How to leverage your customer engagement solution

Customer centricity has been the top priority for companies in the past few years. According to Forrester Research, investment in business intelligence technology will set to hit $12bn worldwide by 2014.¹ However, lots of companies have failed to utilise the full potential of these programmes, and they will strive to elevate their BI game in the future.
A well-designed customer engagement programme is essential to organisations but what you do about your customer data is even more important. Customer engagement enables organisations to understand and respond to the fundamental changes in customer behaviour (involvement, satisfaction, loyalty, and word-of-mouth). As a result, customer engagement helps organisations to:
  • Improve customer satisfaction and, in turn, customer loyalty
  • Increase employee engagement
  • Enhance brand image
  • Reduce marketing costs
  • Increase revenue
Companies engage with their customers in different ways:
  1. Channel of communication (email, internet, telephone, IVR, mobile SMS) 
  2. Touch point (customer care/service, store, billing, and bad debt) 
  3. Customer engagement strategy (push and pull)
Push: In a “Push” strategy it is the company that initiates the conversation by proactively seeking customer feedback around its products and services. For instances, sending out an SMS after a specific company-customer interaction.
Pull: In a “Pull” strategy the company only expresses its interest in obtaining customer feedback, but it’s the customer that initiates the conversation and provides feedback to the company. For instances, web based surveys initiated at the customer’s will. 
A proactive approach (Push) is preferred to a reactive one as it can particularly help identify challenges before they become problems by originating the dialogue before a customer is upset about a situation and churn.
A study conducted by Fizzback in 2010 reveals that the type of customer comments received varies substantially amongst the type of strategy selected (Shown in Figure 1). We also found that in a pull strategy customer feedbacks are mostly related to low sentiment levels, while in a push strategy, the sentiment of customers leaving comments is more evenly distributed.

Hence, the implications or choosing a specific strategy are important, but as long as the company understands these both solutions can lead to great results. Below are two different success stories in using each of the possible alternatives.
Pull Success Case Study: Supermarket Chain


A client received a lot of negative comments because of cold store temperatures in a set of different locations. Because staff was always running around and getting used to it, they never raised the subject.


This customer complain would have cost the client £2 million a year if no action had been taken as customers were spending less time in the store or even threatened to begin shopping in other stores.


Our client captured the problem and immediately took action on the stores where the problem was raised.		Push Success Case Study: Call Centre


A client received a lot of positive comments regarding their advisers. The company gave credit to those employees that where exceeding customer expectations, gave them small prizes, socialised their success, and thoroughly studies the success factors to continuously train their staff.

As a result our client was able to improve its Customer Satisfaction Score by 24 points in only a couple of months.


Four tips to improve customer engagement

  1. Fit for purpose and for occasion. Customers’ needs and desires vary at any point in time, and the more we can be context and situation-aware, and ensure that we adapt to their priorities the better we can serve them. 
  2. Have smarter conversations. Customers like to engage on their terms and when it is most convenient. So we must be prepared to engage anytime and anywhere with customers. Since the only anywhere device is the mobile phone, this means that companies should ensure that the mobile-phone engagement experience is as good as it can be. 
  3. Listen to all the contact channels. Companies should build knowledge of other customer interactions across any channel, and also that they ensure that the actions across all departments are in-synch. 
  4. Take action upon customer feedback. Every time a customer provides feedback on their experience, companies have the opportunity to use that feedback to improve their business.
Now, a quick 2010 assessment before you jump to this New Year’s resolution: invest smartly…Is your company truly leveraging the financial investment of your customer engagement solution? If yes, how is it achieving this?
Vahid Pezeshki