How can you make your company’s customer experience more delightful?
How do you engage customers to turn them into loyal advocates?
Engagement is vital to any organization that wants to grow its business. After all, how can you make customers feel special if they don’t know why they should care about your brand or service? You need to create a strategy that connects the dots of your customer experience and makes it seamless for the end user. Creating a Customer Engagement Plan (CEP) is one of the most important activities in a company’s growth strategy.
Purpose or goal of the customer engagement activity: The purpose of the customer engagement activity will vary depending on your company’s needs. For example, when consulting at a marketing agency, the main goal was to increase client retention and improve customer satisfaction. Gathering a group of stakeholders is one of the first steps in creating a CEP because it will help create an interesting, interactive process. You want to gather key decision-makers from across departments, including sales, marketing, and customer service. This group will help guide you through the rest of the process and provide insight into how to achieve your goal(s) best. Identify and prioritizes metrics for success. If you have an objective that is not measurable (like customer satisfaction), you will need to find other ways to measure your goals or determine whether they are reaching their desired outcomes.
What are the customer objectives of this activity? The key objectives for creating a CEP are to – Create knowledge about the company’s value proposition – Create a consistent, relevant experience for customers – Increase customer happiness and loyalty – Reduce churn and increase customer retention – Keep customers coming back to your site
What are the customer roles that will participate? The first thing you should do is create a CEP with all of your customer roles. A customer roles plan is an important document that helps to define the different “roles” that customers play in your organization. These can be your internal and external partners, sales reps, marketers, analysts, or even users of your company’s services or products. The role that each person plays will contribute to the overall customer experience. You will want to include the following information:
- Name – Primary contact information
- Where they typically interact with your product/service
- Their key frustrations and pain points
- How they feel about the current customer experience
- What they would like to see improved
- What are their goals for how they engage with your brand
What is the desired level of participation of the customer? A customer engagement plan should be based on your desired level of involvement. This means that your CEP should be about the company and the customer. When you think about how much control you want to take over the relationship, it is important to clarify this distinction. To succeed with a CEP, it is important to have a firm grasp of what you want from the customer and what others are willing to give.
What will be your method of customer engagement? Your method of customer engagement will depend on your business and the goals you have for it. For example, if you’re a local pizza delivery service, engagement may be as simple as taking pictures of your food and sending them to customers through a social media account. But if you’re in the software sales industry, engagement might involve getting feedback from prospects before they buy. Your CEP should include tactics that are tailored to your business. For example, certain tactics may work well for a restaurant—like hosting Instagram contests—while other tactics would make more sense for an accounting firm or construction company. Your Engagement Plan should also include objectives that link back to your goals. Once you have completed this step, you’ll see how each tactic contributes to your strategy’s overall success and what else needs to happen for it to succeed.
How will they benefit from being involved? As your company’s CEP gains traction, you will gain more customer loyalty, which means that you will have more people willing to advocate for your business. For example, if you were to implement an Engagement Plan at your company and increase customer loyalty by 100 percent, those customers would be engaged enough to tell ten others about their experience. If each of those ten people tells two other people about the company, society has already been impressed enough with this customer engagement strategy that they could increase sales by a factor of 2. To create an Engagement Plan:
- Gather detail on what a typical customer experience is like for every customer who comes through your doors
- Create a plan to reduce friction in these interactions
- Measure customer engagement to make sure it’s moving in the right direction
- Optimize for conversions
- Support the individuals in your company who need help implementing new ideas 6) Reward employees for their contributions
What will be the method of evaluation? To create an effective engagement plan, you’ll need a method of evaluating how your efforts are going. For example, we use customer surveys in The Customer Collective Engagement Plan. We ask customers what they think of their experience and what they’d like to see the company improve. We also include qualitative data in our Plan, such as interviews with employees who have talked with customers about their experiences. Once you have a method of evaluation and a process in place, it’s time to start! Take some time to prepare some questions for your engagement plan. These will be the building blocks that help you create your first draft. You can also reach out to customers or employees and have them share feedback on how the company could improve their experience. Once you have gathered feedback from your users—including some from outside sources—you should develop ideas for enhancing your company’s customer experience. From there, start drafting a vision for what you want your company to become by the end of 2018, and then create action items so that you can achieve that goal
What measures or indicators will be used? The first step in creating a Customer Engagement Plan is to determine the measures that will be used. These should cover all aspects of your business, from operations to marketing and sales. You’ll want to create a formula for these indicators and define how you’ll use them. For example, suppose you are a company that sells makeup. In that case, you might include the number of visitors visiting the website daily, the total return on investment (ROI), and social media engagement metrics like likes, shares, and posts. Once these measures have been identified and calculated, you can create an engagement score for each measure. This score will be based on how many users or customers complete that task and how long they spend doing it. Then by averaging those scores across all measures over time, you can create an overall engagement score that determines how engaged your customers are with your brand.