Keeping customers isn’t just about customer service or on-going communication. Yes those are important and they need to be there but so does a well thought out Customer Engagement Strategy. Just because you have good customer service does not mean that you are not driving your customers away.
Maybe they need to use customer service too often. Maybe the product or service was the wrong fit or lacked enough upfront training or education. Maybe you give incentives to new customers and don’t reward existing customers. Cable companies and mobile phone providers often fall into this category but so do lots of other customers.
That is not a customer service problem and no amount of follow up communication or satisfaction surveys is going to make the customer happy. Having a reason why the customer wants to stay and want to tell others about why they do business with you depends are more than simple rewards, often price is not very meaning full at this stage.
To truly engage the customer and make the customer experience worthwhile you need to go a bit further. Just as most marketing efforts work hard to understand the customer’s motivation to buy you need to consider the customer’s motivation to stay and to leave. Possibly the engagement experience is great when they first become a customer but is nothing special after that. Maybe the experience is downright unpleasant.
A good Customer Engagement Strategy maps the whole journey from before they become a customer, through purchase and use and into the post purchase experience. This sounds pretty normal for people familiar with CE except that few if any organizations see that the Customer Engagement Experience is a single consistent think from start to finish and should influence every aspect of your business. That strategy should be the core on which your business shows its true self.
So in essence Customer Engagement is you DNA. It is who you really are all of the time not just when you are trying to find a customer. It is who you are committed to be. Its what you do even when no one is watching.