Too often, the customer makes their purchase and then the delivery is scheduled and occurs, but there is little or no more contact with the client. The customer experience becomes nil, nonexistent. This is not acceptable. There must be online customer engagement before the sale, during the sale and after the sale.
How do you feed back the customers experience with your product/service? How do you make sure this happens? You certainly have many tools and options to choose from. The two elements you want to proceed with to help you value just how big the opportunity was or is; include looking at the reactive and the proactive approach.
Reactive
Many companies have made excellent use of customer reactions. Zappos might be one of the best examples out there. This company is obsessed with their brand and making the consumer just as obsessed by using the tools that are out there. Tools like Facebook and Twitter offer channels for your customer service regardless of what the customer wants.
Tools like User Voice are becoming more commonly used, where feedback for product development can be gathered, and where you can gather information on what might be missing in your product. Very valuable information and important in customer engagement.
Proactive
This is an approach that some companies are highly successful with and Dell is one of them. Dell listens to the entire market and then looks for the happy and unhappy customers so that they can proactively resolve any problems their customers are having. They actually have a command center. By engaging with both happy and unhappy customers, they can clearly see what they are doing right and what they are doing wrong.
These methods are not mutually exclusive to one another. They are simply individual processes that a company can use. One or both may be valuable to the company. Both do require staff that are focused on customer engagement. These programs will not run themselves.
Customer engagement is more overlooked now than any other time in marketing history. Ironically, right now, we have more tools available to use than any other time, so companies should be flocking to the tools to find out more about their customers so they can do a better job of finding them, keeping them, marketing to them, branding their product to them and creating a product that their customer wants. A handful of smart companies are doing just that. What is your company doing?
Comments