Cultivating Customer Engagement

Today’s customers can switch brands with the swipe of a screen or a click of a button, making it critical to develop strategies for engaging them. But customer engagement requires more than just surveying consumers, sending out tweets, or rolling out rewards programs. Cultivating true customer engagement requires a multifaceted approach that involves many areas of your business. Here are some best practices that can help you lay the groundwork for developing a customer engagement program:

1. Identify your assets. You aren’t likely to engage anyone without knowing something about them—and the more you know, the better your chances of success. Valuable data exists in many places within your organization, and you want to be able to tap into it to develop a clearer, more defined view of your customers. Identify the different types of information you have, such as customer identity data, transactional information (online and offline), online activity information (including social media), customer feedback, and customer value and history. Don’t overlook billing, ERP, and service provisioning systems. If your organization operates multiple lines of business, you’ll also need to factor this into your assessment.

Be sure to note where the data resides, in which formats, and which stakeholders are responsible for collecting and maintaining it. If you can identify the most useful subset of data sources across your enterprise, you can use it to help you deliver much more targeted, contextual service—a critical component for building customer engagement.

2. Leverage your internal resources. Employees can greatly impact the quality of the customer experience. Since training and coaching staff can be critical, now is the time to assess the effectiveness of your efforts. Are you providing employees with the opportunity to extend and enhance their skills? Do your key performance indicators measure behaviors that actually foster customer engagement, or are they focused solely on delivering service at the lowest cost possible?

Staff empowerment is another key factor. Employees need to have some level of input and control over their work to be able to engage customers effectively. This can mean being able to go off script and make decisions without always having to ask a supervisor. It also means being able to access information quickly and easily to make decisions that are appropriate for the customer and situation at hand. Customers don’t want to wait for extended periods of time while a service representative hunts down information or struggles to decide the next step in the process. Give your employees the tools and skills they need to drive engagement.

3. Pick a starting point. Even if you offer customers a variety of ways to interact with your organization, it may be more practical to focus on optimizing customer engagement in one channel at a time. Maximize the benefits you get from that insight, and then move on to the next channel.

Begin by systematically capturing and analyzing data from the channel you’ve selected to obtain key insights that can be operationalized across your business. Plan ways to leverage this information, and be sure to engage the stakeholders you identified back in step one to help facilitate the internalization of the data. By gathering and assessing data – both structured and unstructured – across channels, you can gain actionable insight into customer sentiments and the overall customer journey, then use it to drive customer engagement.

4. Take advantage of technology. Verint® Systems and KANA®, A Verint Company, offer a portfolio of customer engagement optimization solutions to help transform customer engagement in today’s omnichannel service environment. It includes workforce optimization, customer analytics, and customer service solutions that can provide your organization with valuable insight for enriching customer interactions, optimizing the workforce, and improving business processes. These powerful solutions can help your organization engage customers across multiple channels and deliver consistent, contextual, and personalized experiences that can drive sales and revenue. Contact Verint today to learn more.

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Verint^® Systems Inc. (NASDAQ: VRNT) is a global leader in Actionable Intelligence^® solutions for customer engagement optimization, security intelligence, and fraud, risk and compliance. Today, more than 10,000 organizations in over 180 countries use Verint solutions to improve enterprise performance and make the world a safer place.

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