What your business can learn from the customer engagement cycle

In the era of digital, customers are more connected than ever before, with multiple touch points and ever-developing channels at their fingertips. How many different touch points do customers have with your business? Perhaps they follow you on social media, browse through your website on their smartphone, watch your display ads, or walk into your bricks and mortar store. Customer engagement with your business contributes to customer loyalty and, ultimately, your revenue. So how do you track it?
 

The multiple stages that prospects and customers go through during their experience with your business is called the Customer Engagement Cycle. This describes the process of your relationship, from first interaction to purchase to engagement.
 

Connection is where it all starts. Where do you find your customers, and where do they find you? How does your business or brand appear to them? Most importantly, how do you get them to pay attention to you? Connections are made in a myriad of ways; across social media channels, email, advertisement and word-of-mouth.
 

After Connection comes Interaction, when your customer decides whether they want to communicate, perhaps eve make a purchase. If you’re a B2B business, this might mean setting up a consultation or sales call. If you’re a consumer brand, this might mean a customer visiting your website to look at a certain product. The most important part of this stage in the customer engagement cycle is that it ends in a sale.
 

Once you’ve sold your service or product in the Interaction stage, you’ll reach the Satisfaction stage. In this stage, your customer determines whether they’re happy with the product or service they’ve received. To ensure you reach a positive outcome at this stage, ask yourself how you can make your product or service a better proposition for your customers.
 

Once at the Retention stage you will have connected and interacted with your customers and they will have decided whether they’re happy with what they’ve received. Presupposing that your customers are happy you can turn customers into returning customers. Retention is perhaps the most important stage in the customer engagement cycle.
 

If you have an audience of happy and satisfied customers who have enjoyed positive experiences with your brand and/or products, give them reasons to interact with other lookalike audiences to promote their experiences.

Engagement is probably the most exciting part of the Customer Engagement Cycle – where you can encourage your customers to add value. As happy advocates of your products or brand, you can ask for their input or recommendations for your goods and services. ‘How can we improve service A?’ ‘What could we make better about Product B?’. Maximise customer engagement by giving them the chance to make a difference.
 

The more you understand and endeavour to improve your business’ customer engagement cycle, the more likely you are to achieve your business goals and grow ROI.

Find out how the Nicholson’s Pubs brand boosted engagement, customer acquisition and ROI with a Loyalty App. 

Find out how Eagle Eye AIR could help your business develop its customer engagement cycle and get in contact today.