What’s A Customer Engagement Hub and How Can It Help Your Business?
If you stay up to date on all the latest customer service developments, you might have heard the term “customer engagement hub” before. If you haven’t, don’t worry! This article walks you through both what the concept is and how best to implement it in a small- to mid-sized real estate business.
A customer engagement hub has two key components:
- It ties multiple systems and departments together to engage the client.
- It focuses on personalized, contextual engagement with customers across all communication channels.
Rather than a physical spot, a customer engagement hub is a strategy. It helps a real estate business find a holistic approach to customer engagement by leveraging technology and redefining processes.
How Do You Start Building a Customer Engagement Hub?
Identify Important Customer Touch Points.
A customer touch point is any point that a customer or lead interacts with your business. For most agents, key customer touch points include email marketing (particularly monthly newsletters), social media updates, and open houses.
Take some time to monitor these interactions, so that you can identify and improve key interaction points. For online marketing tools, analyze click and open rates. Consider sending out a short survey as well with questions like these:
- “Do you find my newsletter helpful?”
- “What’s one thing you’d like to see in my newsletter that’s currently missing?”
- “What was your favorite newsletter article this year?”
Stop Thinking About Marketing and Customer Service As Two Separate Entities.
Yes, marketing and customer service are traditionally separate departments. But in most real estate businesses a few people do all this work. This gives independent agents and small brokerages an advantage over larger businesses with a codified separation between these departments. Why? Because good customer engagement brings the two groups together. Since customer service delivers on the promises made by marketing, it’s important that they are in sync.
To reassess the connection between marketing and customer service, go through your marketing materials and figure out how you sell yourself. What words do you use to describe your work? What do you promise clients?
Once you’ve laid out what exactly you’ve promised clients, think about how well you delivere it. Go back through old client testimonials to get a sense of clients’ own opinions on your effectiveness. Ask yourself if you’d be satisfied with the service you provide. Even if you’re doing a good job, look for places to improve. Some common areas are response time, educating clients about the buying and selling process, and dealing with client setbacks or disappointments.
Choose Software that Offers Multiple Integrations.
Whatever your opinion of CRMs, you’ll need a good one to truly strengthen your customer engagement. Think of the CRM as the physical hub in the phrase “customer engagement hub.” It’s the organizational foundation that centralizes your information and records your progress. You need a CRM with marketing automation and customer service tools, social media connections, and reporting features.
If you’re not sure whether your CRM is supporting your customer engagement plans, make a list of all its features. Then try to connect them to your regular customer engagement activities. If you find a lot of holes—features you pay for but don’t use or activities your CRM doesn’t support—it might be time to think about investing in different technology.
The Bottom Line: Improving customer engagement means identifying and filling communication gaps. Look for the difference between what you’re promising and what you’re delivering, and find ways to adjust your service to client needs.
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