Inspired from some great posts by folks like Jay Baer, John Moore and Amber Naslund, I wanted to weigh in on the topic of customer engagement. Everywhere you turn, people everywhere are chanting the mantra of engagement, sometimes at the expense of a formal, planned out strategy. Some even go so far to say that true open, honest and transparent engagement precludes the pre-planning and process mapping inherent in defining and executing a robust enterprise strategy.
Now this is not to say that engagement is not important. Firstly, all businesses have to engage on some level – with business partners, consumers or through electronic mediums – somehow they must engage to sell their product. However, the level of engagement needs to be addressed by first looking at your customer base. If you sell wax rings for toilet bases, perhaps you don’t need a robust transparent engagement strategy with consumers on FriendFeed, Twitter or Facebook. And as good as it feels to record a YouTube video demonstrating installation of your wax ring, it’s doubtful that iJustine is going to favorite it.
So how do you go about determining how to address your engagement strategy? You disengage. Disengage from the old ways of thinking. Disengage from the tendency to believe that you know better than your customer what they need. Disengage from putting your foot in the customer’s electronic front door when they try to tell you that they want to be less engaged with you. Disengage from overactive, repetitive and unnecesssary engagement. Customers are smart and know how to find information and do not need you to broadcast to them through email, DM or status update eight times a day information they can easily pull through an RSS feed, Twitter search or Google query.
Yes, disengage from engagement.
Only then can you fully and, without bias, address your customers from their point of view. Asking a customer that you blast repeatedly how they want to to tailor your blasts to them will always yield predictable results. The feedback inevitably will be retreat from your message, even those parts that they find of value. As a teenager, I thought (as we all did) that I knew better than my parents. So when my father would walk in the house and say “Son, when are you going to wash that car? It’s filthy”, even though I was heading out the door to go wash it, I would turn around and say “I don’t know. Whenever.” I’d then proceed to (even though it didn’t benefit me) wait another week to wash it. I viewed my dad’s method of engagement as one that I would repel from. Had he come in and said “Son, I see your car is dirty. Let’s spend some time talking while we wash it together” I likely would’ve had a much different (and more positive) reply.
It is when you show your customers respect and disengage from them, and tell them that you are listening to their desires to be spared unnecessary and unwanted communication from you, that they will begin to listen. You see, it was they who created social networks to escape from the unwanted interruptions of the rest of us. If we invade their Facebook like we did their home phone via cold calls, and email with unsolicited spam, and web sites with presenting five layers of self-service before allowing someone to find a phone number to call you – a predictable result will occur. The next great medium will emerge and customers will flock to it and away from your engagement, leaving you to diagnose how your great engagement strategy ultimately led to disengagement.
Engaging too much will ultimately lead to disengagement with your customers. It is only by disengaging – and listening – really listening to them – that you will ultimately be able to succeed in engaging them. They want to tell you. You just have to ask them the question from a position of trust. You’ll be surprised at the response.