Did you know that enterprises with superior customer engagements bring in 5.7 times more revenue than their competitors? Or that 84% of companies that work to improve their customer engagement strategy report an increase in their revenue?
Unfortunately, it’s one thing to simply recognize this correlation. It’s another thing to be able to harness it to your advantage. Why? Because, while the goal of every customer engagement strategy is revenue, too few companies actually know how to design a system suited to this aim.
That’s why JRNI is excited to provide readers with our 5 recommendations for building a revenue-centric customer engagement strategy.
1. Tailor your engagement to the customer and the moment
Personalization—delivering the right message, to the right person, at the right time–--is critical in creating a customer engagement strategy to drive revenue growth. In fact, Salesforce.com’s most recent Trends in Personalization study found that 99% of marketers say personalization positively impacts their customer relationships.
But what constitutes the “right” target or the “right” time?
While the very nature of personalization means there’s no one answer, careful consideration of where a given customer is on their sales journey will help you provide tailored content for an individual to engage with. Early in the process, resources that provide customers the information they need to feel confident in their research into a given product or a specific pain point are vital. For customers later along in the funnel, more hands-on engagement is better: 1:1 instructional lessons, personal appointments with product specialists or trials and product tests.
A successful customer engagement program must be built around the understanding that different customers will respond to different experiences, so having a diverse range of resources across touchpoints is necessary. That same Salesforce study that told us marketers love personalization also tells us that 92% believe prospects and customers expect personalization.
2. Treat human-to-human interaction as a high-value conversion event
When it comes to creating a rapport between your organization and your customer, nothing is better suited to personalization than…well, a person. So, if your goal is to move that prospect towards a decision, one-to-one appointments are your best opportunity for both you and the customer to gain more relevant insights that will ultimately advance the sales cycle.
Train your staff to recognize opportunities to turn a request for information into a no-pressure meeting. Work with people across your business so that no matter what your prospect is curious about, you can sit them down with a relevant expert. This doesn’t mean turning everyone in your company into a sales representative, but to give key people the tools to gather structured information in a way that builds a detailed customer profile over time. When the customer feels like they know you—and you truly know the customer—that’s when engagement becomes revenue.
3. Think of staff as both a revenue-generating resource and a customer service resource
Speaking of training staff, you need to make sure that every person your customer interacts with understands the goal of your engagement strategy, and factors that into how they approach their work.
If your website’s primary goal is to communicate who you are, what you do, and provide ways for customers to take next steps and/or purchase, your engagement staff is a living extension of your website. A well-trained, motivated staff combine product knowledge and enthusiasm; they are your best option for advancing customers along a sales path. Consider your own buying experiences.
Sales representatives shouldn’t only think of themselves as sales representatives but as customer service representatives as well. Meanwhile, customer service teams should remember that every question they answer is a chance to build enthusiasm for future purchases or upcoming renewal.
By combining these mindsets, you create representatives who not only exhibit deep knowledge of the product but equally deep commitment to the individual customer.
4. Provide staff with directional intelligence before, during, and after engagement
In order to ensure your engagement staff are able to appropriately work with the people they speak to, it’s critical that they have access to all the relevant information you’ve collected on a given prospect, at every stage of the engagement. Not only that—they need to have the tools to easily collect additional information in order to facilitate future engagements.
Data integration is key to presenting relevant information to your staff. One of the challenges that enterprises often face is that given the vast amount of information they gather on an individual as well as that this information is often collected across myriad channels, all of this critical data exists in disparate systems. Creating a centralized hub for all this data ensures that it’s easy to access, synthesize, and leverage for revenue generation, and that you’re able to foster the best human interactions by directing prospects to the most relevant people.
5. Use engagements as the foundation of personalization
Customer engagement is cyclical, and understanding that is the key to making the most of every opportunity. In the first section of this blog, we talked about how personalization is the bedrock of fruitful customer engagement. Well, it turns out customer engagement is the bedrock of personalization.
Each engagement you have is a chance to better the customer experience. It helps you collect additional data to better understand prospect needs, and gives you the information required to further target said prospects down the line.
How? Just a few examples for your consideration. Volume of engagement and engagement type can indicate a customer’s level of interest and what product and service offers are most likely to succeed next, or what kind of engagement they might next participate in. Engagement can also be used to ‘bucket’ customers according to appropriate next steps.
We often think of the customer journey and its stages as a given, as certain as the Law of Gravity. But it is only through customer engagement—and building off each interaction—that we can even chart that journey in the first place.
Turn engagement into revenue with these simple tricks
If you’re examining your revenue stream and wondering where you could do better, you might want to take a look at your customer engagement strategy. Are you harnessing personalization? Are you availing person-to-person interaction? Are you using every point of engagement as a springboard to the next?
With these 5 recommendations, we guarantee you’ll get more out of your interactions with customers and see material results from your efforts.
Looking for help with your customer engagement strategy? Contact us here!
