“Now don’t go wasting my precious time...”

The Spice Girls were actually way beyond their years. A few of their lyrics hide some really great customer engagement do’s and don’ts that are relevant to customer engagement in 2020.

Hootsuite considers current customer engagement trends as the ‘Age of the Individual’. Meaning generic broadcast messages have come to an end, and one-on-one connections are on the rise. Companies who prioritize busy content calendars, while having a response rate of 8+ hours to customer comments, could be missing the plot leaving customers throwing their hands in the air.

On the topic of time, during one of my online shopping binges, I wondered whether South African consumers were upset by a lag in the delivery of items due to restrictions. I used Brandwatch to quickly investigate this further.

Surprisingly, courier services are not as large of a concern as anticipated. It seems as though the majority of South Africans are more dissatisfied with responsiveness from online retailers. Customers appear to be understanding of delays in delivery, but many just wanted a response- to their calls, emails, and social messages.

"And, all that I want from you, is the promise you... will be there"

It’s well known that many call centres weren’t equipped for operating during the lockdown, and this has put pressure on optimized digital transformation. Social media has always been seen as a departmental activity while it actually is the golden thread that weaves a business operation together. Luckily, there's a fix for looping queries from social, emails and calls together to track a customer's complaint cycle. Enter: The Hootsuite and Zendesk integration.

The below numbers provide a glimpse into how capturing customer engagement data can provide valuable insights into how customers talk to a brand- and ultimately- what they need.

In this example, we see positive brand-related topics from consumers on a brand’s social pages. However, depending on the brand and industry, the majority of topics aren’t always positive. In some cases, a first response time could be 15 hours, with the customer topics all being support related. This drowns out any of the brand’s marketing activities. What is the best practice then? You should be aiming to respond to customers on an average of 0-4 hours, no later than 8 hours.

So here's the story from A-Z... Customers are voicing their opinions and needs. Tools like Hootsuite and Brandwatch provide businesses real-time monitoring and response capabilities to streamline activities. To learn more about customer engagement and best practices, download the below toolkit.

Hootsuite’s customer engagement toolkit

YOUKNOW helps curious companies with marketing technology, and represent the leading global solutions.

To find out how Hootsuite can help your business, email ashleigh@youknow.co.za