What is Customer Engagement and Why Does it Matter?

What is Customer Engagement and why does it matter?

In 2026, customer engagement will increasingly become a business priority. With new strategic teams, software, and automations, companies are prioritizing the importance of customer engagement more than ever.

And this is driven partly by customer demand – Salesforce cites that 80% of customers value the experience provided by an organization as much as what they sell. This means the process and journey you offer the customer matters more than ever. But in this experience-focused world, what does customer engagement mean?

In this article, we’ll define customer engagement and ask why is customer engagement important? What are the benefits and what are some common strategies you can use in your business? You’ll come away with an understanding of how a strong customer engagement strategy can help your business grow, succeed, and develop a loyal customer base.
 

What is customer engagement?

Customer engagement is the process of delivering connected engagements to your customers throughout their entire journey. It means thinking about the full lifecycle of your customer – not just single interactions or transactions.

Businesses that prioritize customer engagement typically see increased retention, ROI, and reduced churn. But it requires strategic investment: businesses must build an information loop with their customers to understand their needs, use data to optimize decision making, and leverage the best customer success software and teams to deliver an exceptional customer experience. 

What is the importance of customer engagement?

Customer engagement has the capacity to drive significant growth and improvements in a business’ operation. By refocusing the strategy to nurture customers over the long-term, businesses yield important outcomes, including: 

1. Improved customer satisfaction: Focusing on customer engagement means focusing on what matters to the customer – which means the customer is happy with the service you offer. 
2. Increased brand loyalty: By re-engaging your customers and developing a strategy to retain them for the long-term, your customers will want to come back and re-sign the contract, extend their subscription, or repurchase.  
3. Reduced churn: When your customers are loyal, they don’t churn as frequently which means your team doesn’t have to invest as heavily in acquisition efforts. 
4. Improved bottom line: All of this loyalty, longevity, and reduced churn means positive financial outcomes for your business and team. 

What are the benefits of a strong customer engagement strategy? 

What else does a focus on customer engagement offer businesses? When the customer engagement definition is put into practice, teams are able to easily uncover upsell opportunities. With a loyal customer base, it’s easier to add features, packages, or enhancements to existing customers who already know and trust your service, rather than generating new leads and converting them on a sale for the first time. This saves time and money, and helps generate increased profit. 

Additionally, by making the most of your existing customer base, your team will be able to streamline the buying cycle. By utilizing effective software, you can automate repetitive tasks, set account-level reminders, and anticipate behavior-based needs with custom solutions and offers. 

Finally, when you focus on customer engagement, you’re able to increase users by demonstrating that you truly put the customers’ needs first and are willing to retain that loyal partnership and long-term business relationship. 

What are some key customer engagement tactics?

1. Thorough marketing strategy: A robust marketing strategy that targets your existing customer base will help maintain connection with your current customers and strengthen those relationships to retain brand awareness. 
   
2. Loyalty programs: Rewarding customers for their loyalty is a strong incentive for customers to keep engaging or purchasing from your brand. By offering benefits to staying with your company, you improve customer trust and reduce churn. 
3. Personalized experiences: Tailoring your marketing and service offerings to different segments of your customer base will help you meet your customers where they are. By using the right technology, you can track customer interest, engagement, behavior, and intent to offer solutions that respond to those signals. 
4. Elevated customer service: Hopefully your customer engagement strategy reduces the number of customer service incidents, but you still want this department to be operating effectively. How you respond to customer concerns will demonstrate your commitment to your customer base.  
5. Customer success teams: Customer success teams who work directly with customers to help them most effectively use the product or service can be a game-changing solution that helps your business drive up customer satisfaction.
6. Strong onboarding and educational materials: The better a customer understands how to use your tool or service for their needs, the less likely they are to become unsatisfied. That’s why the right onboarding software can help ensure all of your customers get up to speed and adopt your platform’s best practices. 

Evolve your customer engagement strategy with OnRamp

An effective customer engagement strategy will help your business grow, nurture stronger customer relationships, reduce churn, and take your operations to the next level. Now that you understand the customer engagement meaning, the importance of an effective strategy, what it can do for your business, and some key tactics, explore how you can start to enhance the customer experience with OnRamp. 

At OnRamp, we redefine customer onboarding by transforming it from a task-based process into a strategic lever for businesses to drive customer adoption and long-term growth and loyalty from day one. We help you personalized customer journeys that drive action from the very first steps, accelerating time to value and revenue at scale. OnRamp's platform enables mid-to-large companies to go beyond project management to create frictionless transitions that make onboarding a seamless part of the customer journey, keeping customers invested and satisfied from the start.