Customer engagement is critical for brands. If you’re in the game of trying to build better relationships with your customers, you’re on point. Learning what your customers want and then giving it to them; building brand loyalty and advocacy to foster customers for life. What’s not critical about that?
At Thunderhead, we define customer engagement as an ongoing, value-driven relationship between a customer and a business, which is consciously motivated according to the customer’s reasons and choices
This is more than customer experience; it is the sum and flow of experiences that drive engagement and why understanding the customer journey is an absolute key factor.
But all too often customer engagement gets added to the ‘too difficult’ pile because it’s perceived to be complex, it’s bad timing or it creates a feeling of bewilderment with where to start.
Engagement is indeed a long-term strategy, not a quick fix, but there are swift and easy wins that can kick-start the process. And technology is key to getting underway.
Here we debunk some of the myths that are holding you back from getting started:
Myth 1: A single customer view is just too hard
Your data is all over the place? Guess what…you’re not alone. Whether you’re an established brand and SME or a start-up, the chances are your brand has multiple systems and departments that hold information about your customers.
They weren’t really designed to act together and while they’re optimized for the job they were designed to perform, they’re sub-optimal for the needs of your customers as they interact across your brand. It’s perfectly natural to feel like it’s going to be extremely difficult to bring these disparate data sources together.
However, it’s now possible to connect these systems using technology and marry that with journey insight in real-time to get a comprehensive view of your customers and their needs.
Myth 2: Customer engagement has to be complex
It requires some thinking and getting the right people together to start the process. But don’t think that you need a huge change programme or a vast technical team, you won’t. What’s important is that you make a start, you don’t need to reach a nirvana straight away.
Just by joining up two customer facing channels, you can gain journey insight which will help you understand what your customers are doing and build from there. Look for technology that’s easy for non-technical teams to use, builds on and scales with the systems you already have in place and that can get you up and running quickly.
Myth 3: There are other more important priorities
Customer engagement frequently gets passed over with the belief that you should be focusing on other priorities, such as your mobile offering, updating your website, your CRM system, or how to effectively use AI.
Although these are important, it’s absolutely crucial to make updates and introduce new infrastructure and technology based on what your customer wants, and how best to meet their needs. Why not listen to them first, understand the customer journey and then build the relevant projects around this insight?
You might surprise yourself – with these extra insights you could change the direction of those projects for the better.
Myth 4: Implementation will be complex and costly
Integrating multiple systems and numerous touch points may sound like a large and costly IT project, but those days are over. The latest in cloud-based technology for customer engagement is more flexible and cost effective, which means that it can be implemented quickly and demonstrate results at speed – not after many months of lengthy integration work.
It places the ownership in the hands of the business user, not IT, making it more agile, actionable and responsive to customer needs. In addition, you can start small and still make big gains.
To get started with customer engagement you need a solution that’s been designed to grow with you as your customer engagement strategy evolves.
So, go on, stand tall and remember it’s not ‘too difficult’ to make a start. What are you waiting for?
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