omer engagement: From value creation to value enhancement //

Customer Engagement is vital to the growth of every business. Yet, so many companies do not engage their customers effectively. It could be because of messy data, a lack of resources or a lack in expertise.

Most companies are good at creating value for customers. But the key to consistent growth is in increasing value. Find out why it’s important to engage customers by focusing on the latter.

Meaningful engagements drive customer lifetime value

Customer engagement is the way brands interact with their customers throughout the entire customer journey. This engagement often begins before a potential customer becomes a client and continues throughout the entire buying process. The ultimate goal is to have customer advocates.

Customer engagement is about building relationships with your customers, creating meaningful experiences, and attracting them to your brand. This will lead to increased sales and customer retention. Creating meaningful customer engagement increases customer life-time value.

You can measure your CLV to determine how valuable your customers are throughout their entire lifecycle. This metric is not tracked by all companies. They miss the opportunity to assess their strategy’s success and make adjustments in order to continually improve it.

For organizations to accurately and consistently measure CLV, they need a data governance process as well as the right tools. Visibility into CLV allows you to approach customer segmentation in a revenue- and growth-oriented manner.

You can then prioritize the segments that have the highest revenue and yield potential, and customize the experience for these customers.

Customer journey and its impact on engagement

You will find it virtually impossible to engage customers if you don’t understand the customer journey from beginning to end. Why? Each stage impacts engagement and can affect different departments in your organization. This gives you the opportunity to personalize customer experiences.

As you can see below, at my company, analyzing the customer journey includes examining the parallel journeys that the customer takes with their business.

This is a macro-view of the journey. However, it allows organizations to see where they are moving from value creation to expansion of value and, most importantly, to do so through the eyes of their customers.

Businesses can create sustainable growth by knowing the stages of customer journeys, even on a macro-level.

It is important to understand the different roles that are responsible for each stage of the customer journey. This common understanding encourages collaboration within the organization, and keeps the customer at the forefront.

As you can see in the picture below, aligning marketing with sales is just a small part of what’s needed to move from value creation into value expansion. It takes a village.

Value expansion is the next step after value creation

I’ve worked with companies who create ideal profiles of customers based on specific information. After speaking with several customers, conducting some research, and adding a dash of tribal knowledge, they develop personas. They also consider customer feedback, responses to NPS surveys and other factors.

This approach is good for getting closer to the customer, but it has a fundamental flaw… Imagine a brand new car. As soon as you drive off the lot, your car’s value starts to depreciate. Even if they can be created and launched within weeks, manually created profiles have the same value.

Markets and clients change rapidly. In B2B, it is still people who are the most important. It is important to be able to get real-time insight into your data, and optimize your engagement strategy. This can only be achieved by using data in good condition and applying machine learning (ML), artificial intelligence (AI) to the real world.

These tools can help you gain a better understanding of the customer journey. You can identify changes or shifts and predict behavior and engagement. This allows you to personalize engagement throughout the customer’s lifecycle, by audience segment and down to an individual customer.

The data insights provide an understanding of customer preferences, which will determine the engagement approach.

Considering that <a href="https://blog.gitnux.com/b2b-customer-experience-statistics/#:~:text=According%20to%20a%20study%20by,have%20for%20their%20business%20interactions." At least 80% B2B customers expect the same buying experience as a B2C client. The question is not whether or when a company will do it, but how soon.

It would be simplistic to say that the best way for an organization to go from value creation into value expansion is by delivering meaningful engagement and world-class experiences at every stage of their customer journey.

How long it takes to reach a certain level of growth maturity will depend on the organization. Customer alignment and engagement, regardless of time or investment required, can create a sustainable culture of growth in any organization. This can be achieved and should be measured – more about that in future articles.

Dig deep: 3 simple steps to navigate the complex customer journey

The article Customer Engagement: Moving from Value Creation to Value Expansion first appeared on MarTech.