For many years, customer engagement was messaged to be the epitome for customer service/support teams. "You need to engage the customer in a meaningful way", we said. "You need to engage them in their channel of choice", we said. "You need to engage them by understanding them and the context in which they are coming to you", we said.
All valid points. All true. Especially today when customer attention spans are short and customer patience with bad service is non existent. Their expectations are high, based on the world class consumer experience and ease of use they have got used to with companies and apps like Lemonade, Amazon and Netflix. But the engagement messaging lacks one extremely important element — its great to engage, but what happens after that?
E.g. I may have a world class, omni-channel tool that I use to do the initial customer engagement, but once they have come to us, if I cannot solve their issue quickly, if I cannot process and propagate that work through the rest of my organization and get resolution; engagement, in itself, becomes useless. I don't want the ability to self-serve and quickly and painlessly create a case if that case is just going to sit there because the rest of the organization cannot move quickly. Engagement only works with Action and Resolution. Customers raise cases for resolution — yes, good engagement is the icing on the cake, but solving that issue quickly is the first and most important expectation the customer would have.
Which brings us to Systems of Action. These allow you to create, escalate and manage work throughout your organization. Imagine a case spanning multiple parallel tasks in multiple departments — each task should have a unique SLA set on it so that everyone in the organization knows what resolution time expectations are. As importantly, you can now report and measure their performance (and even celebrate it with walls of fame, or, in extreme cases, cautiously socialize them on walls of shame). What you can measure, you can manage and these Systems allow you to align your entire company to be customer focused and solve issues and cases — give action and resolution on top of great engagement.
Companies that do this well are the companies that will win. Companies which only have a CRM and Engagement strategy will be called out and not be able to meet Uber-esque customer expectations. Companies that align IT, Operations, Legal and other internal teams with your Customer Support / Customer facing teams through structured workflows and Systems of Action will see magic happen; with strong customer advocates who will likely be partners for life. Is that not better than just being engaged?
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
Credits: Picture courtesy: https://pixabay.com/en/phone-looking-person-mobile-people-2840244/
