Why Engagement is Crucial for Reaching Today’s Customer, and How Mobile Can Help

(This is a guest blog post by Ashley Verrill of CRMsoftware.tv who worked with us to dig into a bit more of how mobile is changing the nature of customer relationships)

In today’s world, we face constant demands for our attention — from social media to news alerts and loyalty programs. Companies need to find ways to cut through this clutter if they want to compete in the future.This means creating an engagement strategy that reaches consumers in a natural way, rather than trying to interrupt them.

Recently, Apptentive CEO Robi Ganguly shared a video that explains how companies can infuse this kind of engagement in their mobile strategy. By integrating customer feedback tools in your mobile application companies such as Yahoo and Urbanspoon have garnered better customer reviews and increased customer retention and satisfaction.

But you have to make it easy.

Ease of use is one of the biggest distinguishing factors in a successful and not-so-successful engagement strategy. Apptentive enables companies to quickly add a customer feedback form or survey within their existing app. The form is extremely intuitive to use for the customer. What’s more, companies can proactively reach out to them with a message. For example, you might say: “Do you love Urbanspoon?” Based on the answer to this question, the customer would be taken down different feedback paths. This ensures the content is relevant to that specific customer, so the engagement feels more like a conversation.

These answers are used in four primary ways:

• To assess the customer’s satisfaction with your company / mobile application.
• To garner feedback about how the app can be improved.
• To better understand your customer demographics.
• To incite a two-way conversation that makes customers feel more connected to your brand

Not all of this feedback is used to respond to issues in real time. Companies also use this data to gain a high-level view of customer satisfaction and feedback. Apptentive customers can see analytics around customer sentiment, as well as which features in their app are used most. For messages that do require a response, the technician or support agent can instantly see details about the customer, such as which app version they are using and their device operating system.

“Our customers are telling us that they are intercepting negative feedback on a regular basis. The last thing you want are unhappy customers going to the app store and ranting in a place where you can’t respond to them,” Ganguly said.

Check out the video below to learn more about how to increase ratings and reviews for your mobile app with a more proactive engagement strategy.