Genuine Customer Engagement

Jon Buscall on Be Good to Your Customers believes that most engagement related activities these days are actually lead generation activities and not really about customer engagement.

This article grabbed my attention as I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the whole customer engagement life-cycle for SaaS and other online services.

The main strategy Jon suggest B2B businesses should apply is to provide true value to loyal customers only.

I would argue even further; loyal customers of online services should get specialized treatment. They should receive personalized engagement by their B2B vendors.
This wasn’t possible few years back, when it took few months and even years to create products and later on deliver it to customers. This isn’t the case anymore, and customers do expect this level of service.

For example, SaaS companies basically have all the information required to provide to each and every one of their customer special treatment tuned directly to their needs:

  • They know who they are
  • They know what they are trying to achieve with their service and
  • They have all of their interaction history

Genuine customer engagement is personalized, contextual and timely. This is what customers expect.

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  1. […] effective customer engagement trend I’ve noticed recently is that the communications between vendors and users is being […]

  2. […] only goes to reinforce how genuine customer engagement is rewarded when relevance is part of the mix. We’ve talked about how customer engagement is […]

  3. […] mentioned a lot in this blog, nowadays the customers are kings, customer engagement is taking a royal place in web applications and the interaction between the business and the […]

  4. […] Jim Cathcart, the well-known author of “Relationship Selling”, defined what customer relationships are all about: in a relationship people know each other and have an exchange of value. Ask yourself: who is truly glad to know me? In a sales relationship, provide value first, sell later. Don’t talk about up selling customers, but rather up serving them. If you do a good job others will vouch for you and recommend your services. Scott Holden summarized this as moving from self-promotion to social referrals: “trust me, he is a great lover” and not “I am a great lover”.  I expressed a similar sentiment in my blog earlier this week on Genuine Customer Engagement. […]

  5. Jon, You’re right – having the right mindset is certainly critical for providing tailor made service.

    However, in addition, without the proper infrastructure in place it is impossible. Most companies still have a different system for each customer facing activity, and instead of having 360 view of a customer, each organization function has a different view of the customer. We’re trying to change this 😉

  6. Taylor-made support and engagement is destined to work. The more we can connect with businesses personal needs through digital channels the better for the customer and the business.

    The biggest challenge for many businesses though is actually shifting mindset to embrace this.

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