Customer engagement is a Madison Avenue buzzword that has come to mean everything and nothing.

To be clear, customer engagement is not an intention, but a method, and the methods your business chooses reflect how seriously you take it. For instance, if your website cannot respond to customer inquiries at all times of the day or night, your message to them is "ask me when I'm ready". If you email customers asking them for an appointment but provide them with no means to book one with you, you're creating a needless barrier to access. And if you're not polling your customers to gauge their wants & needs, you're saying to them you only intend to oil the squeaky wheels.

All of these practices were commonplace and accepted only a few years ago, but contemporary customers have come to expect a higher standard of engagement. For instance, most salespeople now have a calendar link in their signature so customers can book appointments with them at will, without the tedium of email ping pong. Most websites have online forms that ask tailored contextual questions based on the page content, and trigger workflow from the CRM to ensure a timely follow-up. And most customers can expect one or two surveys a year from committed vendors asking them how their service is, and what they could do to improve their experience.

Businesses have not suddenly come to care more about their customers in the last few years, it’s just gotten easier to show it. Calendly identified a friction point with how businesses engage with their customers, and now they're a $3B company. Survey Monkey made it easier to extract & report on customer feedback, and now they're a $2B company. Same thing with Zapier. They saw a need to link online resources with CRM, and now they're worth over $5B. 

While these three companies' services range wildly, the one common element is they all improve and enhance businesses' ability to engage with their customers. None of them create the intention, just the means to facilitate it, and now those companies are worth a combined $10B. If your business is lucky enough to use Act!, you don't have to cobble together solutions from different vendors, as all these services are available in one place - Linktivity.net.

Linktivity is a suite of online products that all help Act! users better engage with their customers.

Link2calendar works like Calendly, but directly with Act!. Link2forms creates surveys & online forms to capture & report on customer feedback, and Link2quotes allows customers to engage with quotes differently, empowering them to pick & choose items in their quotes to suit their needs, and then accept and pay for those quotes online. And with 2022 statistics showing 60% of Internet users consuming their content on mobile devices, businesses have learned they need to engage their customers on all platforms. It is for this reason that all Linktivity products are mobile-responsive. 

If you're a business owner looking to enhance the way you engage with customers in 2023, and you're lucky enough to be an Act! user, pick solutions that make delivering on those intentions easier. Pick Linktivity.