5 Stages of Customer Engagement

Think about the products and services that you spend the most time and money on. How engaged are you with those brands? Now think about your customers. How engaged are they with your dry cleaning brand?

Studies show that people who are fully engaged with a brand spend 23% more over their lifetime than the average customer. They also buy 90% more frequently, spend 60% more per transaction, and are five times more likely to indicate brand loyalty.

Digital technology has drastically reduced the cost of engagement. Email, SMS, web, and mobile are just a handful of ways that you can reach your customers. So what is the best strategy for reaching your customers?

Starchup divides cleaner-to-customer engagement into five categories based on the stage of the customer life cycle: Announcement, Welcome, Order Flow, Retention, and Feedback. While our focus is on pickup and delivery service, this is equally applicable to all cleaners.

Announcement

The purpose of the Announcement is to inform. Let your customers and prospects know about a new initiative, service, offering, or deal. Email is the ideal channel for Announcements because they are free to send, communicate more information, and are easily referenced later.

Welcome

Welcome communications should educate new users who have shown interest in the announced service. Customers at this stage need to learn more about your offerings, the process, and tips for getting everything that they need out of it. Sending emails and text messages at this stage also relaxes users, who can expect relevant communication throughout the customer journey.

Order Flow

The purpose of Order Flow communication is to guide the customer through the order process. Reminders, pickup and delivery updates, and completion notifications take the customer through each step. Text messages are ideal for timely information or if the customer needs to take a specific action. Email is great for information the customer may want to reference later, like their receipt.

Retention

The purpose of Retention communication is to encourage current customers to continue using your service. The primary Retention tactics are to reward active and loyal users and to win back inactive users with promotions. Sending your heavy users rewards for their usage shows appreciation. Loyalty programs encourage usage by moderate users. Win-back promotions encourage a user who may have switched cleaners or let their cleaning pile up to try your service again. Email is ideal for single promotions, but loyalty programs will likely require a more sophisticated technology platform.

Feedback

The purpose of Feedback is to understand and ultimately improve the customer’s experience of your service. Not only does this give the customer a channel for communicating their feedback, but it shows them that you are interested in their experience and actively trying to improve. Email and text messaging can both work for capturing this feedback, but more a more sophisticated technology platform can help you better organize and respond to your customers.

Each stage of the customer life cycle offers an opportunity to keep your customers engaged with your brand. Technology has made that engagement simple, inexpensive, and targeted. You cannot afford to pass up the opportunity, or your customers will engage elsewhere.

Make sure to work with Starchup on all your Laundry business needs. Whether you need SEO services, a POS, a delivery app or software, or even hardware, get what you need.

How Customer Engagement Helps Your Process Flow

When your customers are informed at every step of the way, you avoid mix-ups and common pain points that can jeopardize the future of your business. After all, a customer that's in the loop is often a happy one. It only takes one missed delivery to sour a relationship, especially if the customer is kept in the dark for an extended period of time.

Starchup allows you to maximize your customer engagement and improve process flow with minimal involvement from your drivers and customer service reps. With easy ways to reach out and notify your customers of new promotions and deals, as well as when you may be running a little early or late, the customer engagement process is no longer a burden.

Starchup enables you to increase your interactions with engaged customers that are already looking forward to your next message or offer. It is all part of the customer engagement cycle, where the stages of engagement are predefined and planned in advance to help you to maximize your customers' positive feelings about your brand and to keep them coming back again and again.

For your staff, customer engagement doesn't have to be a nuisance, interrupting your day and making it harder to get things done. When done right, customer engagement becomes a part of the natural process flow of your business, enabling you to create more loyal and impassioned customers that spend more with your business. ( As an aside, you can specifically encourage this type of behavior by offering discounts or referral credits for current customers if they refer their friends or family).

It has never been easier to reach your customers. Whether sending out your latest deal or notifying your customer base of a new service through email, text or even by way of app notifications, the conveniences of modern technology puts your customers only a click away. Click here to see how Starchup can help you to transform your customer relationships.