The quality of engagement experience is essential for fueling ongoing, high-quality customer experiences.
First, the act of engaging customers encourages both customers and sellers to exchange energy with one another. Like a chemical equation, is the desired reaction balanced and controlled? Or, is the quality of the engagement forceful and overwhelming?
Either way, engagement experiences bias current and future customers, for better or for worse.
Engagement experience is all about how brand representatives reach out to customers. Even if we are a brand of one. And even if those experiences are via AI interfaces.
Consider whether, or not, the initial engagement strategy is to spray-and-pray solicitation emails. Do we negatively bias customer inclination to further engage with us, our organizations and our brands?
Think about an over-dependence on cold calling, marketing automation and running around networking events throwing business cards at everything. Then put ourselves in the shoes of current and potentially future customers. Do they want to marry us, or run the other way?
Are our engagement experience tactics building bridges – or barriers – to the next communication?
Let’s go no further than our fourth quarter, Monday morning Inboxes. Then, think about robo cold calls on mobile devices. Do we clutter potential and current customer Inboxes with solicitations from people and brands they do not know? Or, do we send subscriptions to blogs and magazines, or for services, they never signed up for?
Two words describe the net effect of these experiences for us, our organizations and our brands: presumptuous and assumptive.
Neither are the words we want to be associated with. No matter whether our branding strategy targets first time customers or current customers.
Even if our functional roles are not primarily in marketing and selling, our customers’ engagement experiences bias them about how we will deliver outcomes.
Let’s say we feel cozy and comfortable in our post-sale support roles, implementing what is sold. After all, we are not responsible for what has preceded our new assignments to serve that customer. Or, are we?
Customers are skeptical enough about making the decision do business with organizations. Now, they are left in the hands of everyone else in the organization who they did not meet, during the initial sale. That is scary stuff, folks. Download my white paper on selling to skeptical decision makers. Find out how to anticipate customer skepticism, before they intimidate us.
When new customers, and even existing ones, feel inundated by unsolicited customer “reaches,” they either are pleasantly surprised or turned off. Executing projects become ongoing opportunities to uncover the quality of engagement experiences – and gaps in those experiences – which impact the current relationship we build with that customer.
After all, the customer’s future solidly is in the hands of post sale teams. In spite of all of that initial, pre-sale noise. First, what type of engagement experiences do we create, Today? Next, what type of engagement experiences would we like to create, Tomorrow?
Babette Ten Haken’s One Millimeter Mindset™ speaking programs leverage collaboration to catalyze professional innovation and the type of workforce engagement experiences which fuel customer success and business growth. Her professional speaker profile appears on the espeakers platform. She is a member of SME, ASQ, SHRM and the National Speakers Association. Babette’s Playbook of collaboration hacks, Do YOU Mean Business? is available on Amazon.com. To learn more about what her programs can achieve for you, your team, your organization and your association, contact her, right here.
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