The expression Customer Engagement refers to the need to create a relationship and a deep connection with the customer through the creation of customised and engaging content. A way of engaging the user and building their loyalty also in the sports and artistic fields, where the same concept is called Fan Engagement.
Customer Engagement in the post-pandemic scenario
The pandemic has deeply changed people’s lifestyles, forcing companies too to adapt to a new digitalisation and increasingly more aware consumers.
In particular, the ‘State of Marketing’ research conducted by Salesforce in July 2021 reveals that 94% of marketers surveyed had to change their post-pandemic customer engagement strategy. Consumers are much more concerned about privacy and confidentiality of digital data used by companies to deliver hyper-personalised and contextualised content.
In this context, it becomes increasingly crucial for companies to be transparent about the use of both raw and structured data. Customer engagement, in the post-Covid world, is led by data-driven ecosystems built through consumer consent. In fact, consent to collect personal data of current and potential customers is preliminary to building strong customer loyalty to deliver real value to end-users.
Starting from the evolution of the current context, in order to build deeper relationships with customers, many brands are considering investing more in hybrid experiences. Innovation, differentiation and greater inclusiveness are some of the key strategies to achieve greater customer engagement.
The personalisation phenomenon: evolution and perspectives
Customer engagement means offering people exactly what they want and need through a customised marketing experience. Personalisation of products and services is currently one of the most important strategic keys to business progress. Personalisation means creating new ways of relating and communicating to better understand customer behaviour by designing new forms of engagement and loyalty that are both pertinent and relevant.
Brands, in order to be able to create truly personalised experiences, must be able to monitor the data shared by customers in real time, using it to propose marketing and customer engagement activities built on the needs of the target audience. In addition to the services offered on digital platforms, this also translates into the personalisation of the physical product.
The personalisation of the offer to create tailor-made user experiences is also closely linked to the use of AI.
AI: a new way to improve customer engagement
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a research area that studies the programming and design of systems aimed at providing machines with specific human-like capabilities. From a marketing perspective, the use of Artificial Intelligence makes it possible to learn from interactions with users in order to develop specific functionalities useful for the engagement: the automatic optimisation of the time of sending a communication, the choice of the best channel to convey it through, and the evaluation of the results of each mailing, are just a few examples.
The main benefits of this new technological approach are the possibility of:
- classify large quantities of information quickly in order to offer customers fast answers to their questions;
- identify key concepts, speeding up comprehension of content to easily retrieve useful information;
- provide immediate feedback to user requests.
Data Driven Marketing systems that integrate the potential of AI, in particular, are able to extract value from Big Data from multiple sources. This translates into companies being able to offer consumers a range of highly customised products and services in a fully automated way. Artificial Intelligence, when used consistently, is an extraordinary tool to increase customer trust and engagement.
A solution to keep up with the times
Following the pandemic, it is increasingly important for companies to keep up with the deep change that has taken place in the society. With this in mind, offering an increasingly personalised and tailor-made customer experience appears to be one of the best solutions to engage and increase user loyalty. This is precisely why lab-go’s Customer & Fan Engagement service was created: to help companies to be more connected and closer to the end user through engagement, listening to their needs and an increasingly important personalisation.
