Customer Engagement

Customer Engagement Starts at the Top

Audrey Dunning

At a car dealership, staff call customers who don‘t negotiate skillfully “grapes.” These customers can be squeezed to close a deal. They don’t have the knowledge or fortitude to haggle successfully.

While the term doesn’t appear on printed sales reports, it is built into the way that customers are thought of, spoken of and treated. The behavior exemplifies a toxic culture of disrespect. Customers can sense it, whether they are in a car showroom or online.

Company culture regarding customers is set at the top. Whatever values executives demonstrate, employees will amplify. As the car dealership—or any company—enters the “Age of the Customer” its c-suite must lead the development of a culture dedicated to engaging customers. C-suite occupants must first understand how their own behavior affects change in their organization. They must be the first to take the risks they are asking employees to take in order to create trust and lasting change.

A good first step is for executives to treat employees as they would like customers to be treated. This sets a powerful example of respect for the customer. Instead of seeing “grapes” good for immediate squeezing, sales people will have a model for engaging customers. After all, every showroom browser is a potential lifelong customer who may need some education as part of the first transaction.

When employees know that executives expect and value their attention to customer needs, they will do small things that customers see as authentic and valuable and human. The customer engagement technologies that automate campaigns, streamline customer interactions and dissect customer experience data support the people that interact with customers. People decide what questions to ask when servicing customers. (How was your last experience with the call center or field service? And how did that experience affect your view of the company?)

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To see how customer engagement works at its best, consider this story from Roger Dow and Susan Cook’s book, Turned On. A room-service waiter at a Marriott hotel learned that the sister of a guest had just died. The waiter, named Charles, bought a sympathy card, had hotel staff members sign it, and gave it to the distraught guest with a piece of hot apple pie.

Mr. Marriott,” the guest later wrote to the president of Marriott Hotels, “I’ll never meet you. And I don’t need to meet you. Because I met Charles, I know what you stand for...I want to assure you that as long as I live, I will stay at your hotels. And I will tell my friends to stay at your hotels.”

The culture of customer engagement permeates marketing and service systems enabling employees to regard customers as far more than opportunities for transactions. They are a source for growth and innovation.

How does this kind of effort pay off? Companies that engage customers successfully accomplish the following:

  • Increase loyalty by understanding and anticipating their needs and reacting to them 
  • Gain real authenticity that can occur organically and can't be manufactured (don't trust us, listen to what our customers are saying)
  • Make customers an engine for marketing and innovation

Customers will award their business to companies that provide value based on the outcomes they try to achieve, not a prescribed product or service.  At Summa, we strive to create that value for our clients and our clients' customers.  We regard the customer engagement platform as a tool executives can use to first engage employees, listen and inculcate attitudes they will extend to partners and end-customers. Customer engagement platforms complement the traditional levers of executives - the company's operations, structure, policies and processes. 

Audrey Dunning
ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Chief Executive Officer