Bad reviews on social media can spread like wildfire in a few minutes and can taint your public image. This is particularly true for the Philippines, whose citizens are among the heaviest internet users in the world. They each clock in an average of 10 hours and two minutes of screen time a day, according to a Hootsuite and We are Social’s report in 2019.
As such, negative reviews posted online can be detrimental to a business. One may think these reviews are solely brought about by a response to a bad product experience. But if you read through customer reviews on almost every e-commerce site, you would see it is, more often than not, a byproduct of the whole customer experience and the customer’s engagement with the business or seller. This then raises the importance of ensuring that a customer is satisfied with each engagement. But how can this be achieved?
First, let us define what customer engagement is. As the term implies, customer engagement is composed of all interactions a customer has with a business. It can differ from one business to another, even if two businesses are in the same industry and have similar products. It is set by the business. A business can choose which customers can reach out to it through Facebook, email, SMS or any other channel available. But at the end of the day, it is how a business interacts with its customers and how it adds to their experience that matters.
Going back to the initial question, how can a business achieve excellent customer engagement? It involves three steps that eventually form a cycle, with each feeding into the next.
– Moment of interaction. As customer engagement is defined as a customer’s interaction with a business, the first step in having excellent customer engagement is providing excellent service at each customer touchpoint. This means being able to answer these questions:
What is the customer journey like? What are the different customer touchpoints? Knowing each customer touchpoint from a customer’s perspective means being able to identify different concerns he or she may have about a business’ product or service. This empowers the business to anticipate concerns and prepare scripts, spiels and templates that customer-facing teams can use and which can be a part of their training.
Who is responsible for each customer touchpoint? If a customer is at a certain stage in the customer journey, who should they reach out to? How will that be relayed to him or her Identifying who a business’ customer-facing teams are and which aspect of the business they should be trained on is an important aspect of customer engagement. This ensures that a business’ brand is consistent across all customer touchpoints, whatever stage in the customer journey a customer is in and who he or she is talking to. Ideally, each customer-facing team should be knowledgeable on all stages of the customer journey, but they may be an expert on a specific part of a business.
Where are the customers currently at? Which channels are they using? Is it email, SMS, Facebook, Viber or other channels? Identifying which channels customers currently use is a crucial part in knowing which channels a business should be available in. This ensures that it is convenient for customers to reach out to the business and also prevents it from investing in a channel that customers will not use. This enables the business to meet customers where they are and be accessible to customers when they need to.
Answering these questions sets up the foundation of each customer engagement. This enables a business to create an avenue for customers to reach out to the business beyond their transactions with the product, when the customer needs to and where the customer can conveniently do so.
– Processing multiple interactions. After each moment of interaction with the customer, each engagement should be categorized based on the topic of engagement. What was the interaction about? What did the customer need? Was it a problem with the product? Are they following up? These are some sample questions that can be answered by categorizing each interaction. Having a way to categorize each interaction means being able to subsequently identify what the recurring concerns are.
An example of this is identifying whether an engagement with the customer is a problem, task or question, after which it can be further categorized based on each step in the customer journey, such as account creation, a customer’s first purchase or a subsequent one. Numerous business questions can be answered by being able to process multiple interactions. This then feeds into the last step, which is using processed interactions to improve each moment of interaction.
– Using processed interactions to improve each moment of interaction (and other parts of the business). After categorizing interactions, aggregate results can then be analyzed. For example, Company A saw that, in a certain month, questions about account creation increased. With this information, Company A can decide to train its sales and support teams to educate customers on how to create their accounts. Spiels and templates can be created to ensure that communication is consistent with each customer. Experiments can also be conducted to check which spiel and template is the most effective in explaining how Company A’s account creation process goes. This process means each moment of interaction is now being used to improve each new moment of interaction.
Besides using processed interactions to improve each new moment of interaction, aggregate interactions can also be used to improve other parts of the business. For the aforementioned example, the business can further investigate why the account creation process seems to be unclear to customers. Is it the screens used? Or the words? Upon further investigation, the business might discover that the current screens for account creation is not suitable for mobile view, which is what the majority of customers use. The business can use this information to create a better user interface for account creation. This process means being able to use processed interactions and consequently, each moment of interaction, to improve other parts of the business.
How a business interacts with customers is now as important as the benefit customers receive from a product or a service. Being able to provide excellent moments of interaction, processing those moments of interaction, and using processed interactions to improve future moments of interaction and the whole customer experience is key in creating excellent customer engagements. This ensures that a customer has an overall exceptional experience, from onboarding to retention. With excellent customer engagements, the question now is how beneficial would it be for a business if a single tweet, review or Facebook post praises a business for the benefits the customer has received?
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