5 Key Elements of Customer Engagement in an Omnichannel Environment

Customer engagement has a direct impact on revenue and retention, and is key to building up loyal relationships with customers. Effective engagement results in higher conversion and lower number of returns.

Designing a strong customer engagement strategy is key for long-lasting brand loyalty. Customers expect brands to anticipate their needs; with an omnichannel environment, brands must be present and available, everywhere and all the time. Here are are some key elements in a successful customer engagement strategy within this environment:

Consistent omnichannel engagement

Customers often start an interaction with a brand in one channel and continue their interaction in other channels. It’s crucial to keep consistency in the customer experience delivery across all touchpoints.

Customer communities

Communities are one of the great forums for customer engagement, as they allow customers to comfortably interact, raise questions, find answers, share experiences, suggest new ideas, and share feedback about features. Communities are also an opportunity to build a base of brand experts, spokespersons, and ambassadors, and this supports business generation and overall engagement.

Harmonized human-AI collaboration

According to Foundations of Trusted Automation by Michael Lewis, Katia Sycara, and Phillip Walker, humans often have a tendency to either overuse or underuse automation. A balance of the usage of automation and conversational bots is needed to ensure effective usage of resources and the best customer experience. We need to understand that humans and robots have very different, but complementary, skills. The best customer experience is achieved when both can work in harmony.

Listen to the voice of customer

Listening to the voice of the customer is about unearthing the customer’s perception and experience of a brand, understanding their needs and aspirations, and considering their feedback and suggestions for products and service improvement. This requires combining various study and research methods, such as customer interviews, customer surveys, 5-star ratings, website behavior analysis, customer reviews, sentiment analysis, and calls analysis.

Hyper-personalized engagement

The key to designing an effective hyper-personalization framework is adopting an analytics-driven approach for measuring data. To achieve an effective hyper-personalization framework, you need to collect data, combine the gathered data with customer segmentation data, define targeted journeys by choosing the right channel, and measure the outcome of your targeted hyper-personalized engagements,

Customer engagement is critical to enable a brand’s customer experience strategy. Customers who get an engaging and positive customer experience are more likely to stay with a brand and advocate for it. I will leave you with a quote from Harley Davidson’s president, John Russell: “The more you engage with customers, the clearer things become, and the easier it is to determine what you should be doing.”