5 Client Engagement Insights
Times change and things evolve in a blink of an eye. 20+ years ago, emailing colleagues for business information was just becoming the norm while today we have multiple communication streams like Skype, Slack and Teams to quickly connect. Changes happen so gradually in the moment but over time, small progress becomes huge advancements.
The same applies to customer experience. Lucky to be in client engagement roles most of my career, I have seen trends come and go, including when client engagement used to be called account management, which is now considered sales, with sales now presented as new business.
My career began in the ‘Decade of Discovery’ with new technology, relaxed corporate culture and companies starting to offer perks to customers for loyalty as standard. The acronym for Customer Relationship Management (CRM) was born and history was made. Servicing clients was now being recognized as a true skill with evolving levels of execution.
Fast forward 20 years and the ‘Age of the Customer’ has arrived. Where client relationships used to be built on the brand’s terms, now customers have so many choices, brands are expected to keep up. Understanding, advocating, and predicting clients’ needs have never been more important. To compete, companies must become leaders in customer experience.
But how to do that – and how do we bring that mission to life at Copyright Clearance Center (CCC)? Here is a list of what I see as the top client engagement trends of 2019 and how CCC is incorporating these into our relationships.
Data Driven Decisions
Big data and digital transformation were big trends over the past couple of years and for good reason; all these insights can help strengthen our relationship with clients. This includes streamlining service and subscription renewals, uncovering upsell and cross-sell opportunities, and predicting customer behavior.
However, this data is only as good as what we do with it. Making data driven decisions is truly being a digital leader. It is what makes a company stand out from their competition.
Measuring metrics is important at CCC and our Customer Support department does a great job at driving insights to help support the overall client experience. One of the statistics we’re most proud of is that we answer 80% of phone and chat inquiries in 60 seconds or less.
Related Reading: Taking Customer Service a Step Further at CCC
Personalization
Personalization is the key to success when it comes to digitally serving our clients. Engagement needs to be personal, positive and genuine at each touch point. Throwing in a little brand personality never hurts either!
Every message should be crafted with attention to the individual circumstance. The more we make the client feel cared about on a personal level, the more likely they are to come back again and again. Engagement should be proactive too! Anticipating needs before clients even realize they have them keeps clients engaged.
At CCC, we take personalization seriously and have even built our core cloud products around it.
Customer Sentiment
We live in the era of the empowered customer – people want to buy experiences, not just product. A better product may no longer be enough to stay competitive in the market, so we must keep an ear to the ground with client expectations and exceed them whenever possible.
How we make our customers feel has never been more important. In fact,
CCC was named a “Contact Center of the Year” in the 13th annual Stevie Awards for Sales & Customer Service.
Empowering Employees
To maximize customer service program results, all employees need to be empowered to do their jobs efficiently. This includes having a knowledge base they can refer to, having timely documentation, and appropriate access to customer data.
Without these tools readily available, employees can waste time looking for information needed to do their jobs instead of serving customers and other productive tasks. For companies to achieve client experience goals, such as positive brand awareness and increased client spend, they must first empower employees with easy access to the right knowledge at the right time.
Collaboration tools make accessing client-relevant information easy and efficient at CCC. Whether working in support, client engagement or sales, our knowledge base allows employees to access relevant information cross-functionally to help achieve the best client experience.
Customer-Centric Culture
Organizations are realizing the important of strong customer engagement and success teams, not just to keep clients happy, but to help the success of the entire organization. Instead of simply passing new clients off to a client engagement manager, companies are realizing the benefits of having a customer-centric approach in every department. From sales and marketing to finance and product to engineering to everything in between.
When hiring at CCC, we look for strong customer-centric qualities regardless of the position being filled; whether it’s client-facing or back of the house. From engineering to finance to operations to support, a client-focused mindset is a quality we insist on.
Client engagement is here for the long-haul. What’s important is that businesses are agile enough to move with the ever-changing client tide, and solutions to things they didn’t even know they needed. That is how we stay relevant. Even if my landline phone still exists.