Modern customer engagement decoded: Keeping up with Gen Y and Z

The term customer engagement is quite a buzzword in today’s business landscape. It’s been so overused that it’s often misconceived as an item on a checklist rather than an ongoing relationship between a business and its customers, that depends on customer preferences and behaviour.

Customer engagement is about actively interacting with your audience with messaging that interests, educates, or helps them and encourages two-way conversations with your business. In simple terms, it’s just about learning and anticipating what your customers want and then giving it to them at the right time.

The terms “customer engagement” and “customer experience” are often used interchangeably, but they're not the same. Check out our blog to know the difference between customer experience and customer engagement, and how they go hand-in-hand.

This, however, is easier said than done, especially given that most of your current and future audience are millennials and zoomers. Being digital natives, your audience has a plethora of choices, richer and faster access to information, little or zero tolerance for complicated processes, and are increasingly privacy-conscious.

All this translates to a power shift, and we’ve decoded what that means for you as a business and how you can adapt to this new market reality.

Preparing for a mobile-led shift

The most significant change is that mobile usage has overtaken desktop usage, and your target audience is more likely to look something up on their phones or tablets than a computer.

So the first step is to make your website mobile friendly and create mobile apps for major mobile OSs. Step two is to ensure your website visitors and mobile app users can reach you instantly for information or help, by adding live chat on your website and mobile apps. Zoho SalesIQ's free live chat software helps you do this at no extra cost.

In addition, our mobile SDK, Mobilisten, helps you automatically set up contextual personalized push notifications and even add relevant in-app messages to nurture your mobile app users.

Cross-device shopping is also a challenge that makes it difficult for companies to maintain a consistent brand identity and experience, more so for businesses with multiple brands. We’ve solved this with a single admin space to manage each of your brands’ multiple digital touchpoints.

Catering to the “always-connected” generation

The main requirement of customer engagement is being available to existing and prospective customers. This is especially challenging in the present scenario, where time and geography have become irrelevant, and prospects and customers expect businesses to be reachable around the clock.

The advent of chatbots has made this possible without hiring employees to cover multiple shifts, but having developers/agencies build bots for your multiple requirements is going to be expensive. We’ve solved this with an easy-to-use drag-and-drop chatbot builder that makes creating a bot as easy as drawing a flowchart!

Making AI chatbots more human

Though chatbots were invented to free up your staff from mundane tasks so they can focus on more complex ones, research shows that customers find it harder to get issues resolved by AI chatbots.

Zoho SalesIQ offers you the best of both worlds with Answer Bot—an AI-driven chatbot that can greet your prospects or customers, respond to small talk with engaging phrases, and even understand common queries, regardless of the tone or terms used, and answer them using your resources. At any point if your customer decides to switch to a human agent, the bot can forward the chat to one of your team members.

Scaling as required

Running a social media or email campaign? Just deploy a dedicated chatbot to handle the new influx of traffic coming from the campaign, at no extra cost!

Personalizing your messaging without overtargeting

Personalization is considered the pinnacle of customer engagement, but when you’re dealing with a more privacy-conscious generation of customers, it’s too easy for you to inadvertently cross the line between being helpful and just plain creepy.

Zoho SalesIQ lets you deliver timely and relevant messaging to your most valuable leads right when they need it, like an offer for help after a failed transaction, or when they’ve spent a long time trying to decide between two products.

Set up automated chat invites and notifications based on the data prospects voluntarily give you, publicly available data like company details in the case of B2B models, non-sensitive information like visit source, pages visited, time spent and actions on the site, order history and other data available on your CRM if they’re existing customers, date, time or even day of the week. You can also display a GDPR banner if your customers are in the EU.

Achieving business zen with a unified customer view

Many of us fall prey to ad fatigue and endless retargetting. While it’s frustrating, it throws light on the fact that customer data is still jumbled, redundant, or even mismanaged chunks of information.

Zoho SalesIQ has ready-to-use integrations with major CRM tools, help desk software, email marketing tools, analytics software, and just about everything else you use on a regular basis. This gives you a holistic view of customer data, and avoids any missteps in data management and customer communication.

Widgets let you create custom app integrations to bring your favorite apps inside SalesIQ, so you can view and manage the data right from within the app. You can also avoid redundancies by adding an auto-sync feature to your widget, to sync all the data changes in the respective apps.

We hope this blog helps you shape a more successful customer engagement strategy. Before you set out, take a look at our detailed blog on how to build an effective customer engagement strategy too.

Please let us know what you think in the comments below. If you have any additional ideas, we’d love to hear them too!