Executing effective customer engagement strategies
Every day, organizations are looking to not just boost customer engagement, but to create more effective interactions with their customers. At Quadient, many companies contact us for help in planning, designing, managing, and organizing their customer communications - and in the process turn static documents into dynamic interactions. This is the first step that most IT and line of business teams take to manage their overall customer journey to go beyond interacting with customers and start engaging with them. So how do you go about making the leap from one-way to two-way communications, while remaining compliant and driving efficiency across the business? The answer is to focus on customer engagement as a whole omnichannel process.
Why is customer engagement important?
Customer engagement is one of the biggest challenges that businesses are facing today. This is particularly true given the rapid change of habits in terms of channel usage. Engaged customers tend to own multiple products, and they are less likely to switch to another provider – but today’s consumers want to engage across a diverse set of channels.
That means that delivering an omnichannel customer experience is essential to ensuring customer retention and growth. Delivering a positive customer experience consistently is a complex challenge that demands:
- a high degree of collaboration
- coordination and the elimination of silos
- well-thought-out processes and technology
Let’s take a bit of time to provide context around customer engagement – why it is a strategic imperative for any business to provide omnichannel engagement, and some of the barriers to progress organizations experience when implementing an omnichannel customer engagement strategy.
What is digital customer engagement?
Today, customer expectations are being shaped by digital natives. They now expect a lot more, and the bar is constantly rising in terms of what is acceptable to customers. And that presents a major challenge to organizations. To be relevant, organizations must deliver an omnichannel customer experience.
What are omnichannel communications?
Omnichannel engagement means enabling customers and prospects to engage across any channel or combination of channels they choose to use to achieve their desired outcomes. As a result, communications must be contextually relevant, secure, and provide a rewarding experience it is a huge challenge. According to Gartner, 50% of brands will have failed to unify customer engagement channels by 2022. This means the bulk of organizations are struggling with it or are still a long way off being able to deliver that seamless omnichannel customer experience.
Looking at the evolution to omnichannel, it is not easy to simply bolt on new channels to your current business processes. Many organizations operate channels in silos, some have made a multi-channel solution where they have added channels. Still other have unified customer data to assist their customer in transitioning from one channel to another. All of this creates an overall experience that is typically inconsistent – perhaps good on one channel and not in another.
True omnichannel engagement means everything is unified, irrespective of the channel that the customer chooses – allowing business leads to see exactly what the customer is trying to achieve, understand the customer's context, and have a relevant conversation with them or make a relevant offer. This is the first step in developing an end-to-end customer engagement strategy.
What is a customer engagement strategy?
A strong customer engagement strategy is made up of a few key capabilities. First is the ability to recognize the customer or prospect, acknowledge their needs and communicate with them in a relevant manner. This includes the ability to orchestrate the customer experience and to adapt continuously. The second is to protect the customer and their data - ensuring that data doesn't fall into the wrong hands - along with being compliant with existing regulations.
In every interaction, the customer must have choice – of what data they wish to provide, and of which channels these choose to do business on. The channels they choose may be digital channels - including portals, email, sms, and more, or physical channels – such as mail or in person. Customers should be able to interact when they want to, as well as receive information from the organization at the right time, which includes only information that is relevant to them. Continuity of experience must travel across different channels, minimizing the customer effort, and make it easy for them to do business with your company. It's not just about the front office – true customer engagement involves the whole organization.
It is important to include a feedback plan, which will include direct observation of customer journeys, understanding pain points that require improvement, and customer feedback from the voice of the customer surveys and voice of the employee surveys. Finally, proper customer engagement strategies have built-in compliance and privacy protection. This has become a requirement under GDPR, and customer journey mapping is an excellent way of trying to understand the journey from the customer's perspective and mapping where and how data needs to be protected across all customer engagements.
How do I start building a customer engagement strategy?
- In most businesses, building out a comprehensive strategy required breaking down organizational barriers and silos. Oftentimes, product lines operate independently and develop their own customer journeys and routes to market. That's not an ideal approach as it leads to customer experience systems and processes that are often fragmented – including access to customer data. Unified customer data is critical to ensuring engagement is aligned across the business.
- Set measurement goals – without the proper goals, it is easy to encourage the wrong behaviors. The organization needs to line up its measurements so that everyone's working together, and has a willingness to collaborate to make omnichannel customer engagement a reality.
- Set an executive sponsor - Build a customer experience team and ensure they have a sponsor from the top of the organization. Include cross-functional team leaders, cross-functional business domain experts, and potentially third-party systems integrators to ensure you have a team that is constantly looking at the voice of the customer.
- Simplify process where possible – by mapping the customer journey to build that cross-organizational consensus on how to make some progress.
- Identify and deal with legacy systems – you may have legacy systems that have been around for 10 or more years which are holding you back. So you need some kind of platform that sits between the enterprise and its customers. And today that's typically a cloud-based engagement platform, such as Inspire Evolve.
- Leverage machine learning – the sheer volume of engagements across your business is likely too much for any human to keep up with. Machine learning is playing a bigger role in helping businesses manage engagement volume over time.
Get started with omnichannel customer engagement today.
