CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT

In every sentence made by organizations today,  customer engagement is mentioned a few times to buttress how customer - centric the organizations thinks itself to be.  In the true sense of the word,  how engaging is your organization with its customers?  Does your organization walk the walk?  

Customer engagement is not about listening to the customer, handling customer complaints and questions which can be said to be reactive to customers wants and needs at the point of a complaint, but organizations are becoming more proactive with the power shift in business - consumer relationship. As this shift occurs,  people have raised their expectations and grown less patient with companies that disappoint them or are failing to adapt to this evolving landscape of proactive customer relationship building. 

Customer engagement requires building real relationships with your customers and understanding them fully as people and connecting with them with personality and transparency in a timely,  personalized manner. 

The customer is no longer just a customer, the customer has a face,  a name and a unique identity. It is no longer 'a customer' but a 'Mary' , John, Alexa,  Bodunrin or Ebiere. The demand by customers for personalization cannot be overlooked by organizations who crave success beyond profit and innovation but also quality and longevity of its customer relationships and experiences. 

CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT FUNDAMENTALS

• Don't over estimate your business's importance in the life of your customer. He might be patronizing your competition and must constantly try to win over the customer with one stop solutions and offerings to keep him as an existing customer.  

• Every customer interaction must be recognized as being part of the customer 's experience.  If it takes your staff 10 minutes to attend to a customer, that singular interaction would have marred his overall experience with your organization. The organization must recognize and remember whenever and wherever she interacts with an organization.  The organization must have a memory to develop long term relationships.

•  Recognition of the Relationship Type and Adapting to it. Your organization must have the right relationship with each individual based on individual differences as one ideal customer relationship won't work.  Relationships however,  are two sided. Not every customer is right for your business and organizations should also learn to say no when necessary.

•  Be Relatable: Human beings expect organizations to be humanized as well.  They expect personality, transparency,  good communication, passion, style,  taste honest.  They see the organizations as friendly or unfriendly 'persons' based on how relatable the staff who must embody these qualities,  are.

•  Staff Empowerment For the organization to be relatable, the staff must be empowered to do what is best for the relationship with the customer and not staff who recite processes to customers with fake smiles and bored faces.  Along with empowerment comes with being human because the staff will be focused to be solution focused rather than policy focused.

•  Remember me? Says the customer: You must put a face on your customers and recognize them as individuals rather than target figures and data trends. Once you recognize that this customer could be Mr. Mark who is a social media influencer or Ms. Elizabeth who is elderly and requires assistance with reading, once you recognize them for who they are,  the more you would have solidified your relationship with your customer as a  humane organization who understands and engages with its customers better as a result of the strong relationship they have.

What social media channel does your customer choose to utilize in interacting with your brand? Which is most popular and how competent is your social care team in communicating your brand message consistently across all platforms?