There is a lot being said about the customer centricorganizations and how businesses can involve customers at different stages of product/servicedevelopment.
There have organizations that have done this verysuccessfully and continue to engage with their customers. I did write about onesuch initiative that FM station RadioOne recently.
However, what happens if your customers do notparticipate in these activities? Without their active participation, the entireprogram is designed to fail.
How does one deal with this situation?
How would you deal with such a situation?
4 thoughts on “Customer Engagement – What if your customers do not engage with you?”
Go back to the grass roots. Try and find out if customers did not engage if they do not trust your brand, what can you do to develop goodwill, etc. Then revisit your marketing and advertising activities. Are you strategically placed for people to know about your engagement activities? Or are they unaware of what you are trying to do? Or are they just plain disinterested? These might give one a start…
So rightly said. One also has to note that it is not necessary that you should engage with all your customers. Revisit the engagement model. Is it taking too much time of your customers.. Is it too cumbersome..
Most importantly, the best customer engagement model is not to engage the customer but watch them in action.. See what they see, what they do, understand why they do, without coming in the way..
If customers are not taking an active role in participating, I usually take that as an initial sign that they are not motivated by whatever it is we're offering….some customers are motivated by recognition in which case you should offer perhaps an award or speaking engagement that would showcase this. Others are motivated simply by the networking possibilities in the company or amongst peers, while others are motivated by trying to help close a sales deal and get more fellow customers on board. Find out what motivates your customers and act on it.
Thanks Susan.. I think this is a great insight. Usually, someone at the headquarters creates the program, defines the benefits for the customers who are willing to engage and then the program is rolled out. This assumes that all customers will be interested in the same benefits.
The trick is probably to customize the program to individual customer. I understand that it becomes difficult to scale the program but scaling will help only if the program is successful.
This also brings me to the question of who should be driving this initiative. Should it be a central team or should it be the account executive for each customer who should drive it..
What do you think?
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