3 Digital Engagement Insights We’re Grateful For

With Thanksgiving upon us, all of us at Khoros are grateful for our amazing customers and we find ourselves reflecting on the many valuable insights they shared at Khoros Engage events this year. We’re highlighting three of those insights below; if you missed Engage and want to know what it was all about, take a look at the IDC report.

That’s right. Robots aren’t taking over, but they are important to digital engagement. There are two important goals that automation should be deployed to achieve: Better customer experience and helping human agents become more efficient. Replacing care agents doesn’t achieve either one of these. Additionally, automation should be done on a small scale to start. Bits and pieces, not the whole shebang.

Instead of using automation as a catchall, it may make more sense to use it in the middle of an interaction to take care of repetitive, mundane tasks, such as customer identification or reaching back out through messaging.

Automation can also be used in triage situations. For example, a bot can greet a customer and ask some questions to home in on the problem that the care agent can help them with, or the interaction can begin with an agent, and then complete a verification utilizing automation. In other words, automation doesn’t always equal chatbots. Tagging, prioritization, and routing are also automated tasks that add value without a chatbot.

Automation should level up the agent’s work rather than replacing it. Learn more about the role of automation in digital engagement with our tipsheet.

Just like snowflakes, great gifts, and you, every online community is unique, and its successes should be considered in this way. Understanding a community’s purpose is important to establishing measurable objectives. Even if the initial justification for building a community was to save costs, every community’s ultimate purpose should be to strengthen the fabric of customer relationships.

One metric worth measuring is support deflection, but it shouldn’t dictate outcomes. Remember that SEO value, resolution time, and customer retention are important measures of success as well.

Learn more about the unique nature of community success in this tipsheet.

Few marketing agencies claim they can provide a clear takeaway on social ROI, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done — there’s more than one way to cook a turkey. For instance, illustrating the momentum of brand awareness turns the conversation from engagement metrics to the fact that your audience needs to understand your brand. Worry less about your IG follower count and more about whether your content is working as a clear ambassador of your brand. In a similar way, measuring customer engagement through your brand’s net promoter score (NPS) is another way to look at your brand’s value in.

Another novel way to view engagement is to recognize the conversations are going to happen - do you want to be a part of it or not? Address negative reviews directly, own the issue, and take concrete action to solve the issues. The direct line between social customer engagement and purchase is tough to show, but measuring their journey from social media to website is a clear example of ROI.

Learn more ways to demonstrate the ROI of engagement with our tipsheet.

Digital engagement, and how we measure it, don’t follow a cut-and-dried process; much like cooking a turkey, there are multiple ways to engage and evaluate your success. We’re grateful for the juicy insights that Engage attendees shared on care, marketing, and communities, and we hope they aid you in your quest to create customers for life. For other equally delicious takeaways, be sure to check out the IDC report.