5 Crucial Customer Engagement Tips: It’s Time to Rethink Your Organization

"If you’re a fly on the wall of a meeting between C-level executives and could reasonably mistake any of them for the Chief Customer Officer, you are witnessing a customer-centric business at work."

Undoubtedly astute, CMIQ advisor and sector consultant Michele Crocker’s comment reveals the central fallacy affecting many a customer management leader. For far too many within that community, the pie-in-the-sky goal is for the customer experience team to earn a seat at the executive table. They relentlessly seek an avenue for communicating the voice of the customers to those who make big picture business decisions.

That should not be the goal.

Gaining C-level representation for the customer management function is not a terrible starting point on the road to customer-centricity, but the notion of viewing it as some sort of driving force is a fundamentally flawed one. It presumes that the customer experience is a singular business focus that deserves its fair due alongside concerns like operations, human resources, legal and finance. In reality, the customer experience needs to be a primary objective that unites all departments, leaders and employees. Customer-centricity needs to be the lifeblood of the entire organization.

Customer management professionals should not be perpetually fighting to get their piece of the pie; they should be working seamlessly with the entire organization to determine how best to manage that slice. Organizations in which the customer teams are aspiring for the mere opportunity to be heard are already on the losing side of the equation.

Whether the blame for the disconnect falls on a stubborn C-level or misguided customer management function, the disconnect is there and is a significant roadblock on the customer experience journey.

Businesses that focus on inserting the customer experience into existing business discourse will not succeed in moving past that roadblock. Meaningful advancement will only come from reshaping the organization around the challenge of creating valuable customer engagement in a multi-channel world.

A recent McKinsey Quarterly report entitled "Five No Regrets Moves for Superior Customer Engagement" highlights some key implementations and transformations businesses must make in order to properly engage customers. Distinguishing engagement from experience on the grounds that "engagement goes beyond managing the experience at touch points to include all the ways companies motivate customers to invest in an ongoing relationship with a product or brand," the report is predicated on the notion that the ramifications of a business’ customer management approach extend far beyond direct interactions with customers.

As such, a business’ customer management strategy is not merely a concern for the marketing, call center and customer experience teams. It must drive—and unite—all business departments, and the five tips therefore focus on ways to make customer engagement a business-wide focus rather than a singular corporate talking point.

1. Hold a customer engagement summit
2. Create a customer engagement council
3. Appoint a chief content officer
4. Create a ‘listening center’
5. Challenge your total customer engagement budget

Though each tip carries its own set of best practices and its own set of implications, all recognize the universality of customer engagement.

The customer engagement summit is not a pow-wow for marketers and call center agents to communicate about how they can better serve customers; it is a business-wide event that integrates all employees, supervisors and leaders into the customer experience process. In doing so, it assures that action plans regarding a vision of customer engagement and the manner in which that engagement is coordinated and carried out by the various stakeholders achieves buy-in from every corner of the operation. There will be no issue of product teams, marketing teams and customer service teams operating in silos—all will understand their role in the customer engagement strategy.

But organizational summits and retreats are an annual or semi-annual occurrence at best and therefore not enough to assure customer engagement is a 24/7 priority for the business. Customer engagement councils, therefore, bring together leadership from every customer-facing process and touchpoint to derive and execute strategy on a regular (monthly or even weekly) basis. Activities, all universal in scope, should be driven by a customer engagement charter that reveres the central most experience mission as its holy grail.

With social media creating brand engagement outside the scope of a physical interaction between agent and customer, the need for an effective listening center and content strategy is crucial. The insights gained from customer interactions should be "hardwired into the business" so that response times are minimized, perpetual customer service glitches are alleviated and channel strategies are coordinated.

The outward content a brand pushes, meanwhile, becomes a more pivotal focus due to the need for organizational unity. Whereas many customer service and marketing professionals presently see their messaging and customer interactions as isolated events with their own sets of ground rules, pitfalls and opportunities, a business driven by customer engagement recognizes that every business touchpoint is expected to align with the messaging created in every other one. A chief content officer coordinates this messaging, assuring that the content a brand delivers through its traditional and alternative marketing channels not only aligns with the business’ desired role in the marketplace but also the communication occurring throughout the rest of the business.

Though it is not wrong to expect investment into customer engagement to deliver a return, far too many organizations approach the "ROI challenge" from a piecemeal perspective. They look at functional spend, like that for social media, and evaluate its performance in isolation, considering only whether specific business return can be linked to that investment. It is deemed either a go or no-go based solely on how well it transforms the investment into a return.

Organizations truly committed to engagement, however, must approach the budget from a holistic perspective.

Instead of mistakenly viewing spend as an isolated challenge within each function, businesses should consider how best to distribute the spend across all customer engagement activities. Are there opportunities for trade-offs between individual functions (should we, for instance, cut in-store renovation spend in order to invest deeper into our digital experience)? And what overarching customer engagement strategy will yield the maximum return?

A holistic approach to the budget is both wise in a financial sense and valuable in an organizational development sense. It helps leaders act in coordination rather than isolation by transforming departments into partners looking for the best possible business outcome rather than opponents competing for their own self-interest.

And when it comes to the pivotal customer experience question, the totalitarian budgetary view is an essential part of assuring the voice of the customer’s organizational broadcast occurs without interruption.