When engaging customers it’s important to make them feel heard and valued. Excellent customer engagement often means customers buy more from you, but they’ll also be loyal and may even recommend your business to others. However, a lot of companies make mistakes when engaging with their customers and can leave customers feeling disappointed.
Fortunately, in this article we’ll walk you through some of the common mistakes when engaging customers – so you can avoid them!
Avoiding social media
The importance of social media to businesses has soared in recent years. It would be a huge mistake to ignore its relevance in facilitating quality customer engagement. A lot of customers use social media as a platform to voice their thoughts and opinions – whether good or bad. So, it’s important for businesses to be present on social platforms, engaging with their customers where their customers are.
Being slow to respond
Customers want to be engaged at the particular moment they’re reaching out. Not responding to feedback or queries in time can make customers lose interest and lower a business’ credibility. When businesses are slow to respond to enquiries and feedback, it’s very common customers turn to your competitors during the delay. To increase the quality of customer engagement, businesses should put solutions in place to track customers’ experiences throughout the interaction with the business, for example using a CRM like ActiveCampaign or HubSpot.
Launching products without testing
It’s important to ensure your business is customer-focussed and that you engage with customers before launching new products and services, to ensure they align with your customers’ needs. When your offerings do not align with what your customers want, customers can feel put off.
Ensure the new products you offer are tested and are something your customers are in need of. Customers will show increased loyalty to your business when you provide consistent and well-timed value.
Spamming customers
Customers often share their data with businesses and opt-in to allow businesses to engage customers through those channels e.g. email, mobile etc. While this customer data can be a fantastic way to engage with your customers, don’t fall into the trap of bombarding them with communications. If you do choose to use these channels for promotion, be sensitive about timing and personalise your message and special offers.
The consequences of sending “spammy” communications to engage can lead to unsubscribes, poor customer experience, and a missed opportunity to effectively engage customers for repeat purchase. The best way to go about keeping your business in customers’ minds is to send timely and helpful information, so they’re more likely to engage your business.
No human factor in customer engagement
This is perhaps the most common mistake. Despite the rapid growth, development, and convenience of technology, customers prefer human interaction and engagement. It’s not about solving their issues alone, they’ll pay attention to the way you made them feel during the whole process. To improve the quality of customer engagement, ensure that at every communication touchpoint customers have with your business (emails, automations, chatbots and more), it feels like they’re engaging with a real human.
Conclusion
Avoiding the customer engagement mistakes above and ensuring you have a customer focus and great customer experience, can lead to increased purchases, loyalty, and recommendations from your customers. Effective customer engagement is good for your customers, and good for your business.
If you want help to improve your customer engagement, get in touch with us today.