Customer engagement is crucial for any organisation that operates in the services business. It becomes more critical during the time of a crisis situation. Let me start by narrating a personal experience.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, I allocated a portion of my savings to an investment firm that selects mutual funds for investment based on their research and expertise, promising returns surpassing the indexes.
It is common knowledge that at that time, global stock markets were struggling, initially because of COVID-19 and subsequently due to the crisis in Ukraine. My investments were also affected by these events and did not perform well. As a novice in this type of investment, I experienced unease.
What made matters worse was the fact that the investment company did not bother to contact me to share any reassuring messages concerning the prevalent situation and if they were doing anything to mitigate it. In other words, how they were planning to ensure that my losses would be kept at the minimum or if their proclaimed vast experience could assuage my anxieties that such situations are followed by upward corrections.
From my side, I tried to contact them through my relationship manager and asked the same questions 2-3 times, however, I was unable to get any satisfactory response from them.
While I understand that this investment company is very good with their research and would have employed competent resources to take care of my investments, their overall lack of response made me uncomfortable with their way of working and I took back all my investments from them.
The point I am trying to highlight here is that no matter how good we are in the products and services that we provide, it is very important to continuously engage with the customers and keep them updated on what we are doing now and what we are planning to do in the future. Especially in such tough situations, they need reassurance that they are in safe hands.
It certainly becomes more important during adverse situations like the current one, to give the customers confidence that while the tough situation caused by external factors may be beyond our control, we are doing everything that any good organisation would do during such moments, and they need not worry.
This is more critical if we are selling a product or service where customers transact with us frequently and where renewals and repeat businesses account for a large portion of our revenues.
A few factors that can drive us towards not giving due importance to timely Customer Engagement could be:
1. Too Much Confidence in Our Offering
Often, we are so confident in our products or our capabilities to deliver services that we forget that many customers may not know our true abilities. And even if they are aware, they will still need reassurance from time to time.
More so when the circumstances are not as expected but, timely communication is equally important when things are even going well.
It does us no harm in sending an email, text message or a broadcast through mass media or social media, just telling them that everything is okay.
2. High Number of Small Value Customers
If we are dealing with a large user base with very small relationship value, it may be difficult to reach out to all the customers at once and sometimes it might also be economically unviable.
Still, we will have to make an earnest effort to communicate our side of the story to as many customers as is practically possible. The only hindrance may be our reluctance or lack of planning as in today’s connected, digitally enabled world it is much easier than ever before.
3. Weak Competition or Low Threat of Substitution
Customers’ interests are the first casualty in a monopolistic market as there is no immediate incentive for being customer friendly.
Possible Strategies
Depending on our business type, our relationship with the customers and their tenure with us, engaging with different customer segments would require different Customer Engagement strategies.
Pareto’s 80/20 law applies to our customer portfolios too. That is, usually, 20% of the customers contribute to 80% of the revenues and the remaining 20% revenue comes from the balance 80% customers.
For effective Engagement, we can therefore adopt the following two-pronged strategy for both the above groups:
1. Engaging with the Classes (Top 20)
This group has high service needs and high negotiation power. Even a small misstep may end up in catastrophic implications on our revenues and the business as a whole.
A very personalised approach is required to engage with this group. Depending on the size of the group and the importance of the individual constituents, various strategies could be deployed, like:
- Personal Meetings
- One-on-one or Group Video Calls
- Mini Customer Conferences and Seminars
- Personalised Emails and Mailers
2. Engaging with the Masses (Remaining 80)
This group has little negotiation power and thus is usually ignored or is the last to be addressed.
However, what is very important is that a small positive action with this group goes a long way as these customers are not expecting much from us anyways.
Such adverse business situations, therefore, provide us with an opportunity to convert them to ‘Customers for Life’ with minimal investment and low ask.
Since this group is usually very large, a personalised approach may not be practical or feasible most of the time. We can therefore adopt the below approach to achieve our communication objectives:
- Conduct a quick survey of such customers to assess the overall mood of the group
- Classify the customers into Irate, Angry, Neutral and Supportive categories
- Conduct detailed surveys for a significant sample size of the customers from each category to understand the pain points of each group
- Detailed surveys should be conducted individually and never in a group to avoid any biases or untoward influences by more vocal respondents
- The most suitable medium should be used for the survey like personal interviews, phone calls, video calls etc.
- Analyse the survey findings and identify the key factors that are affecting the customers’ feelings
- Design suitable communication addressing the above factors
- Share the communication with all the customers using multiple channels like social media, mass media, emails, messages etc.
- Use direct marketing tools that help generate personalised messages for large groups. Tools like Mailchimp, SMS tools, WhatsApp etc. can do a wonderful job if used appropriately
- Conduct a dipstick survey sometime later to check if the communication is making the desired impact
- Do a set of follow-up communications based on the findings of the dipstick survey
3. Messaging strategy and Contents of the Communication
While the communication must address specific items related to the current situation and also the customers’ issues identified during the surveys, we must not forget to include the below points while communicating with our customers:
- The value we place in their business
- Thanking them for trusting us in tough times
- Steps we are taking for staying afloat in the current situation and
- Various actions we are performing to convert this crisis into an opportunity
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PS: Copilot and ChatGPT have been used to create parts of this post.
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