there is no delete button for such bad reviews on the internet. Here comes the customer engagement in the picture that provides useful information to the top decision makers that directly impact on business bottom lines.

There is no denying the fact that customer engagement is quite necessary to the business’s success as every business is struggling to achieve high customer satisfaction rate. Businesses that surpassed the customer expectation level would survive longer in the evolving market sphere. As the market competition is on the verge, it has become pivotal for businesses to improve the level of customer satisfaction considerably to go extra mile to ensure better customer relations. This further helps marketing evangelists to gain vital insights into customer’s expectations and then change their strategies within short time span based on real-time information and analysis.

Fail-safe strategies for 2017

With immense increase in digital evolution, the year 2016 saw a considerable increase in customer engagement model. Businesses across the different segments have deployed various strategies such as mobile apps, customer reviews, online market surveys, social media and chatbots to improve their customer satisfaction level. When we talk about the coming year, one of the strategies that will continue to grow stronger is the use of chat-bots. The chatbots need to upgrade with artificial intelligence (AI). AI will make the human-machine engagement more realistic by transforming the chatbots into virtual assistants that are more intelligent. They function accordingly on the information captured about the customer’s behavior and preferences.

Let’s take a quick look at the following fail-safe strategies that thrives customer engagement in 2017:

Data-driven approaches will gain the prominence: Though customer engagement over social media is one of the effective ways of interacting with customers directly, more data-driven approaches will continue to take a leap in the future. Personalised information will give you more opportunities to market specific products or brands that customers like. At outsourced call centre, market specialists can leverage the Internet of Things (IoT) to engage more effectively with the customers. The IoT brings valuable information such as customer previous purchases, product usage patterns and preferences, which can be helpful in making products user-friendly. Today, more and more companies can leverage on messaging services or apps to outreach a large chunk of target audience. Moreover, direct interactions with customer can help in reinforcing customer relationships.

Voice searches and multi-media will bring the changes: Another big revolution that can augment customer engagement in 2017 at outsourced call centre is the use of voice searches and multimedia for customer engagement. Undeniably, BigData is already in use for different purposes and by 2017, it must be thoroughly used to enhance customer experiences. Speech analytics and text analytics will be used to make effective customer engagement strategies that ensure better customer understandings. In the coming years, we can expect to see many small scale businesses emerge and succeed considerably by using the modern-day technologies such as 3D printing and customised production.

The future of customer engagement

As small and big brands making their footprints in the global market with powerful customer engagement programs and plans, with immense information available from social media channels and customer analytics, customer engagement strategies will get a complete makeover in the forthcoming time. Businesses should focus on pre-purchase customer engagement, by using the data available through analytics in order to reduce post-purchase customer engagement. In this way, you can delight your customers, increase the customer satisfaction level and then eventually gain a competitive edge.

Tags: Outsourced call centre