Customer Engagement – how important is it?

When we talk about customer engagement, what exactly do we mean? Any business that has survived the start-up stage knows it goes beyond simply managing to get customers to buy a product or service from your organisation. Customers today are engaged at all levels with an eye-watering awareness of the markets. Whether it’s from a practical and psychological response to brand image, comparing you and your competitors online, interacting with other customers to gather opinions and reviews, learning the details of your offering, their buying experience and post-sales interaction… How your company and offering are perceived is affected by how effectively you engage with the customers at each step.

As it is commonly known in business, if you can’t measure it you can’t improve it. It is therefore imperative that, while working on how best to engage your customer, you also devise mechanisms to help you measure the success of that engagement. This should take into account various metrics that link to customer engagement, such as: level of feedback, loyalty score, amount of subscriptions, page views, number of clicks, social shares, replies to emails, content submission, net-promoter score and of course, purchases. But the success of customer engagement can be difficult to measure. Tracking how many times someone visits your site might indicate engagement, but they could go and buy elsewhere. Engagement is not the same as consumption. To convert, we need to engage hearts a well as minds.

Innovative engagement ideas developed within your organisation will be more tailored to your specific business, ways of working, customer segments, offering and goals. Various tools can support and sustain innovation, and social media makes these possible to manage. A customer suggestion box, interactive innovation blogs that are well publicised and in the public domain are crucial. Knowing your market’s preference for means of engaging is key so be adaptive to their preferred styles. Also crucia is the ability to admit when you get it wrong, publicly and quickly, so you have the opportunity to transform a negative exchange into a wholly positive one.

There is extensive research showing how strong the link is between customer engagement and business success. Effective customer engagement has positive effect on measures such as order size, up-selling, cross-selling and profitability. Ultimately, successful customer engagement builds trust of the company’s brand, and if a company is trusted its products and services are trusted too. That means the customer is more likely to buy, to buy more and to buy again – providing that successful customer engagement has built loyalty to the brand. Loyalty is the big prize of course, of course, bringing with it not only a faitfulness but also helping to transform customers into brand advocates who will positively influence other potential customers.

The information gathered on the engagement of your customers is highly valuable to your business and should therefore be leveraged as much as possible. Your first step should be to refine the way you measure engagement to best focus on what is most relevant to your business and strategic goals. Then, the refined measurements should be used to complement your other business performance metrics into a coherent and comprehensive tool to report on and assess business performance. And finally, the assessment should link back to investment decisions in order to maximise return on investment in the future.

Employee Engagement – your most valuable business tool?

One of the great challenges faced in highly competitive business environments is the need to constantly innovate. Technology is advancing at a dizzying rate and no matter how innovative and effective our product or services are today, businesses have to consider their version of tomorrow, too. But how best to do this? The answer might lie closer to home than you think.

It is now an accepted truth that the key asset of any business is its employees, properly engaging them can be the most powerful source of competitive advantage for a company. Innovation and employee engagement intersect if we think of “open innovation”. A concept originally developed by Henry Chesbrough, the idea is based on the increasingly interconnected and distributed nature of knowledge. In Chesbrough’s model, new ideas are sourced outside and inside the company to innovate in its in-house and external business environments. In this context, engaged employees are the key holders of knowledge and ideas. If placed in the right environment, they can provide a new and uniquely critical source of internally-developed ideas. And if business leaders encourage, listen, assess and develop these ideas, they have a contented, valued workforce as well as innovative ways to improve the business at all levels, from internal processes and structures to what to sell, how and to whom.

There are many open innovation examples, some obviously more successful than others so it is essential to involve professionals with the right innovation skills who know how to create innovative employee engagement ideas.  For employees to buy into the concept, it is crucial to ensure that their motivation, commitment and ability to support the business depends on a number of key factors. Employees need to feel that there is trust, honesty and transparency among them and the management, that there is a positive and supporting environment, that achievements are rewarded, and that there is scope for learning and career progression.

Engaged employees can sustain success of the business because they consider themselves not just in it, but also of it; they feel emotionally and personally connected, they believe in the organisation and in its mission. They realise that they are being heard, that their experience and knowledge is valued, that their contribution can directly benefit not only themselves but also their colleagues, the organisation and, maybe, the wider society.

The truth of the matter is, all businesses are at a cross-road: embrace this new approach of leveraging employee engagement as one of the key innovation steps required to succeed, or risk marginalisation from companies that decide to take it seriously. But businesses are warned not to rush in. Effective employee engagement strategies require a bespoke approach shaped around the needs of the organisation.

If implemented carefully, results can be seen at all levels, increased productivity and higher quality output, retention of key skills and knowledge, more effective partnership with suppliers and stronger relationship with end users.

Another outcome is a stronger brand image from positive feedback both internally and externally. This is because not only customers will be better served but staff will also become a stronger advocate with potentially future recruits. Information and opinions are today shared quickly and widely through social media, and having current and past employees giving good reviews on the company can also increasingly be a source of competitive advantage. There is obviously the need to assess how well employees feel engaged and, when new engagement strategies are implemented, measure the effect on employees. For this, best tool is employee surveys which allow senior management to not only understand how employees feel about their role, company leadership, working environment, career potential and so on, but also to get new ideas on how to improve the engagement strategy itself, as well as on how to achieve the organisation’s strategic goals. There is also the need to measure innovation rate and ensure the approach is effective. Linking corporate culture and innovation is vital. If effectively done, this can support a sustainable innovation continuous improvement process that will hugely benefit the business in the short as well as in the long term. If ignored, it is at your peril.

People Analytics – How employee engagement is a business leader’s most vital tool.

Employee engagement is increasingly recognised as being at the cornerstone for innovation and marginal gains in the corporate world; the answer to every business leader’s problem they didn’t know they had. Quality staff retention, renewed productivity, increased profits and happy customers are the holy grail but while everyone might agree on the benefits, the road to quality employee engagement is paved with potholes and dead ends, and can leave employers wondering where they took a wrong turn.

Employee satisfaction surveys in isolation can be seen by emplo
yees to be at best as a waste of time and at worst as a means to trip people up and root out dissenters. Employees who, rightly or wrongly, fear retaliation result in skewed results and an expensive pile of data. And that is just those who participate – employee engagement surveys have a notoriously poor response rate.

However, building a culture in which there is trust and positivity, one which habitually reaches out for and values employee involvement, that strives for employee contributions which improve rather than just mirror concerns, is worth its weight in gold; affording much greater insights and informing the culture for new staff. If set up with due care and a real desire to see change from traditional tip-down hierarchies, it can become the norm for everyone to be instrumental in their company’s future. Naturally, your best assets, your valued and invested workforce won’t offer empty positivity when in fact they have a genuine grievance.

Amy Edmondson, in her book ‘The Fearless Organisation‘ calls it ‘Psychological Safety’ – where team members feel safe to take risks and be vulnerable in front of each other.”We all want to feel respected at work and that we are part of something larger than ourselves.”

Empowered staff will add to the growth and be instrumental in embracing change, whether through making a contribution towards marginal gains or indeed coming up with an inspirational idea that might just take the company in a whole new direction of success.

Liz Ryan (Forbes), had these sobering words to say on employee satisfaction surveys in a recent Linkedin post:
“Employee Engagement Surveys are the business equivalent of giving the prisoners in a penitentiary a survey to complete once a year and slide through the bars of their cells. The survey process cements an unequal power relationship.”

In order to truly involve staff we need to let them break out of the cell and be free. They need to be trusted, respected – not just once a year – but all the time. We need to give them a platform, a voice to share their ideas, even if they raise tricky issues; we need to be as unafraid as we are asking our staff to be; we need to have a realistic perspective on politics, i.e. be clear about who in the organisation is seeing what; we need to share and celebrate their ideas and reward effectively. Embracing change starts with people analytics –  leaders in an uncertain UK business world cannot afford not to.