Customer Experience vs Customer Engagement: Why Both Are So Crucial

Customer experience and customer engagement are both crucial to long-term business success. But what are the differences between them?
Published on: Nov 20, 2023
Last updated: Nov 21, 2023

TL:DR

  • Customer relationships and experiences are crucial for brand success, with AI, ML, and NLP tools enhancing market differentiation.
  • Engaged customers spend 23% more, making strong customer engagement and experience essential for sustainable growth.
  • Customer engagement focuses on building long-term relationships, while customer experience emphasizes the customer journey and brand touchpoints.
  • CRM software enhances customer engagement by analyzing interactions, while customer experience often relies on feedback tools like surveys.
  • Combining customer engagement and experience encourages higher sales, lifetime value, and customer advocacy.
  • Cobrowsing is a powerful method for enhancing customer engagement, offering screen control with zero downloads for customer support teams.
  • Fullview's cobrowsing integration provides a low-resource, secure, and GDPR-compliant solution with customizable privacy controls.
  • Cobrowsing improves support quality, reduces resolution time, and increases customer satisfaction, contributing to a more engaging customer journey.

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The relationships you cultivate and the experiences you foster with your customers are critical to your overall brand success. With new tools like AI, ML, and NLP software debuting on the market daily, differentiating yourself in the marketplace is vital to sustainable growth.

Think about this: customers who are fully engaged with what your brand does and offers spend about 23% more on your various products and services compared to the average customer. They often will go for the upsell or cross-promotion because they feel more affinity to your brand based on the relationship you have built.

In this article, we’ll go over how crafting that unique customer experience and strengthening customer engagement will ensure you have long-term resilience in reaching your business goals. We’ll avoid defining what is customer experience or customer engagement by themselves and leave that to our previous articles. Our goal is to understand why using both is crucial to success.

Customer engagement vs customer experience: the difference

Before we go much further, let’s cover the differences between the two concepts. This will clarify how they combine into a synergistic arsenal to boost your overall customer strategy.

  • Customer engagement is all about building a long-term client relationship. You are measuring how well you capture your target audience's attention and interests.
  • Customer experience focuses on the journey. It looks at the touchpoints and interactions customers have to increase their appreciation for your brand.
  • Think of customer engagement as the ongoing transactions between your audience and your brand, while the customer experience is the total sum of perceptions and feelings they have accumulated.
  • You’ll likely see marketing or sales departments covering customer engagement initiatives and service/support teams focusing on customer experience.
  • Tools like CRM software are designed to enhance your customer engagement. They track and analyze how your audience interacts with the various products, services, and communication you put out.
  • Customer experience can be through a CRM, but it often relies on feedback tools like surveys to gauge user satisfaction with new ideas or initiatives.
  • Most marketers agree that engagement drives immediate sales, while experience is the long-term investment you leverage for positive brand perception and cultivating loyalty.

While there may be some debate over which (customer experience vs customer engagement) may be more beneficial, the real advantage is using both to encourage higher sales, lifetime value, and customer advocacy.

These two ideals complement each other exceptionally well and help you and your team find a holistic approach to customer-centric support that is likely to result in greater success.

Customer engagement vs customer experience: why both are crucial

When you consider how your target audience thinks and relates to your business, you want to find solutions that build positive emotions with your brand. Customer success and the various customer experience roles are meant to create these solutions. From welcoming new customers to designing activation flows to helping set up accounts, you are crafting a strategy with engagement and experience in mind.

Why go through these hoops? Building premium customer engagement strategies directly contributes to higher customer retention. The more loyalty and appreciation they have for your brand, the greater the chance they will organically pass on recommendations for what you have to offer. That correlates to transforming lukewarm leads into solid brand ambassadors.

As your engagement and experience work together, you solidify your brand reputation. Customers will be encouraged to purchase from your business because they understand they receive the best possible experience.

Simply put, when you have consistent interactions with your target audience, including strategies to boost the overall experience over time, you improve customer satisfaction. The more satisfied the customer, the greater the chance they’ll return for more, suggest you to friends, and spend additional money on your product offerings.

To help you toward customer satisfaction, we’ve compiled a list of the best CX Platforms you should integrate into your systems right now. Top among these options includes the idea of cobrowsing for better customer engagement.

Cobrowsing for improved customer engagement

CAC (customer acquisition cost) has increased dramatically since the pandemic. There’s been an average increase in lost acquisition of around 222% from 2013 to 2022. To avoid that situation, you need to lean into building customer engagement. Meeting the needs of your users will be rewarded by greater customer spending on your brand.

Cobrowsing is a fantastic method for increasing the value customers receive from your brand. Fullview’s cobrowsing integration allows for easy-to-use screen control with zero downloads for CX and customer support teams.

That is a safer, low-resource solution that works inside a browser instead of a separate downloadable application. You can leverage everything from audio, video, live chat, and session recordings to solve the many problems of your target customers in real-time by sharing your screens through a simplified service.

  • Cobrowsing allows CX and customer support agents to initiate zero-download screen control calls with users live in their application.
  • They can help the user solve problems with the use of an independent mouse cursor that they can use to interact with the user’s screen, annotation tools, video, audio, and text chat.
  • You can even cobrowsing through third-party websites and documents like PDFs with Fullview.
  • No downloads that eat up bandwidth.
  • Contextual control for greater customer service that your team can learn from over time.
  • Cross-browser and cross-platform compatibility through a secure and 100% GDPR-compliant connection.
  • Customizable privacy controls that give your customers peace of mind (including data blurring options).

With free plans and free trials on all pro plans, adding cobrowsing gives you a more personalized pathway to solving your various customer needs. From simple questions to complex demonstrations, your user engagement will likely grow due to the various interactions being more streamlined and personalized to the customer.

Over time, your customers will appreciate how well you meet their needs. They’ll advocate for others to try out your services because of how easy cobrowsing is to use compared to long-form messages or phone calls without explainable visuals. Now, you can proactively support users, boost technical support, and speed up any interactions while subtly upselling and cross-promoting other aspects of your brand.

All this will significantly enhance support quality, reduce resolution time, and increase customer satisfaction. By integrating cobrowsing, you’re not just solving problems – you’re crafting an engaging customer journey.

Final Thoughts

Understanding the differences between customer engagement vs customer experience and how you can leverage both to complement the rest of your brand strategy is critical to future growth. Yes, both are distinct to the customer-centric business world, but together, they form a holistic view of how to relate better with your customers, so they create a positive perception of your brand.

Embrace the power of cobrowsing to improve your customer engagement and the journey your target audience has will continue to be rewarding over time. With the implementation of tools like cobrowsing, you’re sure to exceed customer expectations, solidifying your position in the competitive market landscape.

Sources used

Sources last checked on date: 8-Nov-2023

Author

Shifa Rahaman

Content Marketing Manager

Contributor

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