DIGITAL CUSTOMER ENGAGEMENT
– THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE STRATEGY
How many meetings have you sat through where participants passionately advocate a “social media strategy” or “the
need to effect a ‘digital transformation’? And how many times have you experienced first-hand, businesses making
‘knee jerk reactions through misplaced investments in digital interaction tools, without really thinking about what
customers need and want from them? Megan Neale reports
Just implementing web-chat, self-service, or mobile app solutions is
not a guarantee that you’ve made things easier or simpler for the
customer. Adding more channels to increase choice without a clear
understanding of why customers choose a particular channel is a
common service pitfall. A big bug bear of mine is the number of mobile
apps out there designed to help the customer help themselves but
simply don’t support effective service. Try it – after going through the
pain of logging, downloading and registering the app, click the “contact
us” button. I will bet you are routed out of the app and back to the
general website (probably not mobile optimised), making you start the
process all over again. What is the benefit of such a service based on
poor, disjointed thinking that creates nothing but significant costs and
unnecessary volumes.
So then, how do you go about designing am effective Digital Customer
Engagement solution? I’d say, right from the start, using the following 3
steps as guidance:
STEP 1 – Decide the level of service you
wish to provide and future proof it.
This will be invariably linked to your customer profile, their expectations
from your business, your brand image etc. There are 4 key categories
to keep in mind and my diagram explains it