7 Tips For Good Customer Engagement
From social media to a positive and friendly approach to late payments, good customer engagement is essential to your business. Is a business really a business without your customers after all? In this blog, we go back to basics looking at how you can engage with your customers more.
Social media
If you haven’t already jumped on the social media wagon – now is the time! Social media is a fantastic way to drive good customer engagement. You can provide your followers with valuable content as well as any updates to your business practices. If you aren’t familiar with using social media for business, Google Digital Garage have lots of free resources and videos that you can use to get up to speed.
Discounts
Everyone loves a discount – including your customers! Regardless of your business or industry, a customer discount is one sure fire way to get more engagement and positive interaction from your customers. What’s more, discounts can actually be beneficial for business too. For example, if you are struggling to sell some of your products, offering a discount can help you to shift the surplus stock.
Positive reviews
If you’re not familiar with a company it’s likely you’ll delve into Google Reviews, TrustPilot or something similar to get insight into authentic customer experiences. Building up a good customer review portfolio won’t just help you attract new customers, but it will also provide you with valuable feedback. There is always something to learn from a customer review regardless of whether it is a good or bad one.
Good reviews will showcase what you should incorporate more of within your company practices, whereas bad reviews will highlight areas where you can improve. Making changes based on your customer’s feedback can help you to improve your customer engagement and build up stronger relationships with your customers.
Make great customer experience a priority
Having excellent customer service goes beyond a smile and a halfhearted email signoff wishing your customer a good day. It’s about doing everything you possibly can to give your customer the best possible experience of your services. Great customer service can help inspire brand loyalty, higher rates of satisfaction, and positive customer reviews.
Extremely satisfied customers can even serve as voluntary brand ambassadors just because they love your customer service, approach, and, of course, your product. To increase your customer engagement, look for opportunities to increase touchpoints with your customers. One option is to do this through social media where you can respond to customer comments, reviews, or complaints. Another way might be to reach out with customer feedback forms or make sure your customer service department have enough staff to meet demand.
Handle late payments in a friendly, approachable manner
There are a number of reasons why late payments can occur like financial trouble, liquidation or administration to name a few. While you should always get paid what you are owed it’s important to approach your late payers in a friendly and professional manner. Approaching late payers like this will help to protect your brand’s reputation and your relationship with your customer.
While you may not want to repeatedly do business with a bad payer, if a customer pays late on a one-off occasion it’s important not to scare them away with an aggressive collection approach. If you have overdue unpaid invoices that you are struggling to recover, Collect-it will give you an instant quote for recovering your debt with our pre-litigation partners, Darcey Quigley.
Review your target audience
When was the last time you reviewed your target audience? When it comes to customer engagement, marketing to the right audience is key! There’s a balance to getting your target audience right – target too broadly and you might lose that personal touch which many customers have come to love and expect from brands. However, if your target audience is too narrow you risk excluding potential customers!
Your customer engagement and retention rely on content that’s relevant to them. It could be that your business has evolved since you first started out and you need a new targeting approach. Have a look at your marketing strategy and where you see your business going in the years to come. Ask yourself the following:
- Are you still targeting the right the same people you were when you started?
- Is this approach working and are your customers engaged?
- If it is working, are there further opportunities you can explore to take it to the next level?
- If your customers aren’t engaging what could you do differently?
Tailor content to your customers
As mentioned above, customers love content that is relevant to them. Good content will provide your customers with valuable information as well as insight into your services. Content can take many forms whether it’s a snappy social media post reminding your customers about an upcoming event, or newsletters showcasing a successful client case study. No matter how you share your content, remember that it should always have a purpose and add value to your customers experience.
Lynne is the Founder and CEO of Know-it!
She is a passionate, driven and forward-thinking entrepreneur determined to help resolve the late payment crisis gripping SMEs.
Having worked within the credit management industry for over 27 years and ran UK leading commercial debt recovery specialists Darcey Quigley & Co for over 16 years, Know-it was devleoped to make credit control more accessilble for SMEs to help them effectively mitigate credit risk, reduce debtor days and boost cashflow!
Connect with me on LinkedIn!
