Engage This!

The Rise of a New Era
As we move away from the brand focused era and into the customer focused/customer centric era, several aspects of this area all hint at one simple concept that has been around for ages – Customer Engagement.  So with the rise of this focus and drive to perfect this concept, some things that may be good to consider are the fundamentals of what customer engagement is and why it is incredibly important to all aspects of the Customer Focused/Centric Era.

What is this Customer Engagement that everyone is talking about?
Customer engagement has been around for ages and has been called several things for a specific purpose by the entity who created the meaning.  Based on a recent assessment and thorough study conducted by Michael Moon of GISTICS, Inc., customer engagement is really about “a philosophy of brand- marketing communications and customer interaction, emphasizing greater levels of collaboration in pre-sales and post-sales phases among buyers and sellers.” So does this mean that customers are communicated with well in advance of a product being developed or introduced?  Yes, it’s really about community or crowd-sourcing of customer perspectives, insights and feedback that drive the creation of robust products and services that customers want.  This in turn leads to varying levels of relationship building.

So how does one achieve this so-called customer engagement?  By a sequence of events that allow a brand to fortify and instill the interest and desire to create relationships well before a product or service is ready or conceived.  One could say that you may need to connect and or have some first initial way of communicating with the ready-to-be-engaged customer and then find a way to inform to tell them about something that gets their interest.  Upon successfully connecting and grabbing their interest, a brand can further fortify their engagement efforts by some form of entertaining and or continual distribution/sharing of information that is appealing and keeps the customer engaged.  This can be done in a vast number of ways and one of the quickest ways to do this is by online customer engagement.  Finally, upon connecting, informing, entertaining this customer, there is but only one thing a customer can do – tell everyone they know about their experience. This can be a good or bad thing depending on the approach a brand takes.

As a side note, this process or cycle can occur at varying levels across a brand sales or communication process, often called a brand story telling process.  If you are interested in more information about details and specifics associated to the brand story telling process and or engagement sequence, feel free to contact the industry’s leading expert Michael Moon at GISTICS, Inc.

So Why does a Brand Really Need Customer Engagement?
As the era of brand focused marketing came to an end, customers of those brands started becoming far more informed about the products, services, corporation and how all those were perceived in the market place.  Customers also remembered experiences and were able to share these experiences on the world wide web in various forms which typically have a viral effect and affects several other customers who may consider or be considering that brand for a future purchase.  Brands need customer engagement for the following reasons:

1 – To build better products and services to hedged against possible public backlash
2 – To build better, real, meaningful relationships with its customer base so to build likelihood of brand advocacy

Without customer engagement in any form, brands do not stand a chance in today’s environment.  Only the brands who truly embrace the power of customer engagement will be able to successfully triumph in today’s climate.