What Is Customer Engagement?

A brand’s interaction with a customer is a brittle thing. It doesn’t take much for a customer to call it a day, give the brand the old heave-ho and switch to another provider while swearing blind “it’s not me, it’s you — definitely you.”

That’s a remarkable lack of patience in something that brands like to consider a relationship.

The  brand will have promised a customer the world, declared its undying devotion to quality and sworn blind that it would never let the customer down. And then after a small slip-up, a problem in customer service or fault in the production line, the customer the brand has fought so hard to land and hold is already looking around for a new suitor.

Whenever that happens it’s a failure on the part of the brand’s fulfillment department; the brand has failed to supply the services the customer expects. But it makes vital the role of the company’s marketers, and more specifically its engagement marketers.

They have to do more than sell the benefits of swapping cash for a good. They have to build a connection with a customer so deep that the customer always enjoys their presence and is willing to overlook any mistakes. They have to create an experience that the customer treasures and doesn’t want to give up. They have to forge trust and build a genuine relationship out of a commercial transaction.

There are lots of definitions of customer engagement and no shortage of literature that attempts to describe its dimensions. We can read about the role of “immersion,” the rational aspects that keep customers engaged; about “passion,” the emotional feelings that drive people to interact with a brand; and we can read about “activation,” the behaviors and habits that keep customers coming back to a service provider who feels familiar.

Customer engagement is all of these things — and less.

It’s the relationship between the customer and the brand. It’s personal.

Customer Engagement Means Taking It Personally

We all take things personally. We all take everything personally. Our relationship with our family is personal, and so are our relationships with our friends and our colleagues. Those relationships differ but the way we experience them is woven into our lives and into our personalities.

We repeat that pattern in our relationship with brands. We bring the same expectations and the same hopes. As long as the relationship continues to bring meaning into our lives, as long as it continues to connect to our life stories, our needs and our expectations — we want to continue that relationship.

Customer engagement is the building and maintenance of that relationship. It’s personal, and it’s also commercial. We know exactly what service we expect when enter into a relationship with a brand but like a relationship with a person, we don’t know what experience we should expect from it.

We notice when it’s missing but we don’t notice when it’s being applied. We notice that we’re happy and secure, but we don’t notice the marketing communications that provide the experience or the content and information that ensure the customer always knows where he or she stands — and which keep that relationship strong.

The customer engagement that we create on behalf of clients is not something that we can see but it is something that we can measure and we can see its effects. We can see it in the rate of conversions, and we can see it in the degree of forgiveness that brands receive, but have no right to expect, in their customer relations.

To learn more about customer engagement in content marketing and what it can do for your business, contact us at contact@astelo.com.

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