3 Ways to Engage the Digital Customer

Andrew Mennie reveals the three key expectations that you need to address in order to successfully (and profitably) engage the digital customer.

1. Be a “customer like me”

In the annual Edelman Trust survey, participants rated offering high quality goods and services and placing the customer ahead of profits as key elements for building trust and a good relationship.

But the key element—rated as most important—is to listen to the customer’s needs. Customers want you to treat them as partners in the relationship and to “be like them”, responding quickly and appropriately to their needs.

2. Go beyond multi-channel to omni-channel

It’s no longer a matter of which communication channel a customer wants to use. It’s a matter of how many channels are needed during the course of an engagement.

Customers expect your business to provide multiple digital channels and to make sure a conversation flows seamlessly between them. This requires an omni-channel strategy that supports what is the natural tendency of the digital customer to use as many channels as they feel necessary to conduct a conversation.

3. Tailor the engagement to the customer

Tailoring the engagement to the customer requires understanding what customer engagement really is.

• It’s not unidirectional—Both customers and companies can decide when to engage.
• It’s not consistently at the same level—You don’t have to engage all the time.
• It’s not determined by the amount of time or effort the customer puts into the engagement—Short, casual interactions can be just as valuable as lengthy ones.

Quite simply, customer engagement is the ongoing interaction between company and customer, offered by the company, chosen by the customer.

• Customers will self-select – By providing an array of products, services, tools, channels and consumable experiences, you can allow customers to sculpt the level of engagement they want—casual to intense, frequent to infrequent.
• Customers want to feel valued – Make the customer feel you understand their needs and that you take them seriously. When the customer engages, have the means to respond in a rapid, consistent and relevant way.
• There will be constraints – Budgets, labour, regulations, etc. need to be taken into account.

You don’t have to delight the customer all the time. Engagements that listen to the customer, respond appropriately and make the customer feel like a partner in the process will be deemed good enough.

With thanks to Andrew Mennie at Moxie Software.