The Customer Engagement Playbook for 2021

It’s no secret that customer engagement is key to ongoing business success. While a great product might attract one-off engagement, it’s great service that will foster repeat engagement. 

With today’s ever-growing array of marketing and sales channels, understanding customer engagement along the customer journey has become a real challenge.

Where do we start?

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Define customer engagement

Put simply, customer engagement is any interaction between a customer and a brand. It begins with a customer’s first impression and continues into post-purchase service and retention. Customers engage with brands across any and all channels that a brand offers.

Although a brand may, for example, induce customer engagement with an ad, the interaction only occurs if the customer chooses to engage. So if you want to improve customer engagement, make it easy for customers to engage with your brand. 

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Measure customer engagement

By using data to understand your customers

Map your customer journey and ensure you’re collecting relevant data at each stage of the journey from discovery to retention. Then, with the insight that your journey-based data will give, you’ll be ready to apply these learnings to your customer experience.

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Improve customer engagement

By personalising your customer communications

Understanding customers on an individual level allows you to tailor communication with them to their specific needs and preferences. Customers today expect a personalised experience and as such view their engagement with brands more like relationships than transactions. Luckily, it’s also never been easier to personalise customer communications at scale thanks to platforms like Modica’s OMNI messaging platform - OMNI is a robust enterprise messaging platform, enhanced with insights; detailed reporting, expert support and advice make it easy so you can focus on your customers.

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Connect with your customers on their terms

By understanding how customers use your communication channels

• 30% use only live/agent service at an average cost per engagement of $8.01
• 9% only used self-service at an average cost per engagement of $0.10
• 61% used both self-service and live/agent service, (Delisi & Poole, 2019)
  

Customers don’t think about which department they’re interacting with when they send an email, call a support line or reply to a text. To ensure that your customer experience is seamless, your channels and teams need to talk to one another. A platform with an API that integrates with your CRM and other in-house systems lets your team stop worrying about untangling their myriad support tools and get on with providing a great experience for your customers.

Understanding modern customers' willingness to use any channel available to them, it’s important to consider the role that each channel plays in your broader customer experience before taking the next step and implementing any self-service or automated channels.

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Make your customers’ lives easier (and save your team’s time)

By doubling-down on channels that encourage self-service

Self-service is any customer engagement that does not require a staff member’s presence, physical or otherwise, in order to take place. 

All self-service channels, from automated two-way SMS to the FAQ section on your website offer the lowest cost per interaction of any channel. Better yet, they free up your most skilled service reps to devote their energy to your highest value customers.

By fielding any low-level engagements using self-service channels, your team has more time available to deliver a better customer experience for every enquiry they deal with. 

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Real-world case studies

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Improving customer engagement isn’t as hard as it sounds, thanks to OMNI

An airline in New Zealand sends 650,000 SMS messages monthly to its customers

These messages keep the airline’s customers up to date with flight disruptions or cancellations. For this reason, it is crucial that urgent updates get to their customers on time. SMS has proven year-on-year to be a seamless way to do so. 

Not only has SMS allowed the airline to provide excellent customer experience, it has also taken an immense load off the 15+ departments using the service.

Vensa’s mHealth solutions replace letters and phone calls for recalls, appointment reminders, test results, medication reminders and advice

More than 3 million messages annually replace costly and time intensive letters and phone calls for recalls, greatly improving patient engagement and appointment attendance.

Vensa Health offers a number of two-way mobile messaging solutions to primary and secondary care providers using Modica’s Enterprise SMS Gateway to deliver their mHealth solutions. 

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Why choose SMS?

It’s affordable

A support phone call costs around $16, whereas an SMS interaction costs only $1-$5, according to Forrester (2020).

It’s highly automated

Using Modica’s OMNI platform, you can automate customer journey communications - everything from welcome texts to feedback and follow-up messages. By putting your customer engagement strategy on autopilot, it frees up your team to focus on meaningful work. Our platform’s easy-to-use API also integrates your SMS communications with your CRM and other in-house systems to ensure a seamless customer experience.

It saves everyone time

If customers are in a hurry, they can deal with their support issue over time. Given that the support doesn’t have to happen in a time-pressured situation over the phone, customers are that much more likely to engage and re-engage.

It’s convenient

Customers can say goodbye to waiting on-hold, goodbye to lengthy feedback surveys and hello to helpful appointment reminders and personalised communications.

It’s accurate 

Your customers can forget having to scramble for a pen and paper when you’re able to automatically text their reference numbers to them.

It’s secure

Our platform is trusted by banks and governments to send and receive sensitive messages worldwide. Your customers can rest assured knowing that their information is private.

Delisi, R., & Poole, D. (2019). Does your Digital Customer Service Strategy Deliver? Gartner, Inc.

Ask, J., & Jacobs, I. (2020). SMS: Customer Service’s Ultimate Workhorse. Forrester.