A brand’s potential reach has gotten a whole lot wider as of late thanks to the growing power of social media and the customer relationship management revolution. Whereas brands used to have to only worry about their stores being filled to the brim with people to know that they were doing well, they now grapple with monitoring social media rants and responding to disparaging statements over the blogosphere.
Accordingly, an attention to successful customer engagement has perhaps never been more important than now as a single customer has the power to ruin a company’s image with the tap of the mouse.
For the past few weeks, TMCnet has been talking with ACCENT Marketing Services – a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about customer engagement – about its Continuous Engagement Improvement Process, which couples ACCENT’s resources with a data-driven approach to help brands get the most out of their customer relationships. As explained by ACCENT officials, companies ought to go through five steps when trying to reach their customers: listen, learn, connect, influence and optimize. Each stage is centered upon making each customer interaction more intelligent and engaging than the last, regardless of the interaction channel.
And when it comes to influencing, this may be one of the most important things that companies are now able to do which was previously difficult for them.
“Influence happens when your brand can not just meet but anticipate your customers needs,” Tim Searcy, chief executive officer of ACCENT, told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “This can be accomplished by providing information to help them figure out the answers they are looking for, resolving their issues quickly and efficiently, turning a bad experience into a good one or presenting an up-sell or a cross-sell that actually is relevant to them on a timely manner and that helps them further entrench with their brand.”
“The goal of influencing customers is to strengthen their level of involvement and intimacy with the brand and we want to do that across a wide variety of channels,” he added. “Influence has a great deal to do with what that customer’s influence is in the social community – where are they in the blogosphere, how active are they within their own communities and what level of involvement do they have that we want to be able to impact.”
While influencing is an important step, just as the other four are, it is a hard step to master because it requires customers to possess a certain degree of respect for the brand and for the brand to be a bit vulnerable, according to Searcy.
“They’ve got to be ready to listen, engage and respond to that brand before you can actually influence them for them to influence others, and in order for them to want to do any of that they have to feel that you care about them and that you are listening to them,” he said. “This level of involvement is necessary for effective influencing to take place. Without it you can’t have true customer engagement.”
To listen to the whole podcast, click here.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli