Customer Engagement Data
What is Customer Engagement?
Customer engagement is the cornerstone of a thriving business-client partnership. It encompasses two essential components: product engagement and people engagement. In this article, we will delve into the significance of each type of engagement and discuss practical steps to strengthen client relationships through customer engagement data.
Understanding Product Engagement
Product engagement entails the active interaction and utilization of a product's features by clients. It is a critical factor in determining the overall value clients derive from your offering. When clients fully utilize a product's capabilities based on their needs and objectives, it contributes to long-term satisfaction and loyalty. Conversely, underutilization of product features can lead to potential churn or revenue loss.
To measure product engagement, the focus must remain on understanding clients' interaction patterns, disengagement reasons and feature utilization. A successful outcome necessitates that clients fully exploit the entire spectrum of your product's capabilities in alignment with their distinct objectives. This harmonious utilization not only ensures value delivery to client satisfaction but also serves as a bulwark against the perils of churn.
Fostering People Engagement
People engagement revolves around the meaningful interaction clients have with various stakeholders within your company, including support, Customer Success Managers (CSMs), product teams, sales representatives, and engineering. The primary drivers of people engagement are often CSMs and support teams, who play a pivotal role in ensuring clients' needs are met and expectations exceeded.
While measuring people engagement, diligent tracking of clients' interactions and details of various projects being run for a client with different teams within your organization is paramount. Here, CSMs and support teams often emerge as the linchpins that shape the client's experience, thus fostering satisfaction and engendering loyalty.
With proper monitoring you will be able to establish a link between people engagement and product engagement.
Measuring Engagement: Tools and Considerations
To gauge customer engagement effectively, a combination of tools is available. It is prudent to analyze product and people engagement scores independently before assessing the overall customer health. However, the suitability of engagement metrics varies based on the unique attributes of your product. Rely on past experiences to identify the most relevant indicators for your client base. You can choose for a list of variables/feature/client activities/CSM activities to which your customer base responds better.
The price range for most of the customer success tools starts somewhere between 50k-70k and it goes on, depending on how you utilize these tools. These tools help you better understand your customers, improve customer experience with your product and your team but, the tools need customer engagement data or playbooks created based on the customer experiences from the past.
There are tools which can share generic playbooks but, what works for one product may not necessarily work for another. Not having your own customer engagement data can delay results from these tools and cost you the money paid for tools and the revenue you lose as churn customers.
Challenges and Consequences of Inadequate Customer Engagement Data
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Not a Priority: In the early stages of a business, prioritizing actions over documentation is common. However, this approach can hinder future insights and strategic decision-making for future activities.
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No CRM/Tool Change: Delayed adoption of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems or switching between tools can result in data loss, hindering the ability to track engagement effectively.
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Resource Constraints: Overburdened CSMs struggle to allocate time for quality documentation amidst various responsibilities leading to missing data.
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Internal Competition: Unwillingness to share communication templates or strategies can foster competition instead of collaboration among team members.
Implications of Insufficient customer Engagement Data
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Revenue Leakage: Inadequate engagement data prevents a clear understanding of churn triggers or upsell opportunities, resulting in revenue leakage.
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High Employee Attrition - The core job of a CSM is to improve revenue numbers and value addition, in the absence of customer engagement data, CSMs can only try to continuously generate more upsell/cross sell leads and shoot in the dark. This leads to more effort and less response hence, leading to frustrated employees eventually leaving the company.
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Ineffectual Health Score: A partial view of customer engagement could lead to an inaccurate health score, impacting decision-making.
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Inconsistent Performance: Dependency on relationships and personal preferences, in the absence of engagement data, can result in inconsistent revenue performance.
Collecting customer engagement data and managing/utilizing is a big change management issue for any team. It will need time, training and your team’s buy-in to work out well.
Initiating the Solution
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Select an Appropriate CRM: Select a user-friendly CRM system and introduce it through a phased implementation plan. Gradual expansion of fields and features ensures an organic evolution.
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Customer Journey Mapping: Understand your customer journey and accordingly map CSM activities in CRM. A clear direction with regards to the number and content of activities helps CSMs plan their calendar and connects well in advance.
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Training and Development: Recognize team weaknesses and create a tailored training plan to enhance data management skills. Your team may need training on managing their calendars, prioritization, understanding the importance of engagement data, typing speed etc. Understand the reasons behind their hesitance to log data and accordingly plan for training need.
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Revise KPIs: Align Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) with the importance of data accuracy and completeness. Giving a 5% weightage to data sanity is not enough, make sure your KPIs reflect the importance of data sanity for your business.
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Audit and Tracking: Develop a streamlined reporting system to monitor engagement data adoption and impact.
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Sharing Insights: Create dashboards that visualize the effects of collected data and share these insights promptly.
Enhancing customer engagement is a transformative journey that demands dedication, time, and collaboration. By investing in comprehensive data management and analysis, businesses can amplify revenue, customer satisfaction, and employee morale. The process may span over several months, but the long-term benefits make it a worthwhile endeavor. By crafting workflows and implementing automated client connect models grounded in customer engagement insights, businesses can fortify the efficiency of Customer Success Managers (CSMs) in their day-to-day endeavors. This, in turn, augments the potential for generating opportunities within the existing customer base. Simultaneously, the introduction of automation liberates CSMs to dedicate more time to high-impact opportunities, as automation efficiently handles the more straightforward tasks. Our team is here to guide you through this process and ensure your success. Feel free to reach out for assistance and support.