Meeting the challenge of customer engagement

Deliver personalized responses. Customers are unlikely to engage with companies that send them cookie-cutter replies to their most important requests or concerns. Responses that are personalized, consistent and quick stand the best chance of attracting and retaining customers’ attention.

Some of the obstacles to greater levels of engagement appear to have to do with the limitations of the customer base. Obtaining this knowledge takes patience, “people” skills and the ability to use technology effectively. One way to deepen knowledge of customer requirements is to look for areas in which customers could use more help than they have traditionally received. Understand what you can bring to your customers. Developing a fundamental understanding of your customers’ pain points is key to your engagement strategy.

Make things familiar but better. As human personalities, we don’t like change. One of the reasons that engagement-related automation succeed is when you take something familiar (for example the many forms that the agents already knew and used) and put it on the Internet in a more convenient form. Having the forms online simplified life for the agents, but didn’t require that their clients change much about the way they did business.

Service oriented architecture, which can link a wide variety of programs and platforms, can do wonders to integrate customer information and deliver targeted service. SOA is beginning to play a critical role in ensuring the success of engagement initiatives.

A key “best practice” to remember is to keep the corporate agenda focused on engagement. Customer relationship initiatives generally tend to center on specific tools and tactics; rarely, if ever, is customer engagement a strategic priority.

It’s the ultimate one-to-one relationship because it’s not just personalization based on a few superficial attributes. We’re really talking about the ultra-personalized experience.