I recently had an issue with my bank regarding online fraud and had to cancel all accounts and open new ones. A few months later, one of the canceled accounts (that had fraud on it) reared its ugly head back onto my online banking with an astronomical negative balance. After many days of going back and forth with my bank, being transferred to 5 different departments and retelling my story to 5-10 different people (I lost count after 3) the issue was finally solved and every thing was back to the status quo.
This daunting experience made me understand customer engagement a little deeper. It isn’t just through marketing and advertising communications that we need to engage our customers, but also through operations and day to day interactions with our brand or company. Each and every time a customer comes in contact with your company, the person performing the contact needs to know exactly where the customer is in the relationship at any given time. Whether it’s a new customer or a loyal customer for 25 years, the person personally communicating with the customer needs to have a snapshot of the customer relationship and be able to build and nurture that relationship at that moment.
Now back to the bank, the simple use of a system-wide CRM system would have allowed the first person I was in contact with to make a note outlining my issue, so the successive contact points knew exactly what was going on and where I was in the relationship with the bank. But, I guess if they had, I wouldn’t have anything to prove with this post.
Customer engagement doesn’t begin and end with marketing. It is nurtured and proliferated throughout the entire organization and every contact point.
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