3 ways to increase your team and customer engagement

Today, the most coveted resource online is undoubtedly your attention. Whether it's through ads on the sites you visit, sponsored content on LinkedIn or product placements on YouTube, advertisers are vying for every last bit of our viewing or listening time to obtain the holy grail: engaging us with their brand.

The notion of engagement has thus become a central concern for companies, as it impacts both the efficiency and the results of a collective. 

How does this link between involvement and performance manifest itself, and how can you manage it, as a team and with your customers? Let's take a look at 3 examples of how this is applied in companies such as Embraer, Microsoft and the Lesaffre Group.

From engagement rate to team commitment

In marketing, the engagement rate is a KPI used to measure user interaction with a given piece of content (video, web page, etc.). It refers to the participation, attention and action generated by a specific publication, advertising campaign or brand.

Web industry players are well aware of the importance of enabling companies to accurately measure user engagement with their site or products. Google Analytics, currently the most widely used data measurement tool on the market, has chosen to focus its new GA4 application on the notion of user engagement.

Not to mention that it also remains an essential metric on social networks (interaction with posts, ads, etc.), where algorithms are constantly being refined to better calculate it.

And as a marketing KPI, engagement is similar in many ways to the involvement of your team. It too involves the participation, motivation and investment of each member in the work of the collective. It goes even further, since it represents the willingness of individuals to actively contribute to the achievement of their common goals, by sharing a vision and working together collaboratively.

In your day-to-day work, all work formats are likely to generate commitment:

• Your brainstorming sessions;
• Your training sessions;
• Your workshops, etc.  

Knowing your team's level of engagement in each of these cases will enable you to make better-informed decisions, understand your team's performance and help it improve. And employee engagement impacts many other aspects of corporate life, beyond the team itself.

Why is it crucial to increase team engagement?

For greater efficiency and better collective results

It's human nature: the more you get personally involved in something, the more you'll want to see it through to the end, and in the best possible conditions. 

According to a study by Hays relayed by Rise Up, a team's effectiveness in the field increases by no less than 40% when it is fully committed to its projects.

The involvement of each member of your team in your joint projects is therefore crucial to collective efficiency. Being able to measure it and know how it evolves over the course of your exchanges will give you the keys to considerably improve the group's productivity, while keeping each team member motivated.

What's more, measuring your team's engagement will give you valuable feedback on the transmission of information and the team's workload. For example, if you circulate a survey to your team and the rate of engagement with it is very low despite the deadline, you can make the following assumptions to readjust the situation: 

• Your request was not clear enough;
• Your team didn't have the time to take action;
• Your team had other priorities.

For improved loyalty and cost savings

Engaging projects can motivate teams to stay with their company longer. In economic terms, this reduces the costs of recruiting and training newcomers. 

According to research carried out by Zenefits, employers in the USA spend an average of $2.9 million a day replacing departures... That's a cost of $1.1 billion a year! 

Then, paying attention to increase your team engagement can significantly reduce turnover, thus facilitating the retention of talent and customers as well. We'll discuss this part later in the article.

Not forgetting that working on your team's involvement will also save you precious time! Your team will need to devote less time to passing on information internally, and will be able to devote more energy to its projects and to improving the way it works, as well as to more informal moments to find a good dynamic.

For a stronger CSR

Finally, Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and team engagement are also closely linked. CSR aims to take into account the social, environmental and economic concerns of a company's teams. Improving your team's involvement is therefore part of the best practices designed to establish good social cohesion.

To this end, measuring your team's level of engagement at the end of your work sessions will enable you to assess the climate of trust. The latter contributes to the creation of an environment where everyone feels comfortable exchanging and expressing themselves. This transparent participation will then enable your teams to considerably improve their results by boosting creativity and innovation, as well as streamlining all company processes.

Now that you know the challenges involved in mastering team engagement, let's take a look at how aerospace company Embraer achieves this by making the most of the collaborative tools on the Klaxoon platform.

Engaging 50 people in an international strategy workshop, with Board and Question

Milton Neto is an IT architect at Embraer, now based in Brazil. His team has to collaborate on data tracking projects with stakeholders spread across different time zones. They were therefore looking for a solution to centralize their collaborative uses and improve the efficiency of remote working.

To do this, they used the Klaxoon platform, and organized a strategic data workshop. The workshop brought together 50 people from teams all over the world over 3 days, which would normally have taken over a week in a face-to-face setting.

During the workshop, participants connected to Klaxoon via integration with Microsoft Teams for real-time discussions. Those based in other time zones were able to participate asynchronously, saving time and adapting their participation to their availability.

The team began with an ideation session to gather requirements and share information. Milton then proceeded to a prioritization phase, using Voting Questions to select the most relevant ideas.

Thanks to Klaxoon's Question tool, participants can quickly and effectively contribute to decision-making, and facilitators can measure engagement levels in real time across different formats: 

• Voting;
• Evaluation;
• Yes/No;
• MCQ,...

In this way, the team saved 100 days' work and was able to involve every member, even remotely. With the Board and Question tools in particular, the Klaxoon platform enabled them to collaborate smoothly and visually, with permanent access to information. 

Klaxoon helps you measure and increase both team and customer engagement

As we saw with the Embraer example, the Klaxoon visual platform offers a variety of activities and tools to foster engagement through collaboration and sharing.

In meetings, project management or training, it provides you with ready-to-use methodologies to encourage everyone's participation and expression, and helps you measure your team's involvement to facilitate your decision-making.

And beyond your team, you can also use Klaxoon to improve engagement rates by working with your customers! Whether you're interacting face-to-face, remotely or in hybrid mode, it is an opportunity to introduce them to new working practices and methods, and thus reduce their churn rate and increase their loyalty.

Microsoft and Lesaffre teams chose Klaxoon to create a participative and engaging work environment for their customers, while working remotely.

Increase participation in remote customer workshops with Board

Jonny Rowley is a Customer Success Manager at Microsoft in the UK, part of a multinational team of around 100 people. His role is to run workshops to encourage large companies to adopt the Microsoft Business Applications suite.

Prior to the pandemic, Jonny ran face-to-face workshops on site, which involved a lot of travel and complex coordination of participants. In 2020, when he switched to teleworking, he had to adapt his workshops to keep customers engaged. The solution found was to use the Klaxoon platform integrated with Microsoft Teams.

The process begins with a brief orientation session. Participants log in and introduce themselves by adding their avatar on Board, Klaxoon's online whiteboard, directly accessible from their Microsoft Teams space.

Jonny then launches an icebreaker to create a friendly atmosphere, using a ready-made Board template. Next, he collects customer feedback in the same space, asking them to share their reasons for choosing Microsoft Business Applications. They also evaluate five strategic pillars to determine which areas to target for better support for them.

Thanks to Board's visual management features, Jonny has been able to improve the level of interaction between workshop participants. Like any geographically distributed team, they can easily connect and get involved from anywhere in the world.

Keeping teams involved and effective in a hybrid environment with Survey

Peter Quiguer is Digital Coordinator at the Lesaffre Group. His role is to optimize the user and employee experience using digital tools. As part of Lesaffre's use of the Klaxoon visual platform, one of the key tools that has improved the efficiency and involvement of its teams is Survey.

As its name suggests, this platform-integrated tool makes it quick and easy to collect feedback from a group by creating a poll on any topic. Poll creators can also measure and track the rate of engagement with their activity in real time.

Peter saw the benefits of Survey in the context of a product launch in Croatia. The Lesaffre teams then used Survey to gather consolidated customer feedback on their product remotely. After sending them samples, an online meeting was organized on the Klaxoon platform, where Lesaffre representatives presented the product via a webinar. 

Subsequently, a Survey was sent to customers to obtain their impressions and comments on the use of the product. This interactive approach helped to engage customers in the product development process and build loyalty.

This way, using the Survey on the Klaxoon platform was a valuable asset for Lesaffre. It enabled them to gather feedback efficiently, actively involve customers in the development process, and facilitate their interactions remotely.

Generate better engagement and results with Klaxoon

Engagement is an essential KPI to track and analyze in order to improve your performance and efficiency. And visual management is the ideal way to generate involvement and participation, with your teams and customers, by offering them a place to centralize their exchanges and actively participate in the development of their projects.

Through these three application examples, our customers have seen the power of the Klaxoon platform to enable them to engage their teams as well as their own customers. And this in a hybrid context as well as 100% remotely. If you too would like to test Board, Survey, Question, and many other collaborative tools with your team, you can do so right now!