What Is Customer Engagement All About?

Customer engagement may seem like a brand new term brought about by social media and other new forms of marketing, but if you’ve been in business for a long time, you no doubt know that this facet of customer service is an essential part of keeping your business thriving and encouraging customers to patronize your products or services time after time. This is why there are many business owners who are sending their staff to train for Diploma of Customer Engagement, either Certificate III or Certificate IV.

 

Customer engagement goes beyond simple customer service as it provides a more personalised and in-depth service. It is about delivering exceptional customer service based on building genuine and authentic business relationships with customers and clients.

 

A standard approach to customer service would mean providing customers and clients what they need. For example, if you’re in the business of selling smartphones or any other similar gadget and a customer asks for a new model, you would basically sell them one of your latest products. You would tell the customer about the brand and model of the product in question, it’s specifications, the colours available and the likes.

 

On the other hand, if you were to employ customer engagement practices, you would go beyond selling the product and into knowing the customer as well. You might ask about the customer’s expectations, what they intend to use the item for (simple calls and text messages as opposed to watching videos, or for business presentations and the likes) and their actual needs. Based on these information, you can make a more personalised recommendation as to which phone would suit their needs best (which may not actually be the first phone that you considered selling). You can offer more information as well as to which accessories they may want to include in their purchase – accessories of course which can be of help to them as well (a power hungry user may want a power bank to go with their phones). Suffice to say that with customer engagement, your focus is not just about selling the product – your focus is also about helping the customer finding the right item for them. By showing your customer that you also care about them and not just their wallet, you are more likely to generate repeat customers and even some word of mouth marketing.

 

This is a rather simple take on what customer engagement really is about, and a more lengthy discussion will be needed in order to fully cover its definition and importance.

 

With this, it is important that all business’ front liners (e.g. staff, sales representative, customer service representative, etc.) have adequate training and knowledge with customer engagement. If you are looking for trainings like Diploma of Customer Engagement, either Certificate III or Certificate IV and other formal trainings to develop your or your personnel’s customer engagement skills, please feel free to contact us at 02 9700 9333. We’d be more than happy to answer all your queries about our customer engagement programs and courses.

 

 

Photo Credits: Wikimedia Commons