In the age of the Internet, customers look for more than product quality

By: Omar Abdul-Hafiz


It is a known fact nowadays that product quality, although essential for customer satisfaction, is no longer enough on its own. Customers are now becoming more aware and much harder to please. And with the intense rise in competition between businesses around the world, customer retention has grown more challenging than ever before.

In light of this, it is important to pose the question: What do customers look for other than product or service quality? Well, there is a short answer and a long one. The short answer is customer engagement. The longer answer, however, is digitalized customer engagement.

What do we mean by digitalized customer engagement?

Simply put, digitalized customer engagement is a broad term that covers every digital solution that facilitates customer interaction and participation in the presentation and development of that product or service.

For example, a company specializing in confectionery can engage its customers by offering them a digitalized interface through which they can view its collection of products, place their orders, communicate and offer their feedback about certain aspects of its products or customer service.

This digitalized interface can be either a web portal, a smartphone app, social media or better, an intricate combination of all these.

How can businesses benefit from digitalized customer engagement?

Engaging your customers digitally has been proven to be a powerful way of boosting your customers’ loyalty. If done as part of a carefully choreographed marketing strategy, it can result in incredibly enhancing your customer relationship management (CRM). Things that you achieve with a digitalized customer engagement solution include, but are not limited to:

• Customers’ ability to view and browse your digital product catalog at their own convenience.
  
• Customers’ ability to easily communicate with you about certain issues or questions they may have about your product.
  
• Customers’ ability to directly express their opinion about your product, either on your online platform or on other platforms such as social media.
  
• Self-service, which is enabling the customers to access and perform a number of activities on their own with ease. Such activities may include updating their data, viewing transaction history, placing orders, paying their bills and so on. 

And these four elements, among several others, can best be achieved by adopting an astute digitalized customer experience strategy.

What are some popular examples of Internet solutions that can enhance digital customer engagement?

Below is a brief list of some very popular and effective tools that can be implemented in order to digitally engage your customers:

Websites

Trivially, a website is the typical medium of digital communication between your business and your customers. Having a well-developed, interactive and beautifully designed website that clearly reflects the identity of your business is essential for achieving the basic level of digital customer engagement.

Smartphone apps 

Smartphone apps are pieces of software that customers can install on their smartphones to give them access to your products and services virtually anytime, anywhere. Through these apps, they can view products, make purchases, share information, submit feedback and so on. As such it is a very simple and ubiquitous tool for self-service that can greatly boost customer engagement.

Customer Portals

Customer portals are another effective self-service tool. They are feature-rich web interfaces where users can access and perform a wide variety of activities. For example, a banking portal can enable clients to view their account balance, make money transfers or pay their electricity bill, just to name a few. 

e-Commerce platforms

e-Commerce platforms are a powerful tool to maximize customer engagement by enabling users to perform a number of activities. Such activities include: Viewing your product catalog, comparing prices, adding items to their shopping cart and then submitting the purchase.

The biggest success story that comes to mind when talking about e-Commerce would be Amazon. Originally started in 1994 as an online bookseller, Amazon evolved over the past couple of decades to become the ginormous ‘everything seller’ we know today. According to Sellbrite, six important lessons can be learned from Amazon’s great eCommerce success:

• Meeting your customers’ needs.
  
• Incorporating data analysis in decision making.
  
• Getting to know your customers.
  
• Building a community for your customers.
  
• Building a loyalty program to incentivize your customers.
  
• Finding new innovative ways to evolve your business.
  

Take a look at what ESKADENIA offers for creating web portals, e-commerce platforms and mobile apps.