Four key principles to engage your customers in a digital landscape

The customer service landscape is constantly evolving, and it will continue to experience many fundamental shifts in the years ahead as digital transformation increases. Customers now expect personalized interactions with your business through reliable and effective eCommerce platforms as well as insights gained from data and analytics. However, it is important not to lose track of the human aspect of customer engagement. How can your business continue to prioritize human interactions from the first point of entry all the way to the sales handoff?

Four key principles can help you prioritize the human experience and increase customer engagement in a digital landscape. We’ve summarized each of these principles in-depth to help you leverage new technology to meet customer expectations and stand out in a competitive marketplace.

What is the current state of the marketplace?

Businesses are seizing new opportunities and addressing emerging challenges as the digital landscape continues to grow and change. These two key trends are emerging in today’s marketplace:

Blending B2B tactics with B2C tactics

Buyers today have high expectations. They also are self-educating through online research, peer opinions, and social media before they commit to a purchase. This is true both within business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) environments.

As the digital landscape changes, B2B marketers that traditionally focused on providing customers with information are now looking to build an emotional brand connection. Conversely, B2C marketers are now refocusing their strategies to create more educational content for their customers.

Your business needs to be able to blend both approaches to successfully engage your customers on a deeper level in today’s marketplace. It is important to remember that you are simply communicating with people — whether you are engaging on a group (B2B) or individual (B2C) level.

Harnessing customer insights

Many businesses describe themselves as customer-centric — and have made strategic investments in modern technologies such as and artificial intelligence (AI) to gain a holistic 360-degree view of their customers. However, your customers may not share the same viewpoint if your business does not follow through on these valuable data points to personalize the customer experience.

Your business needs to act on the insights offered by technology to optimize its customer engagement strategy. Many customers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience. According to a study by McKinsey:

• Seventy percent of customers expect personalized experiences
• Businesses gain a five to 15 percent increase in revenues by enhancing the customer experience
• Personalizing the customer experience reduces customer acquisition costs by 50 percent

Four key principles to increase customer engagement

Your business can learn from customer trends and adapt to changing needs by moving from large groups of impersonal data to solutions that fully unify information across the full customer lifecycle. These solutions can help build credibility and trust in your business by basing your customer engagement strategy on personalized data.

This approach enables you to run multi-channel campaigns to increase sales-ready leads and create individual experiences. It also allows you to use guided processes and AI to anticipate and respond quickly to the needs of your customers.

Building strong relationships is an ongoing process — and nurturing these relationships is critical to your business’ long-term success. These four key principles can help you get started on turning prospects into engaged customers:

1. Nurture more demand
2. Personalize buyer experiences
3. Build relationships at scale
4. Make insight-driven decisions

Each of these key principles can help your business take a more human and personalized approach toward customer engagement to achieve impactful results. We’ve taken an in-depth look at each principle below:

Nurture more demand

It is no longer enough to rely on conventional lead-generation methods such as direct emails, networking, and traditional advertising in today’s digital landscape. Your business needs to reach customers where they are spending most of their time — online.

For example, using Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Marketing can help your business achieve a competitive advantage through gaining vital insights into its customer base. This knowledge can help you understand what your customers expect from their experience with your business and allow you to meet their needs and drive more sales. Generating leads across multiple channels using data-driven insights and handing off sales-ready leads is crucial to support growth of your business in today’s digital landscape.

Personalize buyer experiences

More customers are demanding personalized experiences — however, many companies are falling short of providing a frictionless and consistent customer experience. Customer relationship management (CRM) and marketing automation platforms can help companies reduce friction and improve consistency through acquiring a holistic view of customers, predicting their needs, and creating a connected and personalized journey.

Customers are willing to spend more for personalized service. Businesses that can deliver or adapt to their changing needs are better positioned to achieve success in today’s competitive marketplace.

Build relationships at scale

Technology continues to grow each day, offering new opportunities to build relationships with people that your business may not otherwise reach. However, building these relationships does not happen instantly, and your business needs to build its credibility to establish and grow relationships with customers.

For example, your business may have already implemented Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Sales. The next step on your journey might be to leverage a tool such as Microsoft Relationship Sales to generate more leads through relationship selling.

Make insight-driven decisions

Your business can make more informed decisions by leveraging digital insights and embracing the power of AI. Implementing the right reporting tools and understanding how to analyze and measure your data accurately is critical to make empowered decisions to drive your business forward. Adapting new technology can help improve performance, empower your employees, and enable your business to stand out in a competitive marketplace.

Using our example above, tools such as Microsoft Dynamics 365 can help you bring together customer data into a single unified location. This enables you to gain a complete view of your customers — which can be harnessed to generate customer satisfaction and strategic insights. This approach can help drive improved performance throughout the company and empower your employees.

Take the next steps

The needs of your customers are constantly changing — and it is necessary for businesses to adapt to an evolving marketplace and leverage new technology to enhance customer engagement. Implementing tools to nurture more demand, personalize the buyer experience, build relationships at scale, and make insight-driven decisions can help your business prioritize the human aspect in its customer engagement strategy and gain a competitive advantage.