5 key questions to ask when fine-tuning your customer engagement strategy

For your company to have staying power, it must keep customers staying. However, you can’t expect your customers to remain loyal to your business if it isn’t positively engaging them; in other words, giving these people enjoyable experiences that they long remain fond of remembering.

You can foster customer engagement in many ways – including with your customer service and marketing. Here are just some significant questions you could ask yourself to edge closer to this goal.

“Can I find ways to say ‘yes’ to customers more often?”

We’ve come up with one theory why “the man from Del Monte” was such a marketing success: his apparently unbounded positivity. After all, he would always say “yes”, so the adverts suggested – and you should aim to strike a similarly exuberant tone with your customers.

This means conveying the impression, from the moment you start interacting with a customer, that you are eager to carry out their wishes rather than dragging your feet in doing so.

“How can I keep the customer experience as seamless as possible?”

On occasion, a customer might ask you for information you don’t actually have. In that scenario, you certainly shouldn’t simply leave the customer to call someone else within the company. Instead, you should transfer the customer straight to that person or even fetch the required information from them yourself.

Really, you should always look into taking the latter route first – even if it would require you to ask your customer if they are happy to wait while you track down the other employee.

“How can I improve the customer experience cost-effectively?”

“We were trying to eliminate the need for customers to ask questions or discourage them from asking for help, which was counterproductive,” the chief technology officer of a Fortune 500 financial-services company has recalled to strategy+business about her company once working too hard to cut costs.

In this instance, the cost-shedding curbed the company’s development, customer service and goodwill with customers. This situation underlines the importance of trimming expenditure in the right places.

“How could I make my communications with customers more authentic?”

As customer experience consultant Micah Solomon explains in a Forbes article, he and Richard Branson concur that many customers these days are repelled by what Solomon calls “Stepford customer service”, where employees come across as stiff, soulless mouthpieces for their company.

You shouldn’t be afraid to let your workers inject a little of their own personalities into proceedings – and they could do that more easily by holding video presentations on a software platform from ON24, for example.

“Do my employees know what to do when things go wrong?”

While your workers might look unassailable on the customer-service front when things are plain sailing, it could abruptly become a very different story when a customer airs a grievance.

However natural it might be for a worker to turn defensive in this situation, it’s catastrophic for the customer-employee relationship. Your employees must know how to apologise and patch things up when customer service veers into disarray.