Companies of all sizes grapple with customer engagement challenges because of numerous reasons: whether it is because of the multiple disconnected channels or it is owing to the different customer cohorts with varying needs or the competitor landscape and pressure to keep up with constantly changing customer preferences.
In order to drive sustainable business growth, SMEs need to optimize their engagement strategies to keep their customers constantly engaged. They need to develop deeper customer understanding, build process efficiencies, and ensure they don’t lose out on any cross-sell or up-sell opportunities.
To achieve this, SMEs will need to add robust technology like an insights-led customer engagement platform to their stack, which will in turn will optimize meaningful engagement.
Meaningful customer engagement is all about listening, understanding and interacting with individual customers and cohorts, based on the insights gathered and analyzed. Translating customer data into actionable insights is very important and marketers can’t afford to lose out on such insights as it helps with hyper-personalized recommendations, viz. sending relevant one-to-one communication to customers at the at the right time and on the right channel.
All this and much more is now achievable, thanks to innovative and insights-led customer engagement platforms.
SMEs are growth drivers of the Middle Eastern economy
SMEs in the Middle East and North African region account for more than 90 percent of the region’s businesses. E-commerce in the Middle East surged during the pandemic and is expected to be a $50 billion market in 2022, with CAGR growth of 20 percent by the end of 2022, according to A.T. Kearney.
Even with such a great opportunity waiting in front of them, the sector still tends to solve current customer-related issues rather than invest in long-term solutions. Financial and HR constraints usually compel them to operate in silos and overlook the fact that there are platforms offering insights-led approach to improve their business performance, plug rising costs, and expand their customer base.
Customer engagement platforms help brands take effective actions at every opportune moment. As an SME if you are still debating the benefit of an insights-led engagement platform, it’s time watch out for these warning signs:
Missing data about customers and insights
With multiple data sources to collect and store information, SMEs struggle with gaps in this process. Often times it’s easy to lose sight of the missing data and thus actionable insights. A customer engagement platform provides a unified portal for all these pieces of granular data, which can be stitched together to provide a 360-degree customer view, making it easier to personalize their experience; something SMEs can ignore no more!
Inefficient business processes
Within the SME landscape, most organisations still grapple with digital adoption and end up having a patchy and inefficient business process. Sales teams work in silos bringing down overall efficiency and impacting sales. A customer engagement platform automates most manual and repetitive processes, reducing the burden on teams by consolidating all customer interactions in one place. This leads to outcomes like enhanced productivity, efficiency, and revenue per salesperson. Optimizing a business process and can also help in better operational efficiency, quality and compliance and reduce risks.
Lack of team collaboration
Many a times, SMEs lose out on customers because the latter have a bad experience with a certain team/division. Churns are mainly because of bad customer experience caused by lack of inter-department communication within a company, leading to long wait times, unresolved product/service issues, or even social media comments left unanswered.
A customer engagement platform brings together product, marketing, and operational support teams, providing full visibility into what’s happening with the customer at all stages. This means customer inquiry can be passed on to the right department without any hassle and cut down waiting times resulting in happy customers.
Lack of visibility into customer preferences about communication channel
Brands that do not change their communication strategy to suit customer needs are in choppy waters. Every marketing channel is as different as customers themselves. To maximize the potential of every channel, brands need to understand what customers want from each channel; whether it’s SMS, email, push, live chat or social media.
More importantly, they need to maintain messaging consistency across channels and ensure the channels are connected from a journey perspective, an offering that only insights-led customer engagement platforms can provide. It also allows brands to build dynamic and tailor messages to readers’ preferences, leading to higher conversions and sales.
Missing out on selling opportunities and increasing churn
Despite a marketer’s best efforts, some customers still escape the funnel, sometimes, even at the end of the sales process. The rogue here is a missing element in the customer’s purchase journey: could be a hiccup in in the payment method option, the wrong pricing, a time-consuming on-boarding process or even factors like delays in website loading on their devices.
If there was a way of finding out what went wrong and re-engage these customers and how it can be corrected, marketers can win a significant proportion of them back. Again answers given by a customer engagement platform.
Meaningful engagement can be scaled up with an insights-led engagement platform
It’s clear now there are some unique challenges to small businesses that necessitate the mind-set shift from traditional customer satisfaction to a modern customer engagement model. This will enable them to nurture their customers and stay ahead of the competition and protect their businesses against market disruptions.
In addition, SMEs also have to overturn their organizational culture and move towards data-driven decision making rather making it just gut-based. By focusing on customer engagement, small businesses can gain a competitive advantage over their peers.
A recent study by Gallup revealed that highly engaged customers generate 23 percent more revenue than ordinary customers. With an insights-led customer engagement platform, this is not only possible but also with a huge and far-reaching impact.
Raviteja Dodda, CEO & Co-Founder, MoEngage
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