How to Hack Customer Engagement: Getting Your Customers to Talk, Share, Collaborate, and Find Value.

Everyone in CS, or any customer-focused role, knows how hard it is to get a customer engaged. It’s even more difficult to keep that engagement flowing and flourish for the long haul.?

If you’re in SaaS like I am, then your customer probably pays for 10-100 different tools–and they’re getting emails from all of them. So, why should they care about your tool, product, or service? Why should they carve out their time to pay attention to you?

After all, people don’t act on information–they act on what they care the most about.

People don’t act on information–they act on what they care the most about.

6 ways to hack customer engagement

These 6 core principles from behavioral, cognitive, and social science (Delivered by the Stanford Social Innovation Review) shed some light on practical ways we can engage our customers.

1. Always offer something with value attached to it
2. Talk in pictures
3. Tell a powerful story
4. Build curiosity with familiarity
5. Invoke emotion with strategy and innovation
6. Always provide actionable calls to action

Because I believe these tips are so good, I won’t rewrite or paraphrase them. Simply jump into the link above and get them their well-deserved read.

A few more tips that have worked for me, and probably many others.

1. Find common ground to connect

Imagine you’re a product designer and have a deep love for all things innovation. Now, imagine yourself being invited to a wedding only to find out that you’ll be sitting at a table full of corporate lawyers. The odds are that you’d probably feel like the odd one out. Why? You haven’t yet discovered any ways to relate to the rest of the people at your table. But, once you get a good conversation going, you find out that you all share a common interest in dogs. After a few glasses of wine, you now feel like the people at this table are friends that you have known for years.

When we talk to our customers we need to find ways to connect with them on a personal level that goes beyond a business discussion. It is completely ok to share a little about yourself, your life, hobbies, and what you like to do on a weekend. Humans are humans and our relationships get a facelift when we discover the things we have in common. Our business relationships also improve when we get to know each other beyond the typical ‘’customer-provider’’ arrangement.?

Next month, I’ll be providing practical tips on how to do this–especially with people and customers that aren’t so easy to connect with.

2. Enable your customer champion

Turning a customer into a champion isn’t only about getting them super satisfied and in love with your product, but also fostering a deep and passionate connection that extends throughout their organization. Here's a strategy you can use to transform your customer into a true product champion:

• Understand their business goals
• Make sure you know what your champion’s personal business goals are
• Uncover what your champion values most
• Provide exceptional, dynamic onboarding
• Make sure you have digitized educational resources on hand
• Offer proactive support and guidance
• Make your champion the true hero in the collaboration
• Map out their challenges and come up with solutions together
• Create advocacy opportunities to give them a voice (Case studies, testimonials, etc)
• Always recognize and appreciate them

3. Communicate, but not too much

Nobody likes being bombarded with endless phone calls, meeting requests, and emails. Also, nobody wants to jump on a ‘’quick call’’ unless they, themselves, have asked for it.?

Today, people are trying to grab a valuable piece of everyone else’s time left, right and center. As I said in the intro, most companies use tons of SaaS tools. Imagine success, support, and product teams from these companies asking to connect with them each week. It gets overwhelming and the obvious answer will most likely be…no answer.?

While the occasional customer touchpoint call is necessary, try not to make them too frequent, unless your customer specifically asks for it to be that way.?

4. Educate, at your customer’s convenience

So, how can we be proactive with our communication to customers without being too pesty? Start by helping customers educate themselves. After all, we get the most value out of things when we educate ourselves about them. Some ideas:

• Set up optional touchpoints with your customers.
• Find out what your customer’s preferred communication channels are.
• Provide a ton of ‘’self check out’’ resources like customer academies and knowledge hubs.
• Educate one-to-many through webinars (Really good if you are in a SaaS company) instead of begging for 1-1 calls.
• Send monthly (Or, even bi-monthly or quarterly) emails packed with what your customers would value most instead of sending email overloads all week long. Think one, but ‘’the one.’’

5. Report what is valuable to your customer

I’ll keep this last one short.? Never leave your customers in the dark. No news is not always good news. Make sure you are reporting results frequently. Make sure you can prove why your customers should continue investing their money and time into what you are offering them.

Again, pack this info up into a nice email attachment and decide on the frequency. Put the word ‘’results’’ into the email heading and it will most surely be opened.?

We are in a day and age when we don’t always want to be contacted face to face. It works great on some occasions, but most of us would prefer to get good, valuable news less than getting uninteresting and invaluable news often.?

Ok, no summary here. That's a wrap.