Get More From Your Customer Engagement Platform with Customer Education

Gallup defines customer engagement as: “A customer’s rational, emotional, and psychological attachment to a brand, company or product.”

An effective customer engagement strategy involves interacting with your customers in a way that encourages their commitment and improves their satisfaction with your product. With an automated customer engagement platform,  participation indicators are much easier to accomplish and track.

Why Is a Customer Engagement Platform Important?

Gallup’s research reveals interesting data about customer engagement:

• An engaged customer accounts for a 23% premium to the average customer in terms of share of wallet, profitability, revenue, and relationship growth.
• In the retail banking industry, totally engaged clients generate 37% more annual revenue than those who are actively disengaged.
• When it comes to consumer electronics, engaged shoppers spend 29% more on each shopping trip than actively disengaged clients.
• Engaged hotel guests spend 46% more than actively disengaged ones each year.
• Companies that engage their B2B customers regularly reduce customer attrition by 63%, earn 55% more share of wallet, and are 50% more productive.

Tracking customer engagement is not the same thing as tracking customer churn. However, if your churn rates are high, you can bet these customers are not engaged with your product.

In this guide, we will review the link between engaging and retaining your users, and show you how you can leverage customer education technology to increase the success of your customer engagement platform.

Related: Four Pillars of Customer Engagement

How Can You Use Customer Engagement to Boost Retention?

Customers who are engaged are more likely to return and become brand advocates. As a customer gains trust in your business, they will be inclined to purchase more from you or renew their contract for another term of service. Customers aren’t all the same, so it’s essential to customize your approach to keep your best ones well-served and happy.

There’s a correlation between customer engagement and retention. A pleased customer is likely to return, and there are ways to ensure this happens:

Listen and respond to customer feedback

Having ongoing conversations with your customers is an effective way of engaging users. In addition to improving customer relations overall, you can also use this technique when a customer is unhappy or has a complaint. As a report by Entrepreneur Magazine stated, customers who feel heard feel valued, so giving them a channel to express themselves is always a good idea.

For example, an automated customer engagement platform enables you to respond to customer feedback immediately and send them relevant offers to entice them back. As a proactive way to measure your customers’ overall satisfaction, you can also send them pre-designed surveys after each purchase in order to collect their comments.

Add a personal touch

Every customer has their own unique preferences and personality traits. Understanding this is critical to increasing their loyalty and ensuring they remain engaged. With properly gathered and merged data from various customer engagement platforms (such as customer relationship management -CRM- and marketing automation platforms -MAP-), you can continue to engage them by sending targeted offers based on their visit and purchase patterns. In exchange, you may be able to gather even more valuable data to continue developing communication campaigns tailored to each individual.

Win customers back

When customers churn, re-engaging them is vital. In order to regain lost customers, you can leverage your marketing strategy. Customer engagement platforms can detect if a loyal customer is using your product less frequently, engaging less with your platform, or becoming inactive. In turn, the platform can automatically send them offers and reminders based on their buying habits to ensure they come back and stay.

Educating customers about your products

Your relationship with your customers is a continuous process. In order to effectively communicate with them, you need to reach out at their convenience, which means using the most suitable medium and message for each situation. This should occur during the onboarding phase, when they are new to your platform, as well as anytime you have an update or new information to share about your product.

Customer education is an excellent way to engage your customers. You can complement your customer engagement platform with a leading learning management system (LMS) to maximize the return on your customer outreach. (More on this in the last section of this guide.)

Related: 4 Ways Companies are Using Customer Education to Drive Product Adoption

Choosing an LMS to Support Customer Engagement

To choose the right LMS to complement your customer engagement platform, remember these four criteria:

Scalability

In order to support the growth and evolution of your business, your LMS must be able to scale reliably and effectively. You may find the following questions helpful when exploring available offerings:

• How many users can the platform support concurrently?
• Can the platform maintain the level of support if your user base grows?
• Does the platform have the capacity to enable multiple learning paths?
• Can you add and/or refresh content easily?
• Is there a maximum amount of content it can host?
• Can the platform support single-sign-on (SSO) or other safeguards to enable integrations with other platforms?

User-friendly

Learners tend to engage with content voluntarily, making this criterion particularly relevant. The more user-friendly and intuitive your LMS is, the more likely your customers will complete coursework and return. Consider these factors when evaluating the product:

• Intuitive, self-service learning pathways
• Customization
• Searchability
• Relevant content
• Self-registration

Interoperablity

What integrations are there between the LMS and customer-facing systems, including customer engagement platforms?

An effective LMS integrates seamlessly with the rest of your organization’s tools and reaches across divisions and functional areas. Data about customer education can be merged with other applications such as:

• CRM systems
• MAPs
• Customer success software
• Data and analytics platforms

Analytics

Teams responsible for Customer Education work closely with sales, marketing, customer service, and other areas, and everyone must be able to gather data that can sync with other systems.

Analytics enables you to view the complete customer training path and how it impacts customer engagement. Comprehensive data analysis helps demonstrate how training affects customer adoption, retention, and renewal. You can also leverage analytics to uncover opportunities and challenges in your training content and gain a deeper business understanding of your customers’ needs and preferences.

Customer Education’s Role in Customer Engagement

In the end, driving engagement with your customers is key to the success of your business. An education program that supports all stages of a customer’s lifecycle is one critical solution. By providing training resources and support, you make your products and services accessible at every step of the customer journey, from time to value and adoption to renewal and lifetime value.

Educating your customers quickly can help you gain their loyalty as soon as they buy your product, and then, delivering on-demand education programs sets the stage for long-term customer relationships.

Skilljar is transforming the way enterprises onboard and engage with their customers. We made customer training simple and designed the tools and foundation for successful customer and partner engagement and enablement. Skilljar has all the features you need to onboard and retain customers at scale so you can increase engagement and boost retention over the long term. Request a demo now.