The ease of ecommerce and the accessibility of brands on social media have created a new generation of customers with elevated expectations. For example, 52% of today’s customers expect brands to personalize offers to their needs. Winning these customers over and keeping them engaged should be among your highest priorities, especially when it comes to your communications strategy.

It’s common for customers and prospects to have multiple conversations with different departments in your company at the same time. For example, a customer might receive regular email newsletters from your marketing department while also interacting with your customer service center. To truly engage customers, all of your departments must be on the same page and have a full view of all these interactions.

This post will walk you through 5 ways to engage customers, along with effective customer engagement examples.

Most companies engage with customers on up to 8 different channels, including chat, phone, social media, email, SMS, and more. However, an omnichannel approach is not just about engagement on digital channels but also ensuring the customers’ experience is seamless and consistent. The best way to achieve this is by sharing customer data across channels.

Customers can tell whether you share information effectively—‟76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments, yet 54% say it feels like sales, service, and marketing teams don’t share information.”

A great example of a company with an omnichannel approach that leverages customer data is Lyft. Think about all the touchpoints when you request a ride-share through Lyft:

• You get push notifications and SMS updates at key points in your journey.
• You receive email receipts after your ride.
• You can contact your driver, customer service, and emergency services through the app.

Behind the scenes, Lyft’s custom contact center makes it easy for associates to get the context of each interaction between the customer and the company, creating a better customer experience.

Customers share a lot of data with businesses, and they expect a personalized experience in return. According to a Salesforce report, “66% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations.”

Personalization, through artificial intelligence (AI) or otherwise, goes way beyond using the customers’ name in email greetings. A truly personalized experience considers the customers’ preferences, past purchases, previous interactions with the business, and more to anticipate their needs and keep them engaged.

A company that excels at personalization is Vacasa. With all the data users provide when they browse vacation rentals and make reservations, Vacasa creates highly personalized email marketing campaigns tailored to each customer’s interests and travel preferences.

Gathering feedback from customers gives you valuable insight into their experience. Acting on that feedback makes customers feel heard and leads to better engagement.

Reviews are a great place to start, but if you want more actionable insights, actively seek them out by requesting feedback through surveys, asking customers to rate their interactions immediately afterward, and more. Additionally, customer service representatives receive feedback daily, so make it easy for them to log this information.

For example, web development company Wix customized its contact center to make it easier for employees to track and manage customer feedback. This allows the company to identify and fix bugs, release new features, and more based on conversations with customers.

Customer feedback won’t do much for your business if you just compile it and save it in a document somewhere. It’s crucial to use your findings to improve your business and innovate in a way that will engage customers.

One-way marketing tactics like email promotions are great for one-time sales, but true engagement comes from conversation. That’s why so many businesses have adopted chat, SMS, Facebook Messenger, and other conversation channels.

Conversational marketing relies on 2-way communication where the business responds directly to the customer’s needs and questions. This could look like:

• An AI-powered chatbot that makes purchase recommendations based on customer preferences
• An in-app live chat with a sales representative
• An SMS program that sends customers customized deals and promotions

This type of customer engagement marketing involves all of the tactics outlined above, allowing you to get customer feedback and provide a personalized experience. Plus, it’s greatly improved by an integrated omnichannel approach.

With the right platform, businesses can take charge of contact centers, gaining the visibility and control needed to manage performance, quality, and customer experience. Putting the right technology in place is key to building an effective customer engagement strategy.

Twilio Flex is a cloud contact center platform that you can deploy in a matter of days and fully customize to your needs. It allows you to manage multiple channels in a single interface, creating that seamless customer experience (and making agents’ jobs easier, as we’ll discuss next).

Once the different facets of your business align and start to work toward a common customer engagement strategy, you’ll reap the following benefits:

Accenture found that 90% of customers are frustrated by long hold times, and 89% are upset when they have to repeat their issue to multiple agents. There’s a reason so many customers have a bad experience with legacy contact centers: Agents are overworked. As they attempt to deal with an endless deluge of customer calls, they’re often forced to spend more than half of their time looking for customer data in numerous places.

With a modern customer engagement platform, agents are empowered by a dashboard that shows them customer data across channels. So if a customer calls tech support about an issue, for example, they don’t have to explain it again in detail for the fifth time and grow even more frustrated. Instead, the phone agent can get caught up quickly and efficiently.

While it’s essential for customer service agents to monitor multiple channels at once, it’s even more beneficial to establish this capability across all departments. Whenever your employees interact with customers, they should know:

• What the customer’s name is
• What products they’ve purchased
• What issues they’ve had in the past
• What additional products or upgrades might interest them

By equipping employees with a wealth of information about each customer, you enable them to deliver personalized service. This humanizes your brand and makes customers feel like you know them (because you do). It’s also incredibly valuable to businesses. After a personalized experience with a company, 44% of customers report they’ll do business with them again in the future. This increased loyalty leads to increased revenue.

To realize the benefits above, you’ll need a cloud-based customer engagement platform. Whether layered on top of your existing system or completely reengineered from the ground up, the right cloud-based solution will be both cost-effective and scalable, allowing you to meet evolving customer demands.

Research from Forrester suggests that companies will save an average of $1.1 million over 3 years by eliminating legacy communications platforms. In addition, the remaining expenses are operational instead of capital, meaning the expenses are predictable and easy to fit into your budget.

Contact centers no longer grow only in response to business growth. Instead, according to research from Deloitte, almost 90% of businesses are investing in contact centers equipped to meet customer expectations and deliver a top-notch customer experience. For information about how to tailor Twilio Flex to your business’ unique needs, allowing you to create the exact customer experience you want, reach out to Sales today.