Tech Guest Viewpoint: The Top Five Customer Engagement Mistakes
Today’s customers are firmly in charge of the buying process. The Internet allows them to research products and prices at the click of a button, and in most cases, they are better informed about what’s available in the marketplace than the associates in brick-and-mortar stores. And, the retail environment is more crowded – and less personalized – than ever before.
How often are customers personally greeted by name while at their favorite businesses these days? The truth is, not very often. To add insult to injury, customers are now constantly bombarded with emails (who doesn’t have that one email account just for marketing spam?), retargeted ads, and push notifications. It’s enough to make any customer feel numb to it all.
Most companies are struggling to break through all of the noise and make a meaningful connection with their customers. Here are the five most common mistakes businesses make when trying to engage with them:
1. Not Knowing the Customer: In order to have a meaningful relationship with anyone, no matter whether it’s in business or in life, each party needs to have an understanding of who the other is as a person. This applies to customers. Each customer has his or her own unique set of likes, dislikes, and preferences. A smart company will spend time and energy to find out who the customer is as an individual and leverage that knowledge to serve the customer better. Technology such as beacons, social logins, and cookies and tags can be used to identify customers, so companies can begin the process of getting to know them.
2. Not Busting the Silos Within an Organization: So, let’s say a company is properly using beacons, social logins, and cookies and tags. Information is pouring in to the company about its customers. But is that information being categorized appropriately and made available across the organization? The answer: probably not.
One of the biggest inhibitors of positive customer experience is the experience maze created by the various silos that exist within a company. The customer doesn’t care about the various divisions that exist within a company. Rather, he or she sees the company as one single entity. Companies need to make sure that all divisions are working in harmony to serve the customer.
3. Not Empowering Employees With Insights: Businesses must have complete visibility into every process, platform, and customer touchpoint, so the customer’s intent, likes, and preferences are visible to all stakeholders throughout the customer’s entire journey with the business.
By making customer insights completely transparent to all company divisions, a business can empower its associates by letting them access the information about customers when it matters most – at the moment of engagement. This is where the magic happens during customer experiences!
4. Pursuing Quantity over Quality of Engagements: Many companies are letting automated systems push out messages, but they are not able to tailor the messages to the customer, creating a massive blind spot for the company and an email headache for the customer. These automated systems are transactional in nature and focus on the sale or an offer, not on the customer.
Businesses deploying this tactic end up playing the conversion game, where they push out more and more messages to try to achieve more and more sales. This tactic may appear to work for a while, but it won’t take long to reach the point of diminishing returns. Also, the lack of authenticity of this approach ends up turning off customers.
5. Not Having the Right Offer Ready at the Right Time: This last mistake is, in a way, the culmination of all the other mistakes. One of the main benefits of knowing customers intimately is having the ability to offer a customer the right offer at the right time.
For example, if a customer has finally walked into a store after searching the company’s website multiple times for a specific product, an associate has a much greater chance of closing a sale if he or she knows the customer’s search history and can offer the customer an offer for that product during the in-store visit.
While there are many great tools available now to help businesses communicate with customers, strong leadership and a clear vision on how to effectively leverage technology are what are really required. In order to maximize customer experience, a company must put the customer at the center of all processes and decision-making. Fancy tools alone won’t get the job done, but a new way of thinking about the customer will.