customer engagement

In preparing for a talk to a group of customer contact center managers, I’ve come to the conclusion that customer service ain’t what it used to be. There is a brand of new customer service in play today.

It seems obvious:  employee engagement drives customer engagement. If you treat your employees well, they’re more likely to create great customer experiences. But while this truth may be obvious, how to achieve it may not be. How do you engage your employees? What does excellent employee engagement look like? I found a lot of helpful answers to these questions in my readings this past month.

The start of a new year provides an excellent opportunity to reconsider old ways and adopt new practices. With that in mind, I’d like to suggest three new rules of customer engagement in 2016 for marketers.

Alain Thys is the founder of Futurelab and author of So You Want to Be Customer Centric. Laurent Bouty is the CMO and partner at Futurelab. They were recent guests on the TechnologyAdvice Expert Interview Series. The series, which is hosted by TechnologyAdvice’s Josh Bland, explores a variety of business and technology landscapes through conversations with industry leaders.

Today I'm pleased to share the final installment of a three-part series co-authored with Peter Haid of E Source.

In Part 1, Peter wrote about revisiting your corporate engagement initiatives to identify areas of improvement and to ensure that you had buy-in across the board for any change initiatives that were required.

I know, I know.

I said I would never do it again.

They said it could never happen.

But, at the end of the day you knew it had to happen. Right?

My eldest son is in the process of buying a car, his first car. He knows his budget (£6,0000. He knows the make and model of the car (Ford Fiesta). Given this he knows that he will buy a used car – couple of years old. His goal is to have this car in place by the end of this month. His challenge is that he has never bought a car before.

Google you are brilliant.

Take the advertising people that created four iconic American ads, fuse them with a bunch of hot shot digital marketers and create new customer engagement processes using the best of today's technology.

What happens when companies spend huge sums of (marketing) dollars on customer acquisition when they can't even keep the customers they have because their products, services, and experience stink?

I don't know (OK, I do know), but I think Pizza Hut UK is about to find out.