The client engagement manager is the pathway to every significant objective of a business. It directly influences all the good aspects of a business, including customer loyalty, customer-based profits, customer purchases, and customer ambassadorship for your company’s brand. Customer engagement is significant because it fosters customer loyalty, valuable customer knowledge, health customer relationships, better communication, commitment to quality and excellent services, and trust to improve the business’s productivity and profitability.  Therefore, customer engagement mangers are rapidly becoming essential to SaaS because they directly influence the success of a company. When you engage your clients, you draw them closer to the brand and increase their emotional attachment to the organization.

What is client engagement in SaaS

Client engagement is engaging customers to foster loyalty, improve profitability and influence company success. Customer-company interaction has changed to mirror market trends of customer-centricity. Keeping client engagement at the core of SaaS operations will boost long-term revenue.

Importance of Client Engagement

What is the importance of client engagement, you may wonder? Client engagement is the interactions between a customer and company. The key here is letting customers choose how they will engage with the company. Frequent engagement will make customers more invested in your brand and ensure they stick for a long term.

A customer engagement study found that companies with improved client engagement increase cross-selling by 22%, increase revenue from 13% to 51%, increase order sizes from 5% to 85%. There is direct correlation between business profits and customer engagement.

Need for Client Engagement Manager

The proven importance of customer engagement has necessitated the rapid growth and significance of the client engagement manager. In SaaS, a client is more like a friend as opposed to acquaintances. The business must stay in close contact with the customers to remain relevant and boost its success.  Research shows that active customer engagement is significant for customer growth. It strengthens and deepens the relationship between brands with the customers. Hence, the client engagement manager is essential in determining the most effective strategies to promote customer engagement.

The engagement manager is vital to the development of customer engagement strategies. While customer engagement may seem easy, it requires creativity and innovation. Besides, it needs constant evolution to avoid creating monotony and boredom that may send the customers away. In this view, the customer engagement manager fills the gap by bringing creativity and innovation to the company to ensure that the customers are actively engaged. The engagement manager is responsible for the development of creative and practical strategies that keeps the consumers involved in boosting their loyalty and customer retention rate. The engagement manager, in consultation with the sales team, can help increase the competitiveness of the business through strategies that keep customers engaged and happier, leading to referrals and more customers for your brand.

The engagement manager helps SaaS businesses to develop and foster positive relationships with the customers. Generally, customers place more value on comfort, friendliness, and familiarity. 70% of customers are comfortable making purchases or using services that they perceive to offer friendly treatment. In this view, the engagement manager is essential in ensuring that the business is accommodating and friendly. The client engagement manager improves the relationship between the customers and the company through constant and exciting engagement with the customers. That is, the manager often develops the content and messages that the consumers can find appealing and valuable. For instance, a customer engagement manager can facilitate the development of customized content sent to a consumer based on the expectation of the specific client.

The creation of systems and mechanism where customers can make their complaints freely is one of the most critical aspects of customer engagement. The role of a customer engagement manager is to ensure that customers are spoken to with real and sympathetic staff regardless of the platform used in making the complaint. The engagement manager is responsible for empowering and nurturing the appropriate skills among other employees to solve problems as they arise. The primary aim is to ensure that the customers receive timely and accurate responses and solutions to the arising problem. Such interventions guarantee that the customers are satisfied and perceive that the company values them. Again, the customer engagement manager utilizes the customer’s complaint data to determine the company’s weaknesses concerning customer engagement and develop interventions to improve them.

It is the role of the engagement manager to help develop a customer-oriented culture.  A customer-oriented culture refers to putting the consumer at the top of everything the company does. The customer engagement manager is responsible for retrieving critical customer data that may facilitate the development of the wants expectations of the client. It is impossible to put the consumer at the top of everything that the firm does without understanding the consumers’ needs and expectations.  Consumer-oriented culture’s success in a company depends on customer interaction to identify their desires and wants. The customer engagement manager, through the creation of a positive relationship with the customers, helps retrieve information that can inform the development of company strategies and services that focus on the customer.

Social media has become one of the best customer engagement platforms.  It is one of the most accessible platforms to blast out the company’s content and message. However, if a company starts using it as an instrument to engage with customers truly, it will be able to leverage any platform to boost brand awareness, customer support, and leads. Engagement is a critical metric of social media use. As a result, customer engagement is essential to ensure that the information of the company is effectively integrated with the specific attributes of the target customers to increase interactions and brand awareness. The engagement manager facilitates the development of social media content that is valuable and exacting to the consumer to boost their interaction in the company’s social media pages.

Customer engagement entails the provision of customer support services to improve their experience and satisfaction. The engagement manager is central in helping consumers concerning the services and products of the company. For instance, the engagement manager may develop content that helps the customers understand how different services or products of the firm works. Whenever customers have difficulty in using a given service or product, they must receive timely assistance from the company. In this case, the engagement manager ensures that such aid is delivered with ease and timely.

How to Build a Client Engagement Strategy: 5 Techniques That Will Work

Companies need to build a strong client engagement for effective results, increased loyalty, and brand building. Noting that customer engagement and client engagement is the new marketing is important. As clients are the best advocates through word of mouth marketing.

As per a survey by Deloitte, ‘every consumer wants a different experience’. Also, customers are less tolerant of brands that do not offer a seamless experience. Here are 5 ways to build a client engagement strategy.

5 Ways to Build a Client Engagement Strategy

Define the Customer Journey Map

Know your customers and what are their motivations. When you understand your customers better, it is easier to build a client engagement strategy. Keeping customer journey in mind will be a great way to understand their requirements at each stage.

Identify and Observe Points of Interaction

The next point is through identifying how customers interact at different points of interaction. This will help you understand and identify customer requirements.

Offer Personalised Service

Personalisation of messaging addresses customer issues. It is a great way to build an effective brand around messaging. Customers will prefer customised conversations that will help them solve their issues and smile.

Track Metrics

Knowing customer health scores, net revenue retention rate, churn rate and more will help track customer behaviour better. Take note of how many customers bounce off. How many did not take any action? How many left their action in between? Keep these in mind.

Take Feedback

Feedback is a great way to understand customer expectations. Customers will mention what is wrong so learning what hurt them will help. Through surveys and customer satisfaction inquiries, you can know what causes customer churn.

Client Engagement manager roles & responsibilities

What does a client engagement manager do?

A client engagement manager is responsible for working with customers through various phases of their journey. From the trial phase to the loyalty phase, there is a need for client engagement managers. They ensure customer success, optimum utilisation of company resources, continual development of clients, customer improvement, and more. The main goal is to help customers improve their knowledge base and use the products or services in the right manner.

Responsibilities of a Client Engagement Manager in SaaS

• Manage implementation and delivery
• Train customers for product usage
• Help with onboarding in case there is no customer onboarding specialist
• Plan, estimate, track and update about communication management
• Guide and facilitate customers through knowledge bases, blogs, videos, demos, and best practices
• Capture areas where improvement is possible and coordinate with teams
• Cultivate a long relationship with social media and communicate with clients
• Maintain a strategy to communicate across sales, marketing, and product teams to foster a positive, proactive relationship
• Share product feedback from clients to product development teams

Bottom Line  

Overall, the client engagement manager is central to the success of your business because he or she is responsible for creating positive relationships with customers and boosting customer satisfaction. The roles of engagement managers in your business directly influence the rate of customer retention. Indirectly it impacts the sales and profits of the company. If you want your company to improve your company’s customer experience and satisfaction, it is high time to have a customer engagement manager.

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