5 Ideas to Improve Customer Engagement

Poor service is eroding brand loyalty. This was a decision reached in a recent article in The Retail Bulletin but it didn’t take us by surprise. You see, we see this all the time where clients are not paying enough attention to improving the call handling skills of their agents.

This is exactly the sort of thing we monitor for with the Talk Insight Conversation Intelligence service

The only way to combat poor customer service is an effective customer engagement strategy. Customer engagement becomes everyone’s responsibility, more so now than ever before as customers have more information at their finger tips and are able to find reviews and check out competitor suppliers at the push of a button (or two) twenty four hours a day.

Executives and business owners need to recognise that customer engagement has to be placed at the heart of a business if it is to be effective.

As the lines blur between companies, employees, individuals, and customers the importance of getting everyone getting everyone on message is essential. By creating a water-tight customer engagement strategy your business will be able to:

1. Improve its net promoter score.

2. Maximise the customer life time value (LTV)

3. Get closer to its market and niche

4. Get quick customer feedback on what’s not right

5. Increase brand loyalty

Our customer engagement ideas can help you achieve all of the above.

5 customer engagement ideas

However, creating a water-tight customer engagement strategy requires you to become customer-centric. This can take time, but with the right tools it is something that can be started immediately.

1. Hold a customer engagement summit

By bringing senior managers together to discuss a customer engagement model you get a wider range of input and then buy-in from the management team which will, in turn, lead to smoother application of the chosen model. Take the opportunity to decide what activities can be done internally and which ones must be outsourced, for example:

1. content and communications

2. data analytics and insights

3. product and service innovation

4. customer experience design and delivery

5. and managing brand, reputation

2. Create a customer engagement council

The aim is to coordinate tactics across the different areas of the business in a timely way, making the touch points appear to be executed by one entity- the company, as opposed to by lots of different departments with different agendas.

3. Appoint a Chief Content Officer

The emergence of companies as publishers demands the appointment of a chief content officer. Companies need to produce a lot of content in a lot of different channels in order to bring value to their customers. This content can now take many different formats and can even be produced by your customers or other business contacts. A central person coordinating this content will ensure a consistent message that is effective and on-brand.

4. Create a listening centre

By establishing a listening centre you can regularly ‘take the temperature’ of your customers, their relationship with their brand and your performance as a brand. A listening centre can be a source of early identification for dissatisfied customers, the smoke before the flames, giving you the opportunity to resolve issues before they ignite into disasters.

5. Challenge your total customer-engagement budget

If the way you are working throughout and across departments is different then so should your budgeting be. You can’t expect to keep the same resources to generate new opportunities in new ways. The good news is that you should find that measuring the results is easier and therefore additional budget is more justifiable then it would have been even as recently as five years ago.

This brave new world is different. To have a joined up customer engagement strategy means different functions have to work more closely together, break down silos. Budgets have to be looked at differently too. Do you research and crunch those numbers, be bold and change the way you work. Then sit back and watch the results roll in.

We can help you improve your customer engagement with our tools such as our revenue intelligence platform, as well as our bespoke business improvement programme.