Field service isn’t just about showing up and completing a job, just as last-mile delivery isn’t just about completing a delivery. It’s about providing a positive overall experience that starts with customer engagement.
Customer engagement sometimes gets left out of the overall business equation, but it’s actually the missing piece to gaining a competitive edge with your customer experience strategy. To get the customer satisfaction and ROI you’re hoping for, your customers need to be engaged in every step of the process before, during, and after service.
Refresher: What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement refers to the communication between a customer and the business from which they’re purchasing a product or service, at every stage of the process — from the time they need to book an appointment to after service or delivery is complete, and everything in between.
Examples of customer engagement include automated notifications, two-way chat between the customer and the driver, and collecting post-service customer feedback.
When customers are more engaged throughout the process, they tend to be more satisfied with the service or delivery they received — and higher customer satisfaction can have big benefits, like increased revenue, increased customer lifetime value, improved reputation, and decreased overhead.
What is the Difference Between Customer Experience and Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement and customer experience are intertwined — you can’t have one without the other — but they are different. When looking at customer engagement vs customer experience, here are a few things to keep in mind.
Customer engagement is how you maintain contact with a client throughout their brand experience and how you provide value beyond your product or service. It’s building and maintaining relationships through omnichannel communication, which can take place on everything from your website and mobile apps to community forums, help desks, social media, and email. Customer engagement gets your clientele involved and encourages them to interact with you in the future.
Customer experience, sometimes referred to as CX, is a consumer’s overall impression of what it’s like to interact with your brand. Think of it as the archetypal story pattern of the hero’s journey: Your customer’s adventure with your brand — which is subjective, based on their perceptions and expectations — will ideally exceed their desires and transform them in some way at the end, converting them into brand loyalists who spread the good news.
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Best Practices for Last Mile Delivery
Company size has nothing to do with the ability to transform home/last mile delivery performance—it all starts with a different perspective and vision to turn delivery into a competitive weapon. Technology is an incredibly important enabler of world class delivery performance. Every best-in-class delivery company has 3 things in common. Download our Last Mile Delivery Best Practices eBook to see how you match up.
Incorporating Customer Engagement into Your Customer Experience Strategy
For field service and last-mile delivery, one way to enhance your customer experience strategy is to leverage products like customer engagement management software to keep your customers in the loop and ensure they feel supported and heard.
Here are just a few key features you should look for in a customer engagement solution:
- Real-time appointment and delivery tracking
- Automated customer notifications
- Chat options for customers, drivers, and support staff
- Post-appointment feedback capture
- Self-service appointment management
When it comes to implementing customer engagement management software, there are a few different options to consider. But in most cases, utilizing a comprehensive solution is the most efficient way to go.
With the Descartes Customer Engagement Platform, you don’t have to start from scratch, build your own platform, or redo your whole tech stack.
Conclusion
The bottom line is this: You can’t fulfil your customer experience strategy if you don’t include customer engagement.
If you provide an outstanding experience with plenty of communication throughout the entire process, you’ll be rewarded with happier customers and operational savings.
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