How to Adopt the Right Customer Engagement Model to Delight Your Customers

An engaged customer is a happy customer. When your customers are delighted, it fosters long-term relationships with your business. According to a recent survey by Freshworks, 56% of consumers worldwide have stopped doing business with a brand due to a single bad experience in the last 12 months. 

Poor customer engagement leads to poor lead conversion, damage to your brand reputation, loss of loyal customers, customer dissatisfaction, and ultimately a drop in your revenue. 

We know that high-quality customer engagement is the answer to the multiple challenges we face in our business. But did you know that it is also the one secret recipe your business needs to retain customers and gain loyal customers for life? Keep reading to learn more about customer engagement.

What is a customer engagement model?

A customer engagement model is an approach to building and nurturing customer relationships throughout the customer journey.  Your customer engagement model should ideally be designed to enhance customer experience, improve conversion, and increase revenue, satisfaction, and overall customer retention. 

Customer engagement is no longer just a marketing strategy. It should be a part of your business strategy and growth plan. Broadly, the way to choose the right engagement model for your business is to understand how much engagement is required in order to meet and exceed customer expectations. 

For instance, a pizza brand can assume that customers can navigate through the task of ordering a pizza with minimal brand support. However, an insurance or software company requires a far better engagement strategy to make a sale or support their customers. 

Let’s deep dive into the different engagement models in the next section. 

Three models of customer engagement

1. Low touch engagement model

This approach is most suitable for companies selling high volume but low-priced solutions. Automation can play a significant role in this type of engagement. While the goal is to engage with your customers, the interactions can be limited and automated. This type of engagement works great for companies pursuing a product-led growth strategy. 

This model has gained momentum over the past few years. Here the engagement is driven by an excellent product, combined with a stellar user experience that makes the product a part of your customer’s life. The products shouldn’t be complex, and customers should be able to make a purchase directly without coming in contact with your agents. In low touch engagement

  • Engagement is digitally driven and technology-assisted. 
  • The customer learns from training or onboarding and in some cases from a simple video tutorial. 
  • The product is quite simple and so in-app tips and tutorials can help customers get started. 
  • Engagement and retention efforts are automated with emails and chat pop-ups to send out updates and engage with users. 
  • Customer service is done with self-service documents, knowledge base and solution articles and in some cases automated with chatbots. 

The best example of a company that belongs to this growth strategy is Zoom. 69% of people use Zoom, making it the most used platform for remote meetings. They have built a product that invites even non-customers to use and experience its capabilities.  Here the product is the entry point and it eliminates the need for a sales team. 

Zoom meeting

Zoom meeting page 

2. High touch onboarding model

This type of engagement model is suitable for businesses selling high-cost enterprise products/services. These customers require live interactions between your different teams. If your business follows a sales-led growth plan, this model is ideal for you. Here the marketing team acquires leads, passes them on to the sales development team, where the leads are qualified, and handed over to the account executives. 

This approach is mainly followed by software companies that sell solutions/services that involve multiple decision-makers to finalize a purchase. In high touch onboarding, 

  • The engagement is human-led. 
  • A dedicated sales rep or Customer Success Manager (CSM) is assigned to each customer to facilitate 1:1 interaction to engage and support the customers.
  • The number of customers per CSM will depend on cost and complexity. If the accounts are relatively more minor, a single CSM will be assigned to handle multiple ones. 
  • Regular phone and email communications are carried to keep the customers engaged. 
  • Customer service is offered via email, phone, chat, and messaging channels

An example of this type of engagement model is Cognizant. They leverage their sales strategy for the growth of their business. They don’t offer free product trials for the visitors to experience the product by themselves. You have to use their contact forms and get in touch with their sales team to custom-build a solution. 

Cognizant sign-up form

Cognizant product sign up form 

3. Hybrid Model 

This model is a combination of both high touch and low touch engagement. Most companies adopt a blend of both the models and modify their engagement between high and low based on factors like complexity and cost. Some may begin with high-touch and then move on to low-touch engagement. At the same time, some start with low-touch onboarding and then offer extra assistance to customers who face difficulty. 

Freshworks is an example of this model. We switch between high touch and low touch engagement. For smaller and medium businesses, we offer low-touch onboarding and then automate our engagement with our customers. For enterprise businesses, there are account executives and customer success managers assigned to each account for a high-touch engagement experience. 

Freshdesk customer success demo

Freshdesk customer success demo page

How to retain customers with the right customer engagement model

1. Show empathy

A good relationship is built purely on empathy. Empathetic customer engagement is a process that starts with listening to your customers, addressing their queries at the right time, giving them what they want, and following up with their feedback.

Empathetic customer engagement requires a marketing team that focuses more on building relationships than generating leads. A sales team that sells values more than features; a support team that focuses more on conversations than tickets; and finally, a brand prioritizes empathy and customer-brand relationships more than numbers.

No matter the engagement model you choose, empathetic customer engagement is your first step in achieving a mindset of genuinely helping your users get what they want and add value to their journey.

2. Communicate value

Every user has a different reason to churn and a different reason to convert. Designing a one-size-fits-all product is a task of its kind. Achieving a middle ground is only possible through meaningful and relevant communication. Always communicate value, not product updates and features. 

A well-designed and personalized prompt or message can be the key to engaging with your customers. These messages need to be sent at the right intervals and after the right actions to convey the target value truly.

3. Offer conversational support

Once the user signs up for your product, you must engage with them at multiple touchpoints using different channels. The most effective communication channel is a live chat tool for your business which serves as a holistic solution for your conversational needs.

Live chat support enables your users to stay in touch with you at all times while they explore your product. It’s equivalent to having a salesperson standing next to you in a showroom during a purchase, answering questions whenever needed. Your users might have multiple questions to be answered, like which plan is suitable for them, what combination of features they would need to pay for, how to access a particular option, and so on.

In this high-touch engagement, conversational customer support allows you to listen to their queries, observe their journey within your product, trigger proactive conversation heads whenever you feel they need help, and ask for feedback at any point. Most importantly, it allows you to be present for your users at all times.

Live chat solutions also come with chatbot integrations that help solve basic queries, which companies can leverage by following a low-touch engagement model. Chatbots are trained to be highly context-sensitive to provide valuable and meaningful responses. Some chatbots come with the in-built capability to solve basic queries that users face during onboarding. 

4. Drive action

In this section, we get into the different types of messaging you can leverage to boost customer engagement. You can choose a mix of these messaging ideas and apply them to your engagement model. 

  • Create urgency

A great way to persuade your users to take immediate action is to use a scarcity tactic; providing a limitation, even if artificial,  kindles the user’s urge to act with urgency. The limitation can be with respect to time, features, or pricing deals. 

This type of messaging works well once you have a deep understanding of your user persona. Certain users prefer exploring all the features within a given span of time. In contrast, other users might prefer testing out basic features for a more extended period of time before making a decision.

Grammarly does a wonderful job of providing a pricing offer coupled with an urgency of time.

Grammarly subscription
The short time span of the offer forces you to act fast.  Providing a clear list of benefits gives the audience an understanding of the value-add they receive by opting for the premium plan, which is available at a much lower price than usual. 

  • Fear of missing out 

FOMO as a messaging technique is a way to get into the minds of your users and show them that a large number of people are enjoying something that they are missing out on. This can be implemented by displaying the benefits your customers are receiving as opposed to the ones who are yet to try your product/service. Heinz advertisement

Heinz has created FOMO among its users by promoting an exclusive limited edition only for serious ketchup lovers. They have also cleverly asked their customers to follow their page to know the offer, 

  • Good to have 

This type of messaging is great for saying, “Hey! did you know we can also do this?” without interrupting the fluidity of the user journey.

Zoom upgrade

Some products have subtle but persistent reminders placed throughout the product experience instead of limiting specific premium actions. Here’s an example of Zoom where they list out all the benefits of using a basic plan and also include a CTA to upgrade to their pro plan

  • Sharing delight 

Happiness is contagious.  You can ensure a successful and happy conversion by sending a series of ‘happy’ emails and conveying what users can experience once they experience your product or service. These emails are the best way to keep engagement an ongoing process and improve customer retention. 

Master the art of customer engagement

After all, the mystery is solved after all— customer engagement does help you improve your customer experience and retain customers. The takeaway here is to decide which engagement model works best for you and adopt the same for your business. Just take a minute to deliberate the what, why, and how aspects of this customer engagement model and build a customer engagement strategy that suits your business. 

Freshdesk Messaging