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Growing your company and business model through successful customer engagement
The age of internet has changed the perception of “customer service” as we know it. It’s no longer enough to just answer a couple of questions that your customers have for you when they call on the phone.
Customer relations, mainly the engagement you make at every contact with your customers are what define a successful company. Every public move you make and every change, upgrade or addition to your lineup of services will mark a shift in your customer relations. Making sure that you use customer engagement in your favor in order to grow your company and business model is something that every CEO and executive should strive for.
In This Post:
Channels of communication
Giving your clients and followers a clear line of communication is essential in creating the groundwork of your customer engagement system. People should always know how they can reach you for information or assistance if they are interested in directly talking to a representative of your company. This can range from actively curating the social media pages and speaking to people directly or having a free telephone line on every continent waiting to be used by eager customers.
These channels of communication might seem arbitrary to you as an executive but the ordinary people who use your products will always have something to say or ask about them. Building a healthy customer relation and engaging them the way they are used to can be a great way to establish mutual trust.
Consistent quality
When all is said and done, your main source of customer engagement will be the quality of the product you offer to the public. Whether you are distributing refreshing drinks or working on a global fitness program doesn’t really matter – a product will always be a product.
As such, the quality of said product will speak volumes about who you are and what your company direction looks like. If your product is consistently well-designed, satisfactory to use and offers an incentive to come back to it, people will always do so and invite their friends along the way. This is the best customer engagement strategy you can use and one of the most difficult ones to achieve.
Specialized customer service
Depending on the lineup of products and services your company offers, your customer service will have to reflect it. This means that having a generalized help line and customer service won’t be enough for most of the callers and people who need your help, information or have feedback to submit.
Customer engagement in 2017 steers towards making sure that people who work in customer service have to be specialized for certain types of products inside the company. For example, having five people know everything about product A also means that five more need to know everything about product B and so forth.
If all of them claim to know everything about every product your company distributes, your customer service will be generic and mostly unhelpful in today’s customer engagement-centric business world. Offer your customers a chance to explore the products they use in far more detail than before by having your customer service and experience team specialize in certain product areas.
Customer individuality
Treating every customer with the same amount of respect and energy is a sure way to go when it comes to customer engagement. People don’t like to be treated like just another number on the board. While they might have caller numbers and ID’s, these people are individuals with problems or suggestions about your products. Treating them like generic customer A, B and C will take your customer service nowhere fast.
You need to make sure that your customer service operators know how to treat callers and people who turn to you for more information about products and services. For example, taking a look at Pick Writers will give you a good idea of proper customer engagement when it comes to online paper writing as a service. If you treat people with respect and energy as if they are the only person who called that day, they will likely continue using your service for the foreseeable future.
Empowering brand awareness
What makes most companies opt for customer engagement in the end is the fact that it boosts the public’s brand awareness. Your company and products are the only reason you should be thinking about implementing proper customer service by making sure that people understand who you are and what you are doing.
Your brand name, vision and visual components hold far more value on the market than any product that you may come up with. This means that your brand is your most powerful weapon when it comes to customer engagement. If you can instill trust and loyalty in your customer base, the subsequent customer engagement will be a formality in which they are happy to use your products and give you feedback any chance they get.
Feedback-oriented culture
Encouraging your customers to pick up the phone or write an email and actually tell you what they like and don’t like about you and your services is what proper customer engagements ends up with. Knowing that your customers are happy to use your products but have a suggestion of how you can make it better is something that every executive dreams of.
This is because the customer base is always far larger than any test group you come up with. It’s also far less biased towards your product, meaning that they use it home and family environments where they don’t care what you think about them. Privacy of your customer’s homes is the best testing ground for your line of products and as such, feedback that comes from there is always of the highest quality.
Conclusion
Giving your customers a solid customer engagement system will always result in growth of sales figures. Word of mouth travels fast if people are satisfied with what you have to offer and even more so if you treat them like human beings and family.
Don’t shy away from showing a bit of sympathy or friendliness when customer services are concerned. The people who call you with questions and suggestions are exactly the crowd that you create your products for. They are also the only reason why your company is still operational, so make sure that you engage them properly.
