You sell your products to customers. You want them to like what you sell and to return to you often. But customer behavior is changing fast and one can’t ignore noticing the rapidly evolving customer trends. Today customers are more informed — they check prices, compare services and read reviews online before making a purchase. Advent of internet and thereafter of social media has completely transformed the way customers used to think/behave. They are now more selective about associating themselves with a brand. They form an impression from the information they get on online boards.

Your buyers are most important irrespective of your business size. They can have a serious impact on the future of your business. To keep them hooked you’d need to devise foolproof plan so that they stay attached to you. Here is why customer engagement is critical for a business:

• New businesses are hard to come by so you’ll not desire to lose them soon
• Engaged customers are likely to stick with your for longer; thus improves your customer retention rate
• Engaged customers will go out of their ways to do business with you
• Engaged customers will turn to be your advocates — influencing others to follow suit
• Customer engagement is essential for your brand positioning and image building
• You can create a brand revolution by mobilizing your fans on social sites

However, customer engagement isn’t as easy as it sounds. Market experts have agreed that businesses tend to lose around 10% of their customer base yearly despite every effort of customer retention. Moreover, most marketing professionals have agreed that they don’t know where to begin in the effort of engaging customers.

Well, for a start you can delve into the data gleaned by your CRM. Customer relationship management solutions can prove crucial in helping you find the touch point to plan for a customer engagement campaign.

• CRM software solutions let you search your most loyal customers and help you take the relationship further.
• Its effective lead management solutions also let you find most positive prospects.
• Helps you improve your customer service quality.
• Let you track your progress and customer reactions on social websites.

Emergence of social customers and social CRM

The idea of customer engagement is largely based on influencing customers on social boards. Most modern customers are believed to be more interactive and they leverage the power of social media in expressing their point of view. They have turned to social channels since those were not controlled by companies.

A modern social customer can be described as tech savvy, peer trusting, educated and affluent person. They are more likely to talk their experiences on public boards and are more influential than ever. They have forced open a channel of communication between themselves and organizations. This has forced marketing and customer service agents as well as the sales executives to take social platforms more seriously. They have realized the importance of responding to customer reactions promptly and timely and that too on open forums/social boards.

Social CRM is a growing business need for today’s B2C and B2B firms. Essentially a social CRM (SCRM) helps in tracking, collecting, and analyzing company’s social performance and building strategies in engaging customers on boards.