How do you want to interact with your customers? More importantly how do you customers want to be helped? Traditionally there are three major ways to deal with customers, each for different phases of the customer lifecycle.
Customer Engagement is usually thought of as outbound marketing. This is where you attempt to drive “engagement” with your customers through marketing, newsletters, Instagram or twitter posts? In most cases, its widely understood to mean advertising and marketing. you are building your brand and awareness with your customers, so they use you as an organisation or buy your products and services.
Most people expect customer service to be performed when you are selling to or advising them. You help them by understanding their needs, and which may be a need solved by a product or service.
Dealing with customers after they have purchased something or dealing with problems is sometimes known as Customer Support. If your organisation is large enough, you will likely have some automation to limit the amount of interaction and involvement you have with them.
Do these cover the type of interaction with customers you provide in your organisation?
Responsive
The customer engages comes to you and you respond in the best way that you can. Selling them something or solving their problems.
Proactive
You are able to predict through experience, or have a structured way to know how best to help the customer, while still listening to their needs.
This also means that you provide simple ways to communicate and guide the customer through the best steps to help them.
Interactive
Another flavour of Proactive support when you are not just helping the customer guided by your experience, or solving the customers’ needs before they need to ask. This is where you solve their needs with empathy and transparency and giving them a sense of control.
Everyone has experience of dealing with a business where they needed to continually ask for help and response. Don’t be one of those businesses.
Which one of these types make it easiest to deal with your business, with the underlying goal of reducing the amount of work your customers need to do? There’s no perfect and sole answer, and it depends on your organisation and context of the situation. However, through thought and planning, it’s possible to support your customers in a way that build loyalty.