Why customer engagement is the key to business growth in 2023 and beyond

How do you set your business up for consistent, continuous growth?

It’s the million dollar question that businesses face every day. To answer it, we believe that there are three recurring trends that are shaping the future of business:

1. First, businesses across all industries are facing pressure to become digital businesses. While this shift was already underway, the rate of digital transformation is now happening much faster than previously predicted due to the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
2. Second, expectations are rising for consumer-grade experiences. Whether B2C or B2B, all businesses must now deliver digital experiences that are easy to use, delightful, and personal. Not only is this what customers want (and expect), but it also will have a significant impact on revenue for businesses going forward.
3. Third, the lines between sales, marketing, product, and support are blurring. When a customer reaches out with a question while they’re on a free trial, is that a support issue or a sales issue? The answer is yes – it’s both. When a prospect is intrigued by your outbound marketing and reaches out to your support team to ask a question, is that a marketing, sales, or support issue? Yes, yes, and yes – it’s everyone’s business. More than ever, creating an exceptional customer experience should be top of mind for every team – but to do that, they need to be able to work together seamlessly.

These three trends – ongoing digital transformation, rising consumer expectations, and the blurring of responsibilities between teams – all reveal one huge, undeniable truth: customer experience is now a top-line concern for all companies. That is, in order to stay competitive, businesses need to put customers first by creating engaging, personalized customer experiences.

But this is where many companies are struggling. Customer experience – and by extension, customer engagement, which is the combined cumulative effect of the customer experiences you offer at every touchpoint – can be tricky to get right at scale, especially when you’re trying to provide a cohesive experience across multiple teams and channels. But in order to stay successful in this new landscape, businesses need to run with customer engagement in mind.

Here’s what you need to know.

1. Rapid digital transformation is changing how businesses and consumers interact for good

Digital transformation was already an unavoidable trend – but the pandemic has made it truly business critical.

While customers were already starting to show a clear preference for digital channels such as messaging, COVID-19 amplified this pressure to connect with customers online or risk not connecting with them at all. Subsequently, McKinsey & Company found that the COVID-19 crisis had accelerated the digitization of customer interactions by several years.

“Technology capabilities were one of the key factors of business success during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic”

This trend shows no signs of slowing down. According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), 65% of global GDP will be digitalized by 2022, and investment in digital transformation (DX) continues to grow. They predict that by 2023, 75% of organizations will have comprehensive DX implementation roadmaps, compared to only 27% in 2020.

As a result, digital technologies are being seen as the critical differentiators they are. According to that same report by McKinsey & Company, executive mindsets on technology’s strategic importance have changed radically during the crisis. Gone are the days of pinching pennies in an attempt to cut costs; instead, the true ROI of technology is front of mind for many executives, with more than half reporting that they’re investing more in technology to make it a competitive advantage or refocusing the entire business around digital technologies. Respondents also noted that technology capabilities were one of the key factors of business success during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

“For any business’s digital transformation to be effective, it needs to stay laser focused on the needs of its customers and leverage these new capabilities to create relevant customer engagement”

But as with all technology, the right tools are only half the battle: you also need to ensure you’re using them in service of the right goals. As Deloitte notes, for any business’s digital transformation to be effective, it needs to stay laser focused on the needs of its customers and leverage these new capabilities to create relevant customer engagement.

“With digital becoming an integral part of the new normal, those brands that can elevate the human experience will be able to make a lasting emotional connection with their customers, which then becomes transformational.”
– Embracing digital: from survival to thriving in the post-COVID-19 world

Make the trend work for you: Curate the right tech stack to engage your customers at scale

How can you ensure you’re meeting the need for digital transformation and providing engaging customer experiences at scale – without wasting time and money on endless tools? Invest in creating an integrated tech stack that allows you to seamlessly engage your customers at every stage of their digital journey.

This doesn’t just allow you to reach customers at the most opportune moments and via their preferred medium. By using one platform for all of your customer communication needs, you can also develop a deeper and more cohesive understanding of your customers, leading to game-changing insights as well as more customer-centric – and time-saving – workflows behind the scenes. (More on that later.)

And to ensure you’re being as efficient as possible, look for a customer communications platform that seamlessly integrates with the other key tools in your tech stack, so you can maximize your efficiency.

Ahead of the trend: VendWhen Vend saw their conversation volume increase by 24% at the beginning of the pandemic, they decided to turn off their phone and email support and move entirely to chat. By making chat their primary support channel, they’ve been able to increase agent productivity and engagement, resolve 1 in 5 inbound conversations automatically, and maintain a customer satisfaction score of 90%.Read more →

2. Consumer expectations for exceptional, engaging experiences are rising

This one is a tough pill to swallow for businesses who have only focused on product-driven growth: a great product is no longer enough. After all, as Intercom’s co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Des Traynor says, almost any product or service can be replicated by a competitor. So how do you stand out? With a plethora of comparable options in the market, customers will take their business to the company that provides the best experience.

“90% of Americans say that customer service is important to their choice of – and ongoing loyalty to – a brand”

Customer experience is becoming a critical differentiator for consumers, and it’s having a direct effect on businesses’ bottom lines. According to research by Microsoft, 90% of Americans say that customer service is important to their choice of – and ongoing loyalty to – a brand. And if their service expectations aren’t met? Over half of customers (58%) would happily sever the relationship. On the other hand, Salesforce notes, 78% of consumers will forgive a company for making a mistake after receiving excellent service.

But although customers expect to receive excellent service from companies, the gap between their expectations and reality is stark. Last year, we found that while 73% of support leaders say that customer expectations are increasing, only 42% believe that they’re meeting those expectations. This year, the gulf has widened, with only 34% of support leaders confident that they can meet increased expectations.

“Customer experience and great service isn’t just the responsibility of your support team – every customer-facing team, and every automated and proactive touchpoint, has a role to play”

What constitutes an exceptional experience? For starters, it’s important to note that customer experience and great service isn’t just the responsibility of your support team – every customer-facing team, and every automated and proactive touchpoint, has a role to play. Regardless, every experience should be personalized and personal, as well as fast, convenient, knowledgeable, and friendly. No pressure.

This is where your artfully curated and seamless tech stack comes in. With a clever customer communications platform fuelling your customer experiences across multiple touchpoints and customer journeys, you can stay personal at scale, without sacrificing on speed or burning out your teams.

Make the trend work for you: Use automation to provide personalized engagement every step of the way

The great thing about personalized engagement is that it doesn’t always need to involve a person. Customers don’t mind whether their great experience comes from a human or a bot, so long as it’s a great experience. Ultimately, it depends on their needs: do they want fast, easy answers, or do they have more complex queries that need a human touch?

By using humans and automation together, you can offer up personalized engagement at scale, providing efficient, effective answers without overstretching your customer-facing teams. With custom bots and automation taking care of the simple stuff, like resolving queries or qualifying leads, you can free up your teams’ time to focus on the areas where they can have the most impact, like helping VIP customers with complex issues or getting major logos over the line.

Ahead of the trend: Frame.io
How does cloud-based video collaboration platform Frame.io provide personalized support to two million customers? By cleverly using automation to empower their customers and free up their team’s time, Frame.io has seen an 87.5% reduction in first response time while maintaining an impressive 96% CSAT score across thousands of monthly conversations.Read more →

3. Every team needs to become more customer-centric – because customer engagement is everyone’s job

From both the customer and business perspective, the lines between sales, marketing, product, and support are blurring. So it’s no surprise that 76% of customers expect consistent interactions across departments when they communicate with a company.

Unfortunately, this is another example of customer expectations going unmet. Instead of a cohesive experience, 54% of customers say they generally feel like they’re communicating with separate departments. Even worse: 65% reported often having to repeat or re-explain information to different representatives, creating a huge time sink for customers (not to mention a terrible customer experience).

“It’s no longer good enough to say ‘Sorry, that’s a marketing/sales/product issue’ – now, it’s simply a customer issue”

In a more dynamic and collaborative world, businesses are looking for a cohesive and integrated way for teams to work together in order to build relationships with customers and retain them long term. It’s no longer good enough to say “Sorry, that’s a marketing/sales/product issue” – now, it’s simply a customer issue.

But in order to put this customer-centric approach into practice, teams need to be able to collaborate effortlessly behind the scenes to create this seamless customer experience. And if you want to empower your teams to collaborate effortlessly behind the scenes, you need to be thinking about employee experience right alongside customer experience.

“Happy, empowered employees are the key to happy, empowered customers”

This is what Gartner calls “total experience” (TX), a business strategy that combines multiple experience disciplines – like customer experience, employee experience, and user experience – with the aim of driving greater satisfaction, loyalty, and advocacy across all. It recognizes that these things are all interlinked: an unhappy employee won’t be able to provide a positive experience to customers when they’re not having a positive experience themselves. Instead, we must recognize that happy, empowered employees are the key to happy, empowered customers.

Make the trend work for you: Keep your teams connected to drive better employee (and customer) experiences

Gartner predicts that by 2026, 60% of large enterprises will use total experience to transform their business models to achieve world-class customer and employee advocacy levels.

The right tools can be a major factor in improving both employee and customer experiences. As an employee, there’s nothing more frustrating than being at the mercy of a clunky, slow, unreliable tool to do your job – except maybe being at the mercy of several disconnected, non-integrated clunk, slow, unreliable tools that you need to switch between several times a day.

“By using one platform for all of your customer communication needs across sales, support, marketing, and product, you can create better employee and customer experiences”

As part of your digital transformation, you should be looking to slim down your tech stack and focus on multipurpose tools that play nicely with the other essential apps in your arsenal. Your chosen tools should also make life easier, simpler, more efficient, and more productive for your employees.

For example, by using one platform for all of your customer communication needs across sales, support, marketing, and product, you can create better employee and customer experiences. With one centralized communications platform that gives every team a holistic view of the customer’s history to date, you can provide teams with the visibility and context they need to communicate more productively with customers at every stage of their journey.

In turn, this allows them to collaborate more effectively across the whole business. Instead of wasting time trying to chase down siloed information or re-route queries, every team member can get deeper insights, allowing them to work faster and build stronger relationships.

The result? More empowered employees, who are given the resources they need to engage customers with personalized communications and experiences at exactly the right time, leading to more satisfied customers.

Ahead of the trend: Atlassian
Software giant Atlassian has over 7,000 employees, all working hard to deliver the best possible experiences for more than 200,000 customers. With Intercom supporting their customer communication needs, the Atlassian team has experienced improved collaboration and communication, empowering them to drive growth across all areas of the business.Read more →

Better customer experiences lead to better customer engagement

Creating better, more personalized customer experiences through digital transformation and greater cross-functional collaboration doesn’t just mean happier customers. All of these positive experiences throughout the customer journey ladder up to create better relationships – which in turn drives incredible business results, like reduced churn, increased expansion, and improved retention.

More than simply one-time connections, these experiences become opportunities, allowing for an ongoing dialogue throughout the customer lifecycle that benefits both you and your customers. They’re digitally driven, using in-context, timely, and data-rich communications, but remain fundamentally human and personalized.

This long-term shift in how you think about your customers is key to your next wave of growth. That’s why industry-leading companies rely on Intercom, the Engagement OS. It’s the customer communications platform built for the speed and scale of internet business, that enables engagement throughout the journey – from acquiring to onboarding, activating, support, and beyond. So every customer gets what they need, and your business makes the most of every opportunity.

Ready for your next wave of growth? See how Intercom can help.

Learn more about the Engagement OS