What is Customer Engagement?
The term customer engagement refers to the depth and richness of the relationship between businesses and their customers. Customer engagement is the sum of all the interactions a company has with a customer and the resulting impact to how that customer thinks and feels about that company. Those touch points can take many forms - retail store purchases, TV commercials, promotional emails, corporate Facebook posts, and, of course, interactions with customer service. Every time a customer and business interact, even if it's passive or done through a third party, there is an opportunity to either strengthen or weaken customer engagement. And these touch points shouldn't just be about selling. They should also be about providing customers useful information, acknowledging them in a personalized way, and making them feel good about the brand.
Customer engagement is an important concept because it drives customer behavior. Studies show that highly engaged customers represent a 23% premium in key financial metrics, such as revenue and share of wallet, compared to customers with average engagement.Customers with strong business relationships are more likely to purchase additional or higher end products from that business. Additionally, high customer engagement can lead to word of mouth referrals, which is a very powerful and efficient marketing technique.
How do contact centers impact customer engagement?
Contact centers certainly aren't the only business function that impacts customer engagement, but nonetheless they can have a strong influence on it. After contacting customer service, a consumer needs to feel good about the interaction, which means their problem was resolved efficiently, the agent was empathetic and engaging, and the business knew who they were and their history with the company. This requires not only the right staff but also the right tools to support them, including customer relationship management (CRM) applications, automatic contact distributors (ACDs) capable of intelligent voice and digital contact routing, and workforce management applications to ensure appropriate staffing levels. Contact centers can strengthen customer engagement and should align to the goal of building customer relationships.
How NICE can help
NICE CXone is the market leading call center software in use by thousands of customers of all sizes around the world to help them consistently deliver exceptional customer experiences. Our sophisticated solutions are designed to optimize customer engagement. CXone is a cloud native, unified suite of applications designed to help a company holistically run its call (or contact) center operations. CXone includes:
Omnichannel Routing – routing and interaction management that empowers agents to positively and productively interact with customers in digital and voice channels. These solutions include an automatic call distributor (ACD), interactive voice response (IVR), interaction channel support and proactive outbound dialer.
Workforce Optimization – unlocks the potential of your team by inspiring employees' self-improvement, amplifying quality management efforts to enhance customer experience and reducing labor waste. These solutions include workforce management (WFM), quality management (QM), recording and performance management (PM).
Analytics – turns insights into results by making data relevant, easy to consume and actionable to drive measurable improvements and understand the omnichannel experience customers receive. These solutions include interaction analytics, customer surveys, reporting and performance management.
CXone also includes pre-defined CRM integrations and UCaaS integrations with most leading solutions on the market. These integrations provide a holistic call center software solution capable of elevating customer engagement for companies of all sizes.