Mia Jacobs — October 7, 2019 
When you’re a customer, you don’t want to feel like just another face in the crowd. Customers want to know that you understand their unique business goals, even if you have vast numbers of subscribers. That’s why your enterprise needs to give customers the personalization they demand if you want to survive and grow in today’s customer-centered economy.
The customer-centered economy has changed the rules of how businesses need to address customers. Gone are the days when you can produce a standard-issue product and expect customers to happily purchase it, again and again. Customers have more choices than ever, so it’s critical that you take a customer-centered approach and offer personalized customer engagement.
The Importance of Personalized Customer Engagement
Imagine your business contracts with a video conferencing company so you can stay connected with customers. How would you feel if you had to explain your company to the onboarding team, after you spent weeks with the sales team? Wouldn’t you be frustrated having to share your goals, challenges, and timelines to a different team at the same organization?
Now, imagine that after you move on from the sales team, you encounter a customer success manager on the first day of onboarding and they know everything about you, your company, you goals—things you only shared with the sales team. What if, for the remainder of your contract, the company reached out with solutions before you realized you had a problem? Wouldn’t you be more likely to renew? If you said “yes,” you know the power of personalized customer engagement.
When you show customers you’re listening to their needs, you make them feel important, supported, and heard. This goes a long way in deepening the customer-brand relationship and leads to greater customer loyalty. To achieve this level of customer loyalty, you must enable personalized customer engagement at every step of the customer journey and during every interaction.
Strategies for Increasing Personalized Customer Engagement
Customers purchased your product because they want to derive some value from it; there’s a specific goal they want to achieve. Work to understand customer goals as much as possible and your personalization will be effective and deeply appreciated. Because your customer’s success is your success.
Here are some ways to optimize customer engagements:
- Communicate frequently
- Monitor changing customer goals
- Analyze interactions to achieve a deeper understanding of customers
- Create a customer advisory board
Let’s take a closer look at each.
Communicate Frequently
Customers appreciate transparency, and they want to know what’s going on with your brand and if the product has any upcoming changes. This gives customers the sense that they are supported, and they’ll enjoy seeing what new best practices or future releases their feedback has helped you create. Not to mention, acting on customer feedback helps customers gain a sense of stakeholdership in your brand, which is powerful.
Keeping in touch will help you predict where the customer relationship is headed, and you’ll always know when changes are on the horizon, such as when a new point of contact comes on board. So, share updates with customers and make them feel like their voices are heard. And keep communication a two-way street by responding quickly when a customer contacts you. The more open and frequent your communications are, the more substantive the customer-brand relationship will be.
Monitor Changing Customer Goals
Over time, customer goals may evolve. You need to keep a close eye on such changes so you don’t miss something important. If you’ve been in constant communication with customers, you won’t be blindsided by these changes. By staying aware of changing customer goals, you can always be sure you’re providing the value they’re looking for, ensuring that your product and brand stay relevant.
Analyze Interactions to Gain a Deeper Understanding of Customers
Whenever a member of your organization interacts with a customer, make the most of it. You can gain information that can be used to improve that specific customer relationship and establish best practices for engaging customers in the future. Be sure to make customer data available to all teams across your organization so that everyone can provide consistent, quality engagements. Compare how data gathered during interactions compares to product feedback, and check for any inconsistencies.
Create a Customer Advisory Board
One method of enabling effective communication is to create a Customer Advisory Board. This is an outreach program that assembles a group of strategic customers to work with company representatives to compile customer suggestions on how to improve products, services, and corporate strategies and to express the customer viewpoint in general.
Use this as an opportunity to ask customers the burning questions your team has not been able to answer any other way. Hold these sessions in-person to make your company more personable and to enable authentic, honest feedback. A Customer Advisory Board goes a long way in helping you gather valuable Voice of Customer data.
The Right Software Makes Personalization Easier
When you have thousands of customers or multiple product lines and brands, the task of personalizing communications with every customer can become overwhelming. But not when you have a customer success platform. This software can segment customers and assemble vast amounts of client data in one accessible location. It makes it easy to share information across internal teams and take the correct action in response. It gives you the power to proactively engage customers. It offers early warnings when there are concerning changes, such as a drop in customer health scores.
And, of course, it offers an easy way to fully personalize communication. Because no customer wants to feel like just another number.
If you need to personalize customer engagements, Totango is the right software for the job. Request a demo to learn how Totango can help you improve engagement and retention.
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