Top 13 SaaS Customer Engagement Trends 2023 to Follow

Looking to implement the top customer engagement trends in 2023 for your SaaS business?

Staying on top of the engagement trends is a must for product growth and staying ahead of your competition.

This article has compiled the top 13 SaaS customer engagement trends you should follow in 2023 to help you navigate the emerging trends.

Let’s start!

TL; DR

• Customer engagement refers to the active interaction between customers and products.
• The top 13 customer engagement trends to follow are:
• Personalized experiences across the customer journey are essential to satisfy customers.
• Incorporating videos into in-app experiences is an engaging way to educate users.
• VR, AR, and XR (Virtual, Augmented, and Extended Reality) let you stand out by providing an innovative customer experience.
• Real-time customer assistance helps customers overcome challenges instantly and increase lifetime value.
• Hyper-personalization uses real-time data to provide more contextual experiences and build loyal customers.
• Start embracing first and zero-party to prepare for a cookieless future.
• You should build customer trust by ensuring data privacy.
• A frictionless and secure customer experience is one of the top customers’ needs.
• AI chatbots can help you save time and resources by automating customer engagement.
• Omnichannel strategies are important to foster strong customer relationships.
• Multiple self-service customer support options let customers quickly solve their issues.
• You should use product analytics to keep up with the changing customer demands.
• Leverage predictive customer analytics and machine learning to boost customer retention.

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement refers to the active and ongoing interactions between customers and products or services, encompassing every touchpoint throughout the customer journey.

Top customer engagement trends to enhance digital customer experience

Let’s look at the top customer engagement trends you should follow.

1. Create personalized experiences across the customer journey

Creating personalized experiences across the customer journey is critical to enhancing your product’s digital customer experience. Research shows 66% of customers will quit a brand if they don’t get personalized experiences. So you must deliver targeted, customized experiences directly to customers’ needs if you want to satisfy them.

A welcome survey or a sign-up page is a great way for SaaS businesses to start personalizing experiences from the beginning. Collecting data upfront offers insights into customers’ needs, preferences, and pain points and lets you tailor solutions to customers’ requirements.

2. Incorporate videos into in-app experiences

Videos are an engaging way to educate users and better explain complex features or concepts. They also effectively communicate information quickly since your users will more likely engage with them than text-based content.

Short and to-the-point micro-videos let you easily incorporate videos into your in-app experiences. Moreover, you can use them to provide onboarding assistance, highlight new features, and provide educational content.

3. Adopt VR, AR, and XR to drive interactive customer engagement

Virtual reality (VR), augmented reality (AR), and extended reality (XR) are experiencing a significant growth rate. So prepare to embrace them perfectly and drive interactive engagement.

A few hundred million people worldwide already use these advanced technologies. It’s also not far away from when they’ll become go-to interactive customer experience tools for virtual “try-on” experiences.

They help you provide a unique and innovative customer experience that makes you stand out. As a result, you create a competitive advantage with an intuitive customer experience and drive more conversions and retention.

4. Assist customers in real-time to boost engagement

Real-time customer assistance is another top engagement trend you should follow. Real-time assistance and interactive user guides enable you to provide a seamless customer experience.

You should trigger in-app messages or guidance while your customers interact with the product. For example, if a customer struggles with a particular feature, trigger an in-app walkthrough or tooltips to help. This type of real-time assistance helps customers overcome challenges quickly and reduce frustration, increasing their lifetime value.

In-app interactive walkthroughs provide valuable real-time assistance to your customers by guiding them through specific features and processes with step-by-step guidance. When you integrate this type of guidance into your app, customers receive instant help navigating your product’s various features.

5. Offer hyper-personalized experiences to build loyal customers

Hyper-personalization takes personalization into the next step by using real-time data. It lets you provide more customized and contextually relevant experiences than ever, allowing you to anticipate and fulfill what your customers expect.

You can easily leverage advanced Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning for hyper-personalizing experiences. When AI sees that a user uses a group of features and other users use the same group of features along with another advanced feature, it can identify that the user requires that advanced feature. You can then use this information to trigger relevant in-app messages and drive feature discovery and interactions.

Userpilot lets you utilize user segmentation to deliver relevant in-app experiences. It enables you to set conditions to trigger hyper-personalized in-app experiences after customers satisfy the specified conditions. This effective personalization through segmentation helps you increase engagement rates and customer loyalty.

6. Capitalize on first and zero-party data for a cookieless future

Customers are more aware of their data and increasingly wary of using cookies to track their online behavior. In fact, 1 out of 2 customers says they have left a website rather than accept cookies in the last year.

You should capitalize on first and zero-party data to prepare a cookieless future. First-party data refers to the data you collect directly from your customers, while zero-party data is what customers actively and intentionally share with you through surveys, feedback, etc. You can use Userpilot to collect in-app customer feedback easily and get your hands on zero-party data.

Leveraging first and zero-party data enables you to create personalized customer experiences without relying on cookies. As a result, customers get their preferred control over data, and you also get to personalize the experience.

7. Build customer trust by ensuring customer data privacy

In today’s digital world, data privacy is one of the main customer concerns that SaaS companies must tackle. Almost every customer wants brands to do better in ensuring data privacy while being transparent about data usage.

You should give customers a clear and concise privacy policy or ask for explicit permission before collecting specific data. Being transparent about your data collection and processing practices is also critical. You can put a privacy notice, email, or a dedicated page on your website about what data you collect, how you use it, and how you protect it.

8. Offer frictionless and secure customer experience

Customers nowadays expect a seamless experience along with privacy for their data. So striking the right balance between frictionless experience and data security is challenging for any SaaS business.

You should offer a frictionless customer experience from the start by reducing user friction during onboarding. This includes streamlining the registration process and minimizing the number of required steps.

You also need to ensure personalization and frictionless experience don’t come at the cost of data security. Implementing two-factor authentication or other secure login methods shows customers you are taking steps to secure their data. As a result, they’re more likely to trust your brand, increasing customer satisfaction and retention.

9. Use AI chatbots to automate customer engagement

AI chatbots are an increasingly popular way to automate customer engagement as you use digital channels to engage with your customers. With natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning, these chatbots can understand customer inquiries and provide relevant responses in real-time.

You can program these chatbots to access customer data across the system and provide responses based on existing data. It helps you save time and resources by automating repetitive tasks, like answering frequently asked questions or providing basic support.

Additionally, introducing AI chatbots to user onboarding creates an effective and efficient experience for new users. AI user onboarding lets you easily provide personalized guidance and support during the onboarding process.

10. Embrace omnichannel to foster customer relationships

Customers engage with your business across various channels, including social media, email, chat, and more. As a result, it’s one of the top customer experience trends you should embrace to foster strong customer relationships.

You don’t have to use all available channels for an omnichannel approach. Instead, identify your most effective engagement channels and leverage them to optimize ROI for your business further.

You should turn the most effective channels into a unified customer data platform that provides consistent and up-to-date data. It’s also critical for you to ensure data sync across your multiple channels to maintain consistency and avoid duplicate or conflicting data.

Provide multiple self-service customer support options

Adopting multiple self-service customer support options helps you by significantly reducing the number of support tickets and calls. These options enable customers to easily find answers to their questions and access instant resolutions to issues.

You should provide various self-learning materials, such as video tutorials, knowledge bases, and FAQs. Customers can access these materials at their convenience without waiting for support from a representative.

Additionally, you can make your support more proactive by utilizing machine learning to monitor customer behavior and anticipate their needs.

12. Use product analytics to understand changing customer demands

Product analytics provide valuable insights into customer behavior and preferences by collecting and analyzing customer usage data. It allows you to make informed decisions based on data and insights instead of assumptions and guesswork.

You’ll better understand user behavior and product usage if you properly leverage product analytics with customer engagement analytics. To do that, you can collect data via surveys and track features and events.

13. Retain customers using predictive analytics and machine learning

Customer retention is one of the most important aspects of SaaS businesses. Using predictive analytics and machine learning, you can predict and prevent churn to retain more customers.

Predictive analytics uses historical data and statistical algorithms to identify patterns among your at-risk customers and predict churn. It identifies these users with certain behavior patterns are more likely to churn than other customers. You can use this information to follow up with those customers and offer them personalized help for solving those issues.

On the other hand, machine learning helps you automate this predictive modeling to better anticipate customer churn. You can train it with vast data sets and create algorithms to enable it to learn from the data patterns and anomalies for making predictions or decisions. As a result, you’ll be able to more successfully identify at-risk customers and take proactive measures to prevent churn.

This is how the churn prediction model works in Amplitude.

Conclusion

Implementing the top 13 customer engagement trends in 2023 will help you boost customer engagement with a seamless customer experience. However, keeping up with these ever-changing trends is challenging without the right tools. Thankfully, Userpilot provides an excellent solution for collecting and utilizing customer data to improve customer engagement.

Want to get started with the top 13 customer engagement trends? Get a Userpilot Demo and see how you can easily adapt to these trends.