Understanding Your Customers:
Customer Engagement Tools

You want to understand your customer completely, and in today’s marketplace, you must have customer engagement tools to drive that understanding. The IoT era requires a modern method of communication with your existing and potential customers that optimizes the dynamic conversations that now take place through channels such as social media.

Robust customer engagement tools have given organizations the power to analyze data derived from mentions, clicks, subscriptions, likes, and more.

Customer Engagement Tools Streamline Communication

With the expansion of the internet, consumers now occupy the virtual space rather than stepping into your physical store. This evolution changed how organizations viewed consumer engagement and lead to the development of increasingly sophisticated, yet user-friendly, customer engagement tools.

Prior to the online revolution, consumers played a more passive role in the process of corporate strategizing. Engagement meant more direct interaction between customers and an organization, and that usually took place if the company initiated that communication through such venues as focus groups. Now consumers are active participants who frequently initiate the conversation as well as direct the feedback. Organizations and consumers have dialogue that puts power into the hands of the customer and drives the focus on customer experience.

This new customer-centric environment gives you greater power to understand your customer’s needs and wants. Feedback is increasingly easier to gather, and consumer demands are increasingly accessible to your company with customer engagement tools.

Tuning in to Your Profitable Consumers

According to Gallup, consumers fall into one of three categories that describe customer engagement:

• Fully engaged. These consumers are loyal to you and your product or service. They act as brand ambassadors.
• Actively disengaged. Unfortunately, this category exists. These consumers have no loyalty or attachment to your company or product. They switch brands easily and spread negative news.
• Indifferent. These consumers are generally neutral toward a company or product.

Obviously, engaged customers are your focus. You want to continually strive to add more engaged customers to your base to drive greater profits. They are in fact the most profitable consumers. Gallup found that fully engaged consumers provide close to a 23 percent premium to your share of profitability, growth, relationship, and wallet. In contrast, the actively disengaged consumer hits your company with a 13 percent discount by the same measurements.

Customer engagement tools help you optimize that engagement by tracking, promoting, and analyzing consumer behavior and sentiment. You then use this data to enhance customer experience, develop smarter marketing campaigns, improve your products and services, and exceed your customer’s needs and expectations.

It’s crucial to remember that customer engagement tools provide a wide array of features. Some will specialize in a single area of customer engagement, such as the company website, social media, or conventional marketing. Others may offer multiple features to track omni- or multi-channel feedback. But, whichever you decide is best for your business, today’s competitive marketplace makes it necessary to use this type of software.