If you think it’s easy to successfully engage with customers think again. From figuring out what platforms they liked to be reached on to determining how much interaction they want with your brand, a company can get a serious headache when trying to figure out how to turn first time customers into loyal brand proponents.
Fortunately for businesses out there looking to adopt customer engagement strategies, ACCENT Marketing Services – a performance marketing company for brands that are passionate about customer engagement – has created ACCENT’s 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. According to 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.
While listen and learn are extremely important, connect is a vital step as well, according to Tim Searcy, chief executive officer of ACCENT.
“We look at connecting with the customers as being the natural first step that people like to go through, but you have to start with what does it mean,” Searcy told TMCnet in a recent podcast. “If you don’t have a complete view of your customer before joining the conversation, you are going to put yourself in a position where your brand is going to be weak.”
“You need to understand at what point should you connect with them to build a better foundation to participate in that conversation,” he added. “When we look at things that we see before, insights that were gained through listening and learning, we know that we will be able to engage in a personal conversation through the channel that the customer prefers. By postponing the connection, we can ensure that regardless of how the consumer chooses to interact, we can provide the personal and relevant information that they need and want to accelerate the relationship.”
In order to accelerate a relationship, companies must keep tabs on what a customer wants, how they want to communicate with businesses and what timeframe will work for them.
For example, customers who are actively engaged with brands may want to connect on a personal level and have their opinions heard, while unengaged customers might feel that the brand is being pushy if they don’t ask permission to engage at that level. Simply put, businesses have to interact with customers in a manner that is consistent with their wants, according to Searcy.
So what else can a brand do to immediately improve how they connect with their customers?
“Connection goes back to the first two steps of listening and learning,” Searcy said. “The best thing we can do is understand what customers want from their brand; are they looking for technical support, do they want to do self guided assistance, do they believe that they can handle this on the Web? We want to give them personal assistance with an engagement specialist through something like chat support or telephone support when they want it.”
“If they want to connect with their customers, they are going to have to figure out when, how and how to be relevant,” he added. “If we are not doing those three things, we are not going to create the relationship we want.”
To listen to the whole podcast, click here.
Edited by Amanda Ciccatelli