Customer Engagement is a huge issue for companies that want to grow market share, reduce customer attrition, and enhance profitability. This is the second part of a two-part series. Last month, we analysed what customer engagement is. In this article, we look at what companies can do to promte customer engagement.

How can we achieve customer engagement?

This question is more involved and is a multi-step process. But we want to share with you a simple way to get your staff of the same page – and getting them to elicit the above three value-creating customer behaviours.

When we take this approach, we need to slay a sacred cow or two – the first one being to forget trying to manage your employees’ behaviours – either through competencies or micro-management. Instead, we’re going to share a simple & powerful framework just about anyone will be able to understand (bear in mind simplicity is essential when you’re managing an Emerging Market workforce).

That approach is for your staff to have first of all a crystal-clear idea of which customer behaviours they need to elicit at which point.

The SAY behaviour is the behaviour of communication, that leads to the relationship of advice & partnership.

The STAY behaviour is the behaviour of comfort, relaxation and fulfilment of self image.

The SPEND behaviour is the behaviour of excitement and immediate need fulfilment.

Know which notes to play

A customer experience is no different from playing a piece of music. It’s important to play notes in a certain sequence.

With each business, the first thing your staff need to know about creating a customer experience is the order of these notes. Is the priority to make the customer feel comfortable or special? Or to take the order and deliver it straight away? Or to ask lots of questions and listen patiently? In the first case it’s likely that the service provider is a hotel, in the second a fast food establishemnt, in the third a hospital.

This may sound common-sense. Creating and fulfilling these behaviours does not give you customer engagement – it only gives customer service (which is a commodity and expected by the customer as per the graphic in the post here).

Customer engagement is achieved when your staff understand the combination all three (with the key customer behaviour at the end). Here is an example of how the path to customer engagement would look in 4 different industries:

How to create your Customer Experience

Once you are clear about this path, you then need to fill in each section with a compelling customer experience. Basically, you need to identify the emotions that invoke each behaviour, and be clear abou the medium that will create those emotions.

The medium of the customer experience are Stage, System and Service. We’ll look at the specific emotions that evoke the above behaviours and Stage, System and Service in a future post.

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Talent Technologies. Producing Change.

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