The Customer Engagement Framework For Inside Sales Success (Infographic)

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Here’s an interesting question for you: “What do all customers want that’s easy to give, yet many companies fail to provide, especially across multiple channels?” It is customer engagement. If you don’t own your customers’ attention, then you don’t have their business, loyalty or advocacy. Many times, business owners fail to provide effective engagement. In order to win your customers over, you need to listen and give your marketers and sales teams the resources they need to engage in a two-way dialogue.

With the huge conversations among brands everyday, your website, store or phone line is no longer the first stop for prospects when they want to inform themselves. You don’t drive the conversation. Your community of customers, prospects, and interested bystanders are leading the conversation about your brand, whether you like it or not. These drastic changes in the way customers interact with brands means companies are battling for attention with increasingly less effective methods. Here are the three levels of customer needs:

1. Get in the game – it’s about efficiency.

The second level of customer engagement isn’t always easy to achieve, but being efficient in how you communicate with customers will help secure and protect your brand advocacy.

Think about it. How many times have you called a customer service department, given them your name and account information and once transferred to another agent, they ask you again for the same information? Providing a seamless experience across all channels, giving customers answers in real-time and offering new ways to solve their problems are the hallmark of best-in-class customer service. By responding to and addressing customers concerns in a timely fashion, you will see greater loyalty and commitment to your brand’s success. To reach the top of the hierarchy and separate themselves from the pack, though, businesses must work to address their customers as individuals.

2. Win the Game – it’s about effectiveness.

Just as humans need food and water to survive, companies need effective customer engagement to survive – it’s a basic function that all businesses must now adopt. Being effective in understanding your customer’s unique challenges is no longer a choice, it’s a necessity. As people turn to online information, social networks, and communities to inform themselves, they are engaging with sales people much later in the buying cycle. You now need to understand your customers’ issues and preferences sooner rather than later, and be effective in bringing them new approaches to achieving business objectives through the platforms they’re most comfortable with.

For example, half of the time users are online, they’re using mobile devices. According to a recent SAP survey, already 27 percent of mobile users purchase products or services online, and 80 percent say they want to buy more on their mobile devices. Mobile usage has created such a radical shift in how consumers and businesses interact with each other that digital marketers must have a deep understanding of how consumers use their devices. That’s the only way they can be effective in developing mobile marketing strategies that deliver the right experience to each mobile user. Once a company has achieved effective customer engagement, they must continue to adapt to garner more loyal customers in the customer engagement hierarchy.

3. Change the game – it’s about 1:1 customer interaction.

The final and hardest level of engaging your customers is realizing the full potential of the relationship. Believing that the goal of customer engagement is to make a sale or considering every customer service call as an instance of customer engagement, will only result in a loss. In order to win and survive, customer engagement needs to be viewed as customer’s experience with you – a personal encounter and not a business transaction.

Part of this process is the need to apply new processes and technologies to develop the insights needed to anticipate and respond to customers’ unpredictable and ever-changing buying journeys. No customer is ever the same and using the same approach across the board only creates frustration and disappointment with customer service.

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