Have you ever wondered why you seem stuck on a particular brand, even amid many alternatives? If yes, then you probably already know a bit about customer engagement. Customer engagement is the relationship or emotional connection between a brand and a customer and the processes/experiences that make these connections possible. Research by Gallup found that engaged customers represent a 23% premium as regards profitability, revenue, share of wallet, and relationship growth.
Customer engagement can either be positive or negative. If you lack a customer engagement strategy, it is likely that you may either be attracting negative engagement or you may be missing out on opportunities to build relationships with your customers and interact with them. One industry with innovative customer engagement tactics and strategies is the Casino industry, and it is only wise to learn from them.
Providing Continuous Entertainment
Casinos are in the entertainment business, and there’s a need to offer various experiences and activities to keep customers returning. Take, for example, the Slots of Vegas, an online casino destination for slots real money enthusiasts in the USA. To keep customers engaged, Slots of Vegas has a collection of over 200 slot machine games of different themes, spanning many interests. Casinos are known to use generous and personalized bonuses and special promotions to inspire loyalty in their customers. Casinos go big on using technology to enhance their entertainment factor by making their physical and digital real estate easy to navigate and incorporating elements of gamification to make the customer journey more interactive and enjoyable.
While there’s no one-size-fits-all customer engagement strategy that works for every industry, this is a good strategy to copy and implement in your own business. Other businesses can do this by creating an immersive environment, designing a captivating physical or digital space for customers, utilizing sensory cues to enhance the customer experience, and incorporating storytelling elements to engage customers emotionally.
Reaching Customers by Understanding Their Motives
In a survey by Salesforce research, 84% of customers admitted that being treated like a valuable person, and not a number, influences their decision to do business with a brand. At the core of customer engagement is a need to understand the customer and use the available data to create personalized experiences that meet them (customers) at the point of their needs.
In a presentation at the BrightInsight Ecosystem event hosted in Boston, Loveman Gary, a Harvard Business School Professor with experience in the casino and healthcare industries, discussed strategies from the casino industry that could be adopted in the healthcare world to engage their customers better.
Loveman suggested that one reason for reaching customers and tracking these variables is to understand their motives and use the discovery to build rapport until they take a desired action and become engaged clients. This can be adopted in other industries by using data to create personalized experiences, prioritizing exceptional customer service, building a customer-centric culture within the organization, training employees to provide personalized interactions and anticipate customer needs, and resolving customer issues intelligently.
Making Customers Feel Like Winners
In the past, businesses depended on unique offerings and services to cultivate customer loyalty. However, the present landscape has witnessed the mass production of products and services and abundant information. Consequently, today’s customers enjoy a wider range of choices and have raised their standards accordingly. In the current scenario, the differentiating factor lies in the realm of experience, where trust plays a pivotal role.
Trust has emerged as a significant element in shaping the customer experience. Jovanie, Catherine, and Brent conducted research titled: “The influence of customer experience with automated games and social interaction on customer engagement and loyalty in casinos.” The findings indicated that customers’ experience and certain aspects of automated games significantly and positively influenced customer engagement with the casino, resulting in increased loyalty.
Moreover, the experience of automated games had an indirect impact on customer loyalty. Social interaction significantly moderates the relationship between customer engagement and the frequency of casino visits. Casinos always try to implement rewards into their offerings by designing loyalty programs and reward systems to incentivize customer engagement, using data analysis to personalize rewards and offers based on customer preferences.
