Engaging Your Customers Is Not Sufficient Anymore

We are in an era where we are grappling with too much choice.  Consumers today are facing a challenge in keeping up with the different choices they have. Every product or service category has become crowded (maybe apart from some categories like online search, where Google still continues to have substantial market share). In this scenario, having a meaningful engagement with your customers has become table stakes for any business to survive and thrive. So, the question that every marketer grapples with is “How can my Product/service stand out in this crowded marketplace?”. Some marketers try to stand-out by providing […]

Customer engagement in a digital era

There have been reports that the overall customer engagement at banks for customers using one of the digital channels like Online banking, mobile banking, etc. One of the most important aspect of customer engagement, is in fact engagement. You need to continuously engage with your customers through out their journey with you. This implies that you need to know what a customers journey is with your organisation: – What are the touch points where you come in contact with your customer; – What does the customer want to get done at each of these touch points & why? – What […]

Customer engagement vs customer centricity

As an employee responsible for customer advocacy at a software vendor, I often receive requests from colleagues in the development teams requesting me to help them connect to our customers and seek feedback on our existing products or solutions and validate new product ideas. Having been in this scenario so many times, I realise that there is a big difference between customer engagement and customer centricity. In one, you work with the customer, together to achieve common objectives (which is so rare). This activity can only succeed if both the customer and the supplier have deep skin in the game. […]

Step by step guide for success with social media

In the past week, I have now met three people who head marketing functions for their organizations and all three have complained about how their foray into social media has received such a lukewarm response. They all indicated that they are not sure if this is something they should continue to support or just let it die their natural death. They were not the only one’s who were finding it difficult to sustain the initial rush of getting on to social media. So, clearly there is a need for a detailed framework or a step-by-step guide which organizations can use […]

The idea of Customer advocacy

I came across a nice article by Jeannie Walters titled – Community Managers as customer advocates. I completely agree with her when she says “This emerging role is really the first line of advocacy for customers. These people are engaging and interacting with customers, former customers and future customers daily. If the C-level isn’t asking for constant feedback from them, they are missing out.” My day time role is as a customer advocacy manager at a large multi-national software giant. So, I was very much interested in the post. She does have a few interesting points to make: When I took this role early […]